Blog Option #4

Trisha Langley

Blog

OPTION #4

            I’ll never forget the first time I visited Jakes Bridge, which is a place that had a scary local legend near the town that I grew up. Supposedly a depressed boy by the name of Jake that lived just up the road from this bridge one day hung himself from it. The legend goes that is that Jake is there haunting the bridge and doesn’t want you to suffer his same fate so if you go and park your car on that bridge in the odd hours of the night your car will begin to move, and if you place baby powder on the back of your car it will reveal mysterious hand prints left behind from Jake pushing on the back of your car.

            Growing up we had all heard about Jakes Bridge, