The Lessons of Lore
October 29, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Elizabeth Friend | Longreads | October 2024 | 4,622 words (16 minutes)
On a bright but chilly day in February, my teenager and I are trespassing. We’re clambering down an embankment by railroad tracks in Jamestown, tripping on roots and brambles. There’s a liquor bottle at the top of the hill, and at the bottom, a pile of empty beer cans and an Easter basket, slightly broken, shining robin’s-egg blue in the afternoon sunlight.
We’re alone today, but clearly we’re not the only ones making this trek.
To our right, a modern cut-stone bridge spans the rural two-lane highway. It’s covered with graffiti like an old sailor with tattoos—a myriad of fading messages left long ago by teens from the high school down the road.
We can’t stop to decipher the wall of text. Cars come whipping around the corner and the tight curves in the road make 45 mph seem a whole lot faster. Besides, that’s not the bridge we’re looking for.
The one we want is smaller, more narrow. It’s off the main road now, tucked away under the train tracks, like a secret just out of sight.
Photos pinned to Google Maps from years past show this bridge as a dark round tunnel, slick from mud and moisture, with clumps of unidentifiable detritus scattered along its length. Graffiti climbs the walls here, too, but it feels wilder, almost as if, away from the bright light and busy road, it flourishes in the gloom.
By the time we arrive in early 2024, the vibe has shifted. No longer subterranean, this place is practically suburban.
The tunnel is still here under the tracks, but now there’s a brick path leading to it and a white picket fence along the way. The interior is paved with concrete. Most of the graffiti is hidden under flat gray municipal paint. There are formal entryways at each end of the bridge, and by the road, a highway marker. The shiny red and gold plaque reads: Lydia’s Bridge. Since the 1920s, apparition of a young woman has been seen hitchhiking here, only to disappear when drivers come to her aid.
Lydia’s story was the first ghost tale my mother told me as a child. Having read every book on the shelf in the paranormal section at the local branch library, even the boring ones about aliens, I pressed her for a “true” ghost story, one that took place somewhere not too distant.
The story she told me is one of North Carolina’s most well-known legends.
On a rainy Saturday night not that long ago, a young man was driving home from Greensboro. It was dark and late. The fog was thick on High Point Road, and he had to go slow to navigate its twists and turns.
As he neared the bridge just outside of Jamestown, he glimpsed something pale in the darkness. It was a young woman wearing a fancy dress, drenched in the rain, hitchhiking on the side of the road. He pulled over and opened the door for her; she slipped in without a word. He asked what she was doing out alone on such a miserable night.
“I’m trying to get home,” she said.
She gave him an address and pointed out each turn as they made their way through the darkness, but said little else. When they pulled into the driveway, he grabbed an umbrella and leapt out, hoping to shield her from the pouring rain. But when he opened the passenger door, the girl was gone. A few raindrops remained on the seat where she’d sat. Thinking she’d somehow gone ahead, he rushed to the house in confusion and knocked on the door.
An elderly woman opened the door just a crack, looking tired and wary. He stumbled over his words trying to explain what he was doing on her doorstep. The girl. The rain. The ride home.
She reached in her robe for a small photo.
“Is this who you saw?”
The photo was faded and creased, but he recognized the girl, and her fancy dress.
“That’s her. That’s the girl I brought home.”
The old woman shook her head.
“That’s my daughter Lydia. She died 20 years ago in a car wreck, coming home from a dance. You’re not the first to see her. She returns on nights like these to hitch a ride, but nobody can ever bring her back home.”
He stumbled over his words trying to explain what he was doing on her doorstep. The girl. The rain. The ride home.
There are countless variations on Lydia’s story. Sometimes her dress is a specific color. Sometimes a different family member opens the door. Sometimes the young man drapes his jacket over the girl’s shoulders, only to find it later on her grave.
North Carolinians like to claim Lydia’s story as their own, but the tale of the vanishing hitchhiker is widespread. In his seminal 1981 work on the folklore of urban legends, Jan Harold Brunvand felt so strongly about the enduring value of this archetype that he borrowed it for the title of his book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings.
Brunvand calls the story “a prime example of the adaptability of older legends,” and notes its origins can be traced back to European immigrants who came to the US in the late 19th century with tales of ghostly travelers on horseback. Stories of mysterious disappearing travelers spread throughout the country and evolved over the decades to reflect the anxieties of the era. By the Great Depression, older stories had begun to incorporate the new technology of the automobile. As cars began to reshape American culture, they changed our popular imagination as well.
“If there is a lesson in all of this,” Brunvand explains, “it may be that whatever is new and puzzling or scary, but which eventually becomes familiar, may turn up in modern folklore.”
