{"id":2013,"slug":"silver-bridge-site-point-pleasant-west-virginia","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["At 4:58 in the evening on December 15, 1967 — Friday rush hour, the deck full of commuters and Christmas shoppers — the Silver Bridge folded into the Ohio River. Thirty-one vehicles went down with it. Forty-six people died; two were never recovered. Witnesses on the Point Pleasant side described the failure in seconds.","The bridge had opened in 1928, a one-of-its-kind eyebar-chain suspension span carrying U.S. 35 between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio. For thirty-nine years it was simply the way across."]},{"heading":"The crack no inspection could see","paragraphs":["The National Transportation Safety Board traced the collapse to a single link — eyebar 330 — where a stress-corrosion crack had grown for years inside a joint that the inspection methods of the era could not reach. It was the NTSB's first major bridge-failure investigation, and it rewrote American bridge law: the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 created the national inspection standards still in force. The bridge's twin at St. Marys, West Virginia, built to the same design, was closed the following year and demolished."]},{"heading":"The thirteen months before","paragraphs":["For roughly thirteen months before the collapse, Point Pleasant had been reporting a winged figure with glowing red eyes — the Mothman, filed in this archive under the legend's own name. Believers read the sightings as a death omen; the engineering record, kept in its own layer, explains the failure without one. The memorial at the site lists the forty-six. The statue downtown is of the thing said to have warned them."]}],"name":"Silver Bridge site","aliases":[],"type":"BRIDGE_SITE","type_label":"Bridge Site","cats":["DARK_HISTORY","DISASTER_HISTORY","LOCAL_FOLKLORE"],"groups":["dark-history","legends","roads"],"desc":"Site of the 1967 bridge collapse that killed 46 people—folded into Mothman lore.","full_desc":"A bridge site in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Silver Bridge site is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Site of the 1967 bridge collapse that killed 46 people—folded into Mothman lore. The archive files it under dark history, disaster history and local folklore. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors.","address":null,"city":"Point Pleasant","county":null,"state":"West Virginia","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":38.8447,"lon":-82.1411,"coord_kind":"EXACT","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"New record from encyclopedia/official-source pass; VERIFY task auto-queued for primary-source corroboration.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":70,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0.85,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1227,"type":"LEGEND_CONFLICT","description":"Mothman believers frame the 1966–67 sightings as a death omen; skeptics note the collapse’s documented engineering cause. Silver Bridge site's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. 'Silver Bridge' carries the account. As folklore it's unkillable: the story is too good, and the place too fitting, to let go.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":"The legend grew after the fact; engineering reports fully explain the failure.","source":{"name":"Silver Bridge","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"The Silver Bridge collapsed December 15, 1967, killing 46 people; a corroded eyebar caused the failure. The record dates it to 1967-12-15. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. 'Silver Bridge' documents the entry. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1967-12-15","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Silver Bridge","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Mothman believers frame the 1966–67 sightings as a death omen; skeptics note the collapse’s documented engineering cause. Silver Bridge site's file is thin on proof and long on persistence — the standard profile of American place-lore. 'Silver Bridge' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The retelling is the record now — the legend metabolized the facts long ago.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Silver Bridge","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[],"events":[{"name":"Silver Bridge collapse","type":"DISASTER","date_start":"1967-12-15","date_end":null,"description":"At 5 p.m. on December 15, 1967 — rush hour, Christmas shoppers aboard — a single cracked eyebar failed and the Silver Bridge folded into the Ohio River in under a minute, killing 46 people. The collapse rewrote national bridge-inspection law — and cemented Point Pleasant's Mothman legend, since the sightings had stopped the very night the bridge fell.","evidence":"DISASTER","source":{"name":"Silver Bridge","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Site access varies; verify before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Silver Bridge","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Bridge","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}