Going Home (1)

I was driving home from my boyfriend's house late one night (it was about 2 or 3 a.m.), and I had to cross an old bridge that went over a creek. This bridge was on a little-used back road in the country in the middle of the woods. I had driven over this bridge MANY times late at night and had never been afraid or seen anything strange.

On this particular night, just as I got to the bridge, a light near the woods by the creek bank caught my attention. At first I assumed someone was camping out down there, but the light had an unusual glowing effect, and I found that I could not look away from it.

Obviously I was not watching where I was going, because my eyes were drawn to the eerie light. About half way across the bridge I hit something with my car and looked up to see a woman in a white dress roll across my hood and windshield and then roll off onto the ground.

I immediately stopped my car and got out to check on the woman. I was terrified of what I would find, but there was no one on the bridge. I looked over into the water, which was not very deep, afraid that she had fallen over the side of the bridge. She was not there either. Then I looked for the light. It was gone too.

My cell phone would not work so far out in the woods, so when I was certain that I had looked everywhere for her, I got into my undamaged car and drove to the county sheriff's office. As I was telling my story, the deputy and staff at the office had strange looks on their faces. They did not seem too worried about the woman I hit, so I figured they thought I was lying, or crazy.

As I was leaving the sheriff's department, the deputy followed me out to my car. He suggested that I not tell anyone about what had happened to me that night. "Why not?" I asked. He told me not to think HE was crazy, but that I had hit a ghost.

He went on to explain that a few years before, he had worked a homicide on that bridge. A man and his wife were coming home from a party along the same route that I had driven that night. The man was an abusive husband, and deputies had been called to the couple's house for domestic disputes before.

It seemed that the husband had accused the wife of flirting with another man at the party that night, and the deputy said they were not sure if he had forced his wife to get out of the car and walk down the road, or if she had gotten out to avoid her husband's abuse. But what they DID know was, as she walked across the bridge, her husband hit her with his car and killed her. She had flown over the side of the bridge and landed on the sandbar below.

From what he told me, I surmised that the light I saw that night was coming from the spot she landed. The husband had been arrested and convicted of murder, but had hung himself in prison awaiting sentencing.

The night that I saw the ghost was the anniversary of her murder. Her name was Cyndi, and I have since visited her grave and taken her flowers.