Regional variations of the vanishing hitchhiker tale are tailored to specific settings. They highlight elements of local culture the way wine reflects its terroir. So, taxi cabs play a role in urban versions. The volcano goddess Pele shows up in Hawaiian retellings, and Utah folklore weaves in elements from The Book of Mormon.
Though it’s hard to pinpoint the origins of something as amorphous as a myth, it seems Lydia’s ghost story—the version North Carolinians hold dear—may have coalesced around a small-town tragedy. In the past hundred years it’s grown beyond its roots, tapping into a specifically Southern type of unease about the changing roles of American women in the first half of the 20th century.
Ghost stories need a sense of place to really take root. The details are often adrift in time, but the stories thrive and promulgate when they can be tied to a location. For locals, there’s the frisson of seeing the familiar made weird. For outsiders, a story feels more grounded, more believable, if you can nod to the place where it allegedly happened.
Native American tribes—the Keyauwee, Shakori, Mánu: Yį Įsuwą (Catawba), Occaneechi, and Cheraw—were living on the land that would become Jamestown. In the 1750s, Quakers settled in the area. Later, the town became an early hub of industry in North Carolina’s Piedmont region. Today, it’s still a small town, with about 3,300 people in three square miles situated between Greensboro and High Point.
Lydia’s Bridge was built in 1916 by Southern Railway. The train tracks run above East Main Street, formerly known as High Point Road, which used to curve through the narrow overpass in a tight S bend. Sometime between 1935 and 1944, the road was diverted a stone’s throw to the northeast, straightening out sharp curves and making room for two full lanes of traffic in and out of downtown Jamestown.
North Carolinians like to claim Lydia’s story as their own, but the tale of the vanishing hitchhiker is widespread.
The new bridge is square where the old bridge is round, bustling instead of deserted, awash in the sounds of schools and neighborhoods nearby. At some point, Lydia’s haunting shifted along with the traffic patterns. She’s been seen at both bridges, but the new one is the only place she might still hail passing motorists.
Today, the two bridges are united by the tracks overhead, the graffiti they attract, and the legend that binds them. Step back far enough and you can capture them both in the same photo, looking like cousins at a family reunion.
Robin Mitchell Taylor grew up in Greensboro, roughly 20 minutes up the interstate from Jamestown. She’s lived there all her life and can trace her family roots in the region back to the 1750s. She was researching this family history some years ago when she came across old newspaper accounts of a relative, Annie L. Jackson, who died in a car wreck in 1920.
“I kinda thought about it for a while, and set it aside, and thought about it some more,” she says, “and I thought, ‘that would be weird if my great-aunt was Lydia.’”
One person was killed and three others injured in an automobile accident which occurred about three miles from the city on the High Point-Greensboro road last night about ten o’clock. Miss Annie Jackson, young woman of Greensboro, was fatally injured, and died before she could be brought to a hospital in High Point. . . .
An account of how the car, which turned completely over, came to such a mishap, could not be obtained, but it is surmised that the sharp curve in the road at that point and the slippery condition of the pavement last night must have had much to do with it.
—The High Point Enterprise, June 21, 1920
The more Taylor researched, the more likely it seemed to her that the accident that killed her father’s aunt might be the kernel of truth around which the Lydia legend grew.
Annie L. Jackson was born in Greensboro in 1885. At the time of her death, she was 35 years old and working in the sample room at Vick Chemical Company, famous for its eponymous VapoRub salve. Though she’d been married once before, the union was short-lived, and her death certificate lists her as single. Both her parents preceded her in death, but newspaper accounts mention a sister. There were several siblings, in fact, including Taylor’s grandmother Dora and a younger sister named Roberta.
“I kind of thought that my grandmother did not approve of Annie or Roberta,” Taylor recalls.
The two youngest siblings stuck together, she says, especially after their father died and the family moved into boarding houses. They both married early, and separated quickly, which Taylor thinks may have contributed to the gulf between Dora and her younger sisters.
“I honestly feel like they were the fun girls,” says Taylor. “Annie and her sister that was closest to her were party girls.”
After Annie died, Roberta married a carnival manager and left town.
According to newspaper reports, on the night of June 20, 1920, Annie was riding in a car with two men and another woman. Their destination was never made clear, but Taylor notes Annie had family living near the Jamestown Bridge, close to the scene of the accident. When the car flipped, the others were injured and Annie was killed. The driver, who briefly went missing following the crash, was arrested a few days later and charged with reckless driving, but Taylor says he was never prosecuted.
