There is an urban legend.

(Yes, I know there are many, but bear with me.)

This particular one, according to Snopes.com, doesn't originate anywhere in particular, although versions of it appear in legend and folklore tracing back to the Bible (Acts 8:26-39). The vanishing hitch-hiker is nearly ubiquitous in this age of chain e-mail and forwarded email. You know the one: a guy's driving late at night and pauses to pick up a lone young woman at the side of the road. Her car broke down, she says, or she's had a fight with her boyfriend, and needs a lift back to her home. Obligingly, the man plays knight in blue jean armor, the woman gets into the back seat and gives him directions to her house... and disappears before ever they reach it. Bemused, he gets out and knocks on the house's door anyway, because that's not creepy at all.

Stories diverge here. Some say she leaves a scarf or book or some other personal belonging in his car, which her elderly parents, when they open the door, recognize as belonging to her. Some say he doesn't realize what's happened until he sees the girl's photograph on the piano or the mantel or slightly disturbing, obsessive shrine to her memory in the middle of the living room floor. However it occurs, he is informed at this juncture that the woman he's given a ride to has been dead for fifteen/thirty/fifty years now and can we have that scarf back, please, we'd like to add it to the shrine.

I first heard this story over a decade ago, in high school. There's a bridge, my friends told me, in Jamestown. A woman named Lydia died there, and she still haunts it. You can see her sometimes, and she's been known to try to hitch-hike home. O rly? I asked, and they solemnly nodded. It must be true, then. Now, ten years and change later, I keep stumbling across the story while browsing for column topics. It's got a brief mention in several NC-related ghost story and ghost-hunting websites. HauntedNC.com gives it a relatively lengthy write-up, including mention that someone's found a death certificate to authenticate, at the very least, that a woman named Lydia did indeed die in a car crash there just after Christmas in 1923.

Jamestown is about ten minutes away from me. I couldn't not go and look, could I? Of course not. Any right-thinking person would have done the same thing. So very early this morning, after a breakfast of too much coffee and not much else, I and co-nosy-person Dana C girded our loins, gathered together a flashlight, my camera, and a tape recorder, and ventured out to Jamestown.

The overpass that exists now along that road is not the same overpass upon which Lydia lost her life. The road was moved many years ago, and the original overpass now lies 40-50 feet away, to the right if approaching from High Point. It took Dana and I a few minutes to find it, as we initially began exploring the wrong side of the road, but we did get there after following the train tracks over the new bridge.

I took my tape recorder with me, and it ran the entire time we explored. It recorded us slithering down the slope of loose scree that tops the overpass from the train tracks down (which is, by the way, a highly amusing thing to listen to), and it recorded us remarking on the bridge's appearance. It's understandable, as Dana said, that ghost stories have evolved around it, given its current dilapidated state. Sightings of Lydia's ghost, however, reportedly began in 1924, only a year after her death and well before the road was moved. The overpass would certainly not have been so derelict then.

Approaching the bridge was unsettling, in the growing grey light of pre-dawn. It loomed, a disused concrete arch, with dead vines hanging down over its yawning mouth. Slender, new trees were visible beyond the far end of it, seeming twisted and watchful, with a delicate, cold mist rising around them. Car headlights occasionally illuminated trees and mist together, the swish of their tires seeming ghostly in the early-morning hush. My camera would not take a photograph of the bridge itself: the light was insufficient, even given the flash.

There was certainly a very eerie feel to the bridge, particularly when D took it upon herself to sing a brief aria in a minor key. The acoustics under there are fantastically unsettling. Admittedly, the current road is very close by, and noise from passing traffic does much to shatter what would otherwise have been a delightfully creepy atmosphere. The graffiti is thick to about ten feet high, and sparse after that. A pile of clothes had been dropped to one side, and a blanket near that. I was momentarily startled by a splash of truly disgusting red high on one curving wall: it turned out to be paint, of course, but the brief glimpse out of the corner of my eye was enough to make my heart race.

There was, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one's outlook) no sign of any ghostly presence, Lydia or otherwise. Granted, we didn't linger there too awfully long, but I feel fairly sure the bridge is haunted more surely by teenagers with spray paint cans than by a long-dead woman in a prom dress. Ah, well. There's always next time. I doubt the bridge is about to get up and wander away anytime soon (although to be sure, that would be excellent column material). I'd like to go back sometime when I have more time to linger. If we go less close to morning, the traffic will be more sparse, and the sounds of passing cars will be less distracting. Perhaps Lydia was only put off by that evidence of busy commuters. They, after all, are unlikely to stop and give a lonely hitch-hiker a ride home.

I'm always on the lookout for the strange, odd, bizarre, bewildering, unexplained and blatantly paranormal. If you've heard about or experienced something that you feel fits those criteria, please feel free to comment here, or drop me an email at weirdoholic (at) gmail (dot) com. I can't promise fame and fortune, but if your story catches my interest (and offers enough material to appropriately pad a column), I can offer ten seconds of dubious glory here at Firefox.org.