Avon Haunted Bridge

The bridge was built in 1906–07 for the Big Four Railroad — the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway — to engineer W.M. Dunne's design, a concrete giant of spandrel arches over White Lick Creek on what is now County Road 625 East, half a mile south of U.S. 36. It was double-tracked in 1908 and still carries CSX freight today; it is, as of now, well past a century of continuous service.

An older bridge stood here from the 1850s, and some tellings reach back to it for the legend's origin. Either way, the bridge is older than the town that claims it — Avon incorporated only in 1995 — and so fully adopted that the arch profile sits on the town seal. The grounds below are now part of Washington Township Park, where the haunted landmark looms over an afternoon's fishing.

The legend ledger runs three entries. First: a worker — sometimes described as drunk, sometimes as Chinese or African American, the description drifting with the decade — slipped during construction and was buried in wet concrete; when a train crosses, people claim to hear his moaning. A variant folds in the older bridge, holding that a collapsed platform dropped a man into a cement vat that became a bridge pylon, his knocking audible until the end.

Second: a young mother carrying her sick baby to the doctor along the tracks was caught by a train and fell with the child; at night her screaming for the baby can still be heard. Hendricks County custom offers a remedy — honk as you drive under the bridge to muffle her. Third: four workers fell to their deaths into the creek during construction, and witnesses report thuds and splashes in water that shows no sign of disturbance.

The reports never really stopped after Bunk Atherton's election-night spirits. Knocks and screams under the arches, a man wandering the tracks trying to flag down trains during a period when the line was torn up — the claims ledger is thin on names and thick on local circulation, the kind of file where everyone's father has a version.

Historian Susan Truax of the Avon-Washington Township Public Library notes the telltale drift in the buried-worker's identity as a sign of folklore doing its work. Harriett Muston, whose husband's family settled here in 1831 — his aunt Ruth Barker fed the bridge's construction crews — told WISH-TV the dependable version: "If you go by on Halloween night you'll hear her scream. Yes, you will."

The bridge still works for a living. Freight crosses Dunne's arches daily over a county road and a walking trail, the town seal keeps the silhouette, and drivers still honk underneath for a mother the record never names. The dossier's oldest line remains the Friday Caller's: alleged to be haunted, November 1908, reported by reputable men.