Campfire Ghost Stories

by Jo-Anne Christensen

Stories Told By Firelight

The Screaming Bridge

There is a certain small town in the next county where it is tradition for students to have an informal party on graduation night at the little campsite by the bridge. IT has been that way for years; for decades, in fact. It always has been and always will be a fine thing to drink bootleg liquor from a paper cup and kiss someone under the stars far from the judging eyes of adults.

Those adults never once tried to put a stop to the campsite party. Maybe it was because they had their own fond post-grad memories. Maybe it was because they saw the get-together as being harmless. Although, the truth is that two terrible things have happened at those parties. One is said to have happened a long time ago. The other happened just this year.

This year, the valedictorian was a fellow named Ted Hobbes. Ted was bright, without beeing bookish; good-looking, without seeming full of himself; and likeable, despite his obvious wealth of attributes. When he stood by the bonfire that night, all eyes were upon him. Ted handled the spotlight with practiced ease and deflected it frequently and generously upon those who were less popular.

"Why don't you tell us one of your stories, Chris?" he said to a pimply boy who stood half in the shadows.

"Oh, I don't know..." the boy named Chris stammered. He scuffed his feet in the dirt but smiled at the attention.

Ted then told the group that Chris had been in his English class and that he was going to be a great writer one day.

"I don't know about 'great,'" Chris said modestly. Then he brightened with an idea. "Hey, I do know a story that I can tell you, though! A ghost story that takes place right here! Right by this bridge!"

Everyone agreed that a ghost story told besdie the campfire would be a perfect idea, and they urged Chris to continue. He took a shy step closer to the flickering flames and told his tale.

"From what I hear, this happened about 30 years ago," he said. "It was graduation night, just like tonight, and all the grads had come here for the party. Most of them were having a good time, but a girl named Brenda Jones was not. Brenda's boyfriend had decided to break up with her and had given her the bad news at the party. Now, I guess she was just nuts over him and she didn't take it too well. They were over there on the riverbank and people up here, at the campsite, could her her crying and carrying on.

"The boyfriend tried his best to calm Brenda down, but eventually she was so hysterical that she just ran off. This guy was hunting though the bushes on the bank-he got some of his buddies to search too-but they couldn't find her. And then, all of a sudden, they hear this scream from right up there, on the bridge.

"Everyone looked, and there she was. Brenda Jones screamed once, so everyone would look at her, then once more as she did a swan dive into the river.

"From what I heard, they never found her body. This river moves pretty fast and if she did turn up, it would have been a couple hundred miles downstream. Her spirit, though, that stayed right here."

"What do you mean?" asked one of the girls who had been hanging on every word of the story.

"Well-now this is a legend, so I donb't know for sure-but they say that when the wind is calm and conditions are just right, you can hear Brenda Jones screaming on her way down to the cold water. Some people even say that she's still trying to get her boyfriend's attention, trying to get him to join her in her watery grave."

The girls all shivered then and cast nervous glances toward the water. The boys laughed and made joking ghostly sounds to prove that the story hadn't affected them one bit. Only Ted Hobbes stood still and quiet, staring thoughtfully into the fire.

"That was creepy," he finally said to Chris. "Good story, man."

But Ted didn't really look as though he had enjoyed the tale and, in an antisocial move that was unlike him, he turned away from his friends and went down to the river where he could be alone.

Five minutes later, he was back. There was dirt on his white pullover, from having clawed his way quickly up the back, and an expression of terror on his face.

"Did you hear that?" he asked in a panicked voice. "Did any of you hear that, just a minute ago?"

All the young people who weren't too busy necking, shrugged and looked at each other and said they hadn't heard anything unusual.

Ted stared at them in disbelief.

"You had to have heard it!" he said. "It was a scream! Someone was screaming over on the bridge!"

They all laughed then congradulated Ted on having made such a good effort to frighten them. But nobody was about to fall for an improvisational version of the story of Brenda Jone's doomed ghost.

Ted denied fabricating the story, but as he looked from one bemused face to the next, he began to doubt himself.

"Maybe my imagination did get the better of me," he admitted. But no more than a few seconds later, he jumped as though he had been touched with a live wire.

"There it is again!" he yelled. "That scream!"

Again, Ted Hobbes found himself alone. If anyone else had heard the cry of distress, they weren't admitting to it.

"Someone's in trouble," Ted said. "We have to help." When no one offered to accompany him, he shook his head in disappointment and set off alone.

For the next two hours, the partygoers watched uneasily as Ted scoured every inch of the bridge and surrounding riverbank, searching for the source of the sreams that only he could hear. He looked around pylons, behind every steel girder, and combed the entire bridge deck. At times, he appeared ready to give up, but then his head would snap back and he would call out "I hear you! I'm coming! Tell me where you are!" Frequently, Ted's best friends pleaded with him to rejoin them at the campsite. Occasionally, someone would try to approach him and take his arm. He reacted so wildly to such attempts that everyone thought it best to keep their distance, lest their obsessed friend lose his footing and fall.

Many people left the party early. Near dawn, those who remained were forced to admit that Ted had come unglued and that some authoritative adult intervention was required. They decided to call upon a friendly, middle-aged police officer whom they affectionately referred to as "Copper."

"Copper can get Ted down off the bridge," one of the kids nodded confidently. "And he'll probably be willing to keep it quiet." No one wanted to see Ted's fine reputation and prospects blemished becasue of a few too many graduation-night beers.

Someone went off to rouse Copper out of bed. The others sat on the riverbank and watched Ted's frantic search. At one point, he lay down flat on his belly, hanging dangerously over the edge of the bridge deck, so that he could peer at the network of steel support beams that were beneath it. The pose looked so precarious that a few of the boys that were watching jumped to their feet.

"Ted!" one shouted. "Get back!"

"No, I can see her!" was his reply. Then to whoever was supposedly trapped in the beams beneath the bridge, he called out, "I see you now! Give me your hand! Just a little closer... Give me your..."

And then Ted Hobbes leaned too far forward and lost his grip. He screamed horribly as he plunged into the balck waters below.

Copper arrived five minutes later, which, of course, was much too late. There was nothing that he, or anyone else, could do. As had been pointed out earlier, it was a fast-moving river and Ted's body would already have been far downstream.

Chris, the acne-plagued youth who had told teh story, was perhaps teh most distraught. He confided to Copper that he would never have imagined a fellow like Ted having such an irrational reaction to something like the old folktale about Brenda Jones.

The policeman nodded in solemn agreement, but corrected the boy on one point.

"You know, the story's actually true," he said. "Well, the ghost part is probably a lot of hogwash," he admitted with a shrug, "but the girl diving off the bridge-now, that really happened. It wa a long time ago. Before I was even on the force."

Chris then asked the obvious question.

"If Brenda Jones was real," he said, "who was the guy who jilted her?"

Copper stopped still for a moment then. When he turned to face the boy beside him, his eyebrows were raised in an expression of vague surprise.

"Well, now, that's an odd coincidence," he siad. and then Copper told Chris and the others the name of the fellow over whom Brenda Jones had killed herself. It was a name they all recognized, but not because of the man's business connections, or his good standing with the Rotary Club, or his seat on the town's council. They knew him, first and foremost, because he was the father of a friend.

***

His name was Dan Hobbes. And his son-drawn into a watery grave prepared by his own father's actions at a graduation party years earlier- was Ted.