The details of Annie’s life are unsatisfying and inconclusive. Her death is an arbitrary one, one of those small random tragedies in which we struggle to find meaning. But wrapped in the shroud of Lydia’s ghost story, the narrative becomes one of great loss: the loss of young life and the promise it holds, the yearning to return home, the weight of endless grief.
For the mother at the heart of the tale, her grief is never allowed to fade. She is forced to relive the loss of her child each time the doorbell rings late on a rainy night, each time she must show her daughter’s fading photo to the disoriented driver at the door, each time their eyes search the dark for the girl who can never come home.
The humans caught in this ghostly loop cannot escape the past.
Amy Greer and fellow paranormal researcher Michael Renegar spent years trying to track down the possible historical origins of Jamestown’s vanishing hitchhiker.
“I can remember many times talking about Lydia and crying,” Greer recalls. “And saying ‘what if this was your daughter? Wouldn’t you want the truth to be told?’ So that grief and sadness, it affected us both.”
Renegar, who passed away in 2020, published several regional ghost story compendiums before he and Greer teamed up to research Lydia. They combed local paper archives looking for car accident death reports between 1916, when the old bridge was built, and 1938, when accounts of Lydia’s apparition began to circulate. They chronicled their efforts in the 2018 book Looking for ‘Lydia’:The Thirty-Year Search for the Jamestown Hitchhiker.
In 2015, a student at High Point University brought Greer and Renegar a 1920 article about Annie’s crash near the old railroad underpass. As they looked into it, they came to the same conclusion as Robin Mitchell Taylor.
The more Taylor researched, the more likely it seemed to her that the accident that killed her father’s aunt might be the kernel of truth around which the Lydia legend grew.
“We do feel that Annie is who Lydia actually is, because it’s the only story that fits the scenario,” Greer says.
Still, there are many questions the records of the day cannot answer.
It’s not clear why the four in the car were traveling together. It’s possible they were running moonshine, Greer speculates, noting that the nearby town of High Point had a rough reputation during the Prohibition years. Or perhaps, somewhat less dramatically, they might have been trying to get back to Annie’s boarding house before the nightly curfew.
“We don’t know why they were out there, why the wreck happened,” she says. “We know they were in a rush.”
The story Greer and Renegar present differs from Lydia’s in key details, but Greer is careful to note she isn’t looking to disprove the legend so many have grown up hearing and retelling.
“All we can do is be investigators and try to piece the pieces together as best as we can,” she says.
As she sees it, these historical clues pointing to a real-life origin lend credence to the myth. On the way to becoming Lydia’s story, the details of Annie’s narrative may have blended with those of other automobile deaths involving young women in the area.
Greer has no doubt that there’s a ghost at the heart of this ghost story. Her belief in Lydia’s unsettled spirit motivated her to search through one false lead after another. It’s important to her that others see the real person she feels is behind the legend.
“It could have been anybody’s daughter.”
Ghost stories serve only the living. They transmute specific tragedies into universal lessons, and in the process, give us a way to make sense of a changing world.
As Colin Dickey writes in Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, “More than just simple urban legends and campfire tales, ghost stories reveal the contours of our anxieties, the nature of our collective fears and desires, the things we can’t talk about in any other way.”
My mother first heard the story of Lydia at slumber parties as a teen in the 1960s. It was whispered late at night alongside a slate of stories designed to scare young women.
“Everybody always started out with the couple who was parking and the guy with the hook,” she recalls.
Brunvand, the folklorist, notes that these types of classic slumber-party ghost stories have a consistent theme: as young people grow up and strike out on their own, they become exposed to the dangers of the world. “[A]lthough the immediate purpose of many of these legends is to produce a good scare,” he writes, “they also serve to deliver a warning.”
Lydia’s story is more subtle, and more poignant, than one in which teens get terrorized while making out. It’s meant to be sad rather than scary. But it is still a cautionary tale, rooted in societal unease about the changing roles of Southern women in the first half of the 20th century.
Ghost stories serve only the living. They transmute specific tragedies into universal lessons, and in the process, give us a way to make sense of a changing world.
Dr. Joey Fink is the chair of the history department at High Point University, located just five miles from Lydia’s Bridge. Much of her work focuses on women’s history and labor movements in the US. She says tales like Lydia’s exist largely outside the traditional historical record. One way to gauge the power of ghost stories and other urban legends, she suggests, is to evaluate how long they last, and how they get retold.
The key, she says, is to look at “what is the story doing to help people make sense of themselves or the world around them.”
