I first heard of Cry Baby Bridge in middle school. The area I live in has a long strange history since its colonization and therefore many haunted places. Cry Baby Bridge was lumped in with Gravity Hill and Midnight Mary and the old school where you challenged the ghost of a deceased quarterback to a race. (that one didn’t have a name)
Over the years the stories started to tease themselves apart. Gravity Hill was where your car would roll uphill toward a supposedly evil church. Midnight Mary would walk the roads around a lake where she’d been thrown from her car on prom night.
Cry Baby bridge had two stories associated with it, in my area. One is that a bus full of kids got stuck on it and met some terrible fate. So now, if you put powder or flour on the back of your car and stopped at the edge, your car would roll across on its own and you would find little hand prints on the back.
The other story was that it was where they hung people. Horse thieves maybe? If you went at a certain time, you could see the ghosts hanging from the rafters of the bridge.
In college my roommate and I took to legend tripping. We drove down dark roads, and we explored that entire abandoned school (although we did not challenge the quarterback to a race) and we even trekked through a haunted park and got some frankly terrifying photographs.
But our trip to Van Sant bridge was, honestly, disappointing. It’s a beautiful little bridge in a lovely country area of mansions and renovated historic farmhouses. And there was no crying baby, hanging ghosts or children pushing our car across the bridge.
It wasn’t until later that I learned that the Van Sant bridge was only one of many haunted bridges. Bridges that all share a common story, on top of their other tragedies.
The mother and her child.
In some stories she is pregnant out of wedlock. In others, she has been scorned by her lover upon the birth of her child. In a few, she has given birth to a stillborn baby. Sometimes she jumps herself. Sometimes she only throws the child.
And whether it is the baby or the mother who cries is up for interpretation.
Those stories, and the fact that they are so prevalent, are what really impressed Cry Baby Bridge upon me.
So many towns, so many people, all know this story. All have fleshed our versions of it.
“She was the daughter of a pastor and her married neighbor seduced her. She hid her pregnancy from her father but when she gave birth, she went to her lover and he cast her out and called her a whore. She ran to the bridge and threw herself and her baby over.”
“She was the wife of a farmer, but while he was a away, a farmhand raped her, and when her husband came home and found her pregnant, he chased her to the bridge with a gun. She slipped over the side and was crushed on the rocks below.”
“She was only 15 and he told her they were going to get married. When she told him she was pregnant, he told everyone in school she was a slut and she committed suicide.”
Cry Baby Bridges are everywhere because these stories exist everywhere. Cautionary tales, meant to shame and frighten young women.
No surprise this is universal.
But legends are evolving things. In our collection of utter speculation, there are time loops and teen dares and sometimes that crying baby is no innocent thing but something out for blood. The helpless mothers have an agency of their own as well. They have stories beyond their abuse, beyond their death.
The cries have many causes. Creatures of all genders wailing in the wind for vengeance, for fury, for lust and in limbo. The time of for desperate young women throwing themselves over the side of a bridge is past.
Now those young women want their price in blood, or to shelter the next generation.
The ghosts and monsters that haunt out legends have changed, and will continue to change.
Cry Baby Bridge will remain.
These pictures Photos of PA CB Bridges (With Exception of the Van Sant Bridge) are courtesy of Valerie Zell
Cry Baby Bridge: A Collection of Utter Speculation is available October 3, 2023
LC W. Allingham 
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