Case file · Folklore spirit · Road, bridge or woods
Emily’s Bridge (Gold Brook Covered Bridge)
Also known as Gold Brook Covered Bridge, Stowe Hollow Bridge
Vermont’s “most haunted” covered bridge is said to hold the ghost of a jilted woman named Emily. Historians trace the legend to a 1960s school paper.
The Gold Brook Covered Bridge carries Covered Bridge Road over Gold Brook in the Stowe Hollow area, a few miles from Stowe village. Built around 1844 by John W. Smith, it is the only surviving 19th-century covered bridge in Vermont with wooden Howe trusses that still carries a public road, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. For most of its life it was simply a well-used country bridge.
Today almost everyone knows it as Emily’s Bridge. The legend holds that, at some point between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, a young woman named Emily was jilted by her lover and died at the bridge – by accident in some versions, by her own hand after the end of the affair in others – and that she has haunted it ever since. Visitors describe lights, apparitions and voices, and the story has spread across countless paranormal websites.
Historians have traced the story with unusual precision. A 1930s history of Stowe described the bridge without any mention of a ghost. The first published account of Emily appeared in the early 1970s in Bob Hagerman’s history of Lamoille County’s bridges, which reprinted parts of a high-school paper on the legend by a local student. Historian Jill Mudgett, who found the paper at the Vermont Historical Society and spoke to its author, reported in 2012 that the student had not believed in the ghost herself; in a 1978 newspaper interview Hagerman said a friend of hers had admitted the two girls used a Ouija board for part of the paper.
No record of anyone named Emily dying at the bridge has ever been found, and the Vermont Historical Society describes the legend as “pretty well debunked.” That has not stopped the bridge from becoming Vermont’s best-known ghost story and a magnet for nocturnal visitors – a reminder that a legend can be completely invented and still become part of a place’s history.
What people report
Reports include lights and apparitions on or near the bridge, voices or cries, and a sense of an unseen presence.
Where and when
Inside the single-span covered bridge on Covered Bridge Road in Stowe Hollow, mostly at night. It is a working road in a residential area.
Timeline of the haunting
- c. 1844The bridge is built Stowe, Vermont
John W. Smith builds the Howe-truss covered bridge over Gold Brook. For over a century no ghost story is attached to it.
- Early 1970sThe legend goes into print Lamoille County, Vermont
Bob Hagerman’s book on Lamoille County bridges reprints parts of a late-1960s high-school paper on the legend – the first published account of Emily.
- 1978The Ouija board admission Vermont
Hagerman tells a newspaper that one of the student’s friends confessed the girls had used a Ouija board to produce part of the paper.
- October 31, 2012A historian tells the story of the story Vermont
Jill Mudgett’s Vermont Public commentary traces the legend to the student paper and the author’s own disbelief.
What could explain it?
- There is no record of any death at the bridge, and the legend first appears in the late 1960s – more than a century after the bridge was built.
- Part of the founding account reportedly came from a Ouija board session between teenagers, at a time of popular ghost films and TV.
- Night visits to a dark, enclosed wooden bridge – with creaking timbers, running water and passing cars – reliably produce eerie impressions.
- Internet retellings have multiplied the versions of the story, which already varied in the earliest written account.
Ghost tours, books and screen
Emily’s Bridge features in nearly every list of New England’s haunted places, in paranormal TV and countless online videos. Vermont historians use it as a case study in how a modern legend is born, and the bridge itself remains a much-photographed landmark of Stowe.
Places to visit
The state historical society’s short history of the bridge and its legend.
Where it’s reported
Emily’s Bridge (Gold Brook Covered Bridge) in the news
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Sources
First published · Updated