Lydia’s story has persisted for a hundred years, shaped in part by major cultural upheavals in the first half of the 20th century. From the 1880s to the 1920s, during Annie Jackson’s lifetime, a generation of young, working-class white women in the South moved from rural areas to work in factories, usually in the textile industry, earning wages outside the home for the first time.
Leaving the farm to move to a city or a mill town may have offered these women a new kind of opportunity, but it wasn’t exactly liberating. Many would enter the mills as young women, get married, and end up working alongside their own children. Factory owners could punish an entire family if one person stepped out of line.
Fink says women like Annie were stuck in a rigid hierarchy of class, race, and gender, with few chances to advance, but many ways to lose what little privilege they had.
“They were already seen because of their class status as ‘lower than,’” Fink says. “To break out of any traditional norms of Southern white womanhood made them more vulnerable to accusations of deviance, or it could justify all kinds of abuse or maltreatment.”
Lydia’s ghost story may have started circulating as early as 1924. Renegar, Greer’s former research partner, reported finding a newspaper account dating back to 1938. But the story came to wider prominence in 1959 with the publication of Nancy Roberts’ popular book, An Illustrated Guide to Ghosts & Mysterious Occurrences in the Old North State.
Lydia’s story functions as a moral fable, obliquely warning young women from straying too far from their traditional roles.
By this point, another fundamental shift was underway.
During World War II, millions of women went to work to support the war effort. Once the war was over, a broad cultural backlash aimed to put middle-class women back at home.
In the Cold War years, as the US sought to limit the spread of communism abroad, political leaders promoted the concept of domestic containment at home to steel American society against the purportedly undermining influences of socialism.
The family unit, then, became a battlefield. According to the rhetoric of the day, the fight against communism could best be won by raising girls and boys “to be the next generation of Cold Warriors,” says Fink.
This meant men and women were expected to adhere to strict gender roles, with an emphasis on breadwinner dads and stay-at-home moms, to set a strong moral example for their children.
The stakes for women who stepped out of line changed between Annie’s death and when Lydia’s story became enshrined in North Carolina lore in Roberts’ book. During the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, any deviance from the norm, such as perceived promiscuity or homosexuality, was seen as more than just the moral failings of an individual; it was a threat to the safety of the nation.
Memorable ghost stories are often cautionary tales that explore the risks of crossing certain social boundaries. Lydia’s story functions as a moral fable, obliquely warning young women from straying too far from their traditional roles.
Patriarchy demands women walk a narrow path from home to marriage, from maidenhood to motherhood, and to deviate invites tragedy. For even the most innocent of young women, a teen dance could be your downfall. Riding in cars with boys could cost you your reputation or your life. Seen in this context, the nontraditional life of Annie Jackson resonates with the mythical Lydia. Both pay a price for transgressing the boundaries of what’s deemed acceptable for young white women negotiating the new freedoms of mobility and modernity.
For the most part, Annie Jackson lived the invisible life of the working class. But even from the slim historical record she left behind, we can tell her life had some nuance. Lydia’s, however, does not. Her past is as blank as her flowing white dress, an empty canvas on which we can project our fears for young women moving from adolescence to adulthood, from the safety of home into the wider world.
Part of the staying power of a myth is what larger sentiment it speaks to, and as Fink tells me, the throughline that runs from Annie Jackson’s time to the 1950s when Lydia’s story spread is the concept of lost innocence. And it’s a specific Southern flavor of innocence.
Fink says there’s a key reason white Southern womanhood was so narrowly defined and staunchly defended during periods of tumultuous societal change. The alleged vulnerability of white women was often used as a pretext for racial violence and control.
The post-Reconstruction decades when young women were flocking to factories coincided with the rise of the Jim Crow system, in which, as she puts it, “white men in power used the claim of defending and protecting white womanhood to terrorize and subjugate people of color in the South, to reassert control over Black labor and reaffirm white supremacy in law and custom.”
Fink says the economic draw of industrial work, and the limited freedoms it offered, directly clashed with the pervasive cultural message that young white women should be shepherded and protected for the good of society. This tension over competing visions of womanhood fueled the kinds of collective anxieties that manifest in modern folklore and urban legends.
Patriarchy demands women walk a narrow path from home to marriage, from maidenhood to motherhood, and to deviate invites tragedy.
As Colin Dickey writes, “The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses and our cities appear at moments of anxiety and point to instability in our national and local identities.”
This idealized notion of fragile Southern womanhood was used to justify the Jim Crow system of segregation for decades. Fink points out some of the most robust challenges to this system of power—like the 1954 Supreme Court ruling declaring public school segregation unconstitutional—happened during the decade when Lydia came to embody an abstract notion of youth and purity.
