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Date Collected

Fall 9-14-2018

Place item was collected

The Hub, Utah State University, Logan, Utah

Informant

Ryeanna, Tucker

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Ryeanna is a 23 year old college student here at Utah State studying Animal Science. She hopes to one day be a veterinarian. She grew up not too far from Logan in a little town just north-west of here called Tremonton.

Context

Ryeanna had told me this story last year when a bunch of use were sitting in The Hub in the TSC at Utah State. We were talking about pranks, supernatural events and weird dream occurrences when she shared this story. I thought it was so funny and weird that I asked her to share it with me so I could collect it for this Folklore project. She agreed with no complaint and set an appointment with me so that I could record it. We met in The Hub in between one of my classes and she retold me the story.

Text

“Ok so in the town I grew up,…so I grew up in like Tremonton area and there’s like a lot of little towns surrounding it and there’s this town called Bear River City…and over there they have this like…really old bridge, and this bridge used to be an actual functioning bridge, that people would drive over, but it was like getting so old like, if you walk on it-… you can still walk on it, but if you look down there’s like holes through because it’s like so old, it’s like…so old they like blocked it off so you can’t drive on it but you can like jump over the rail and like walk on it.

And I remember that everyone would like talk about this bridge and everyone called it like…Cry Baby Bridge. And so…umm…in high school I do a folklore project and me and my friend chose cry baby bridge because we were so interested in it. And so she went out there with another friend and this was her first time she was out there on the bridge and people like to- like…walk across it at night just because it’s creepy.

And so the story goes that there was a woman,…and I couldn’t really find all of it, but there was this woman she was like driving at night, and she like either became possessed or got like sick of her kids or something, but like she stopped at the bridge and threw her kids over the bridge and then like jumped off herself and like drowned and died. The other version I’ve heard is like she became possessed and then like drove the car off the bridge killing her and her kids.

So the story goes if you go and honk you’re horn three times, you can like hear the kids crying. But I can’t remember if you either like…honk the horn or like flash the lights and then you can hear them crying it’s one of the two. So she went out there with another one of her friends, and it was the first time she had been out there…and they went at like midnight on like a chilly night so they like honk the horn three times, and like nothing, they do the lights and like…nothing and they are like, ‘whatever.’ So they decided they were going to get out and walk across the bridge so they left the car lights on so they could see where they were going because there’s like holes in the bridge and it’s like old and rickety and they walk across the bridge her and the friend and they get to about the middle…and they just like feel really cold, and she’s just like ‘Whoa did you feel that?’, you know… And they get to the end and her nose just starts gushing blood and she like never gets nosebleeds, like ever, so this is just like a new occurrence for her and it just like starts gushing blood. So she’s like oh my gosh we should go and as they are walking back, all the lights in her car start like…flicking on off really fast and they like just won’t stop.

So they get in the car and she’s just like throwing tissues in her face to like stop the blood and like the lights are just like still going crazy…and she turns her car off and back on and they are just like… still going crazy so like she goes home and the lights are still doing the flicking and she has to like tell her dad and he’s just like…’I don’t know what happened or what you did but like you had like this fuse that had a short in it or like it’s missing.’ And he like fixed it for her but like whenever she makes sharp corners they like still flicker, so like it ruined her lights forever.

And then me and her would go out like a few other times, but nothing ever happened to us, it was just like her that one time…but it was just always really creepy and we just always just got like, a weird vibe….and so for our project we had to go like out and interview people and talk about it, so we went knocking on doors through the town by the bridge to see if we could find someone who had like a story about it.

And we found this like woman and her name was….ummm I can’t remember I’ll have to look it up or ask my friend….It was Phyllis or something, but she lived right next door to the bridge and we knocked on the door and we were asking her about the bridge and she’s like ‘oh yeah I can tell you about the bridge I’ve like lived here my whole life and bear river city is my home…’ blah blah blah and so we go in, ask her questions and we are like…’So do you think the bridge is haunted?’ and she said not exactly but that she had heard that for some reason that little boys, no , not little girls, but only little boys…all the time, that there were these stories of these little boys always walking off the bridge and drowning and just the boys never girls, and she said she remembered that in high school that there were these two boys driving and that they drove off the bridge and died too. And that’s all she could really tell us that her whole life little boys just always walked off the bridge and died like….If a little boy was missing, he probably walked off the bridge and that it was never girls and they built a new bridge around it. I can’t remember the exact year they built the new bridge,…but they did.”

Texture

When Ryeanna told this story her whole attitude changed, we had just been laughing and chatting before and she had a more serious vibe when she started telling this story. She was less animated, and it seemed like she was more ridged and maybe even quieter. She didn’t really want other people to hear her and I got the feeling that since this was a weird occurrence she didn’t particular like talking about it since it was about her. However I could be total wrong, and she could have just not found this story as funny as some of her other supernatural adventures.

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Revenants

EAD Number

2.1.2.25

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Additional Files

Cry Baby Bridge - Ryeanna.m4a (4460 kB)

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