Screaming Bridge

There's a haunted place in Arlington - the city where I grew up - that is still haunting people to this day...

Screaming Bridge.

Here is the story as it was told to me...

The year is 1961. The month is February. Six young women ages 16 - 17, all students at Arlington High (Arlington's only high school at the time) piled into one of their parents' car and went to a drive-in movie (Butterfield 8). Afterwards, they drove out on Greenbelt to bounce over the dirt road.

Greenbelt (Arlington-Bedford) Road was a little-used dirt road at the time. There were wooden bridges that sloped upward on the north and south sides of the railroad tracks. In December of the previous year, some pranksters had set fire to the bridge on the south side of the tracks.

It has been assumed that the same pranksters (young men from Arlington High School) thought it would be funny to remove the barricades that had been placed in front of the burned-out bridge.

A young man and his girlfriend drove northward up Greenbelt, stopping at the foot of the burned out bridge. The young man had passed the girl's car, which was stopped on the side of the road, facing north, about a quarter mile south of the railroad. He decided to go back and warn the people in the car that the bridge was out and the barricades were down. When he approached the girls' car, the driver apparently got spooked and drove off at high speed, sailing straight off the burned out bridge, landing upside-down in the creek bed.

The story goes that if you hang out near the spot that the accident happened, at midnight (the time that the accident was supposed to have happened), you will hear girls screaming. There is no bridge there now, but the screams still echo...