“I think there’s something to this idea that in the 1950s a ghost story really becomes something about innocence lost when you have so many white Southerners who react to the dismantling of the Jim Crow system in this incredibly fierce way,” she says.
Lydia’s story does not address the racial systems and politics of the South directly, but, like all Southern stories, is shaped by their legacy. And this may help explain, in part, how Lydia’s story ended up so different from Annie’s life. A divorced middle-aged factory worker out late at night with unknown men is perhaps not so stirring a tragic heroine as a young girl returning home from a dance. The mythical Lydia makes a much better magnolia blossom, closer to the ideal than a real Southern woman could ever be.
My mom recalls that when she was growing up, Lydia’s story seemed more rooted in the realm of the possible, more likely to be true, than some of the most lurid slumber party tales. That’s part of its continuing allure. Stripped of historical context it feels plausible, just one step removed from the teen car crash ballads of the 1950s.
I felt this, too, when I heard it as a child. This apparent plausibility did not make me love it. In fact, it seemed a little too mundane, not quite weird or uncanny enough to enchant me. When I was young I thought only of the driver’s eerie brush with the unknown. I didn’t grasp the mother’s enduring horror until long after I became a parent.
For my teenager, the story seems more abstract; a novelty at best. The lure of a road trip to check out a haunted bridge was too good to pass up, but the tale itself doesn’t seem to resonate beyond a passing curiosity.
Nonetheless, we’re part of the oral tradition that keeps ghost stories like this alive. We’ve passed this lore along through three generations, even if we’re largely unaware of it. And not believing the story doesn’t necessarily strip it of its power.
For all my thirst for ghost stories as a kid, the ghost-hunting fad that came later never really captured my imagination in the same way.
Still, paying a visit to a spooky locale is an American tradition of its own, popular long before the rise of reality TV. Folklorists and anthropologists call it legend tripping when groups of (usually) teens travel to a supposedly haunted space and test the lore by enacting whatever rituals are said to summon that particular spirit.
These outings have more to do with group bonding and proof of bravery than the supernatural. It’s a way to get a big thrill from a bite-sized adventure, a relatively safe venue to experiment with risky behavior. Lydia’s Bridge has been a draw for teen legend-trippers for decades.
We’ve passed this lore along through three generations, even if we’re largely unaware of it. And not believing the story doesn’t necessarily strip it of its power.
When I make the trek with my teen, we’re following in those footsteps, but not fully participating in the ritual. To do that, we’d need to make the trip late at night, preferably on a Saturday, preferably in the rain.
Instead, we’re visiting by daylight, here to see the living more than summon the dead. The bridges, both of them, are empty, but teeming with evidence of life. The graffiti here goes back at least 50 years. It’s a changing canvas of private sentiment made public, but also safely anonymized. Messages meant for individuals become transmissions to the masses, carrying currents of emotion we might not be able to speak out loud.
Writing for the North Carolina Folklore Journal in 2000, Laura Sutton captured a moment in time when spray paint on the new bridge honored three high school students who died in car wrecks in the late ’90s, while graffiti on the old bridge commemorated Lydia’s tragedy nearly a century before. Today, almost none of it is legible, just layer upon layer of scribblings documenting romance, rivalry, celebration, and mourning through the years.
The road that runs by Lydia’s Bridge seems almost familiar, like a slightly polished version of the rural highways where I grew up about an hour away. Narrow two-lane ribbons lined with trees, winding between small towns, with twists and turns barely suited to the speed and heft of the automobile. I spent so many Saturday nights traversing roads like this as a teen. Packed in a car, never enough seatbelts, balanced on the lap of some boy. Grasping at handholds as we slid around the hairpin curves. Everybody some combination of drunk or stoned, hoping the kid at the wheel was more sober than the rest of us. Looking back now I realize I would have been the first through the windshield if we’d lost control.
As the afternoon shadows grow longer, my teenager and I stand under Lydia’s Bridge. Old graffiti peeks out at the edges of flat gray paint. A handful of names are still decipherable near one entrance, and in a few spots along the tunnel, new graffiti has appeared like mushrooms after a rain: An elaborate multi-colored tag in three-foot-high lettering. Cartoonish creatures outlined in black spray paint. A ballpoint pen heart joining the names of two young lovers.
At the other end, where the dim concrete walls are washed with winter sunshine, there’s a message—the kind a mother might impart to her daughter as she ventures out into the world.
“I love you . . . be safe.”
Elizabeth Friend is an award-winning freelance audio producer and writer. She lives in North Carolina where she researches stories about history, science, nature, and the occasional oddity.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/29/lydia-ghost-story-folklore-north-carolina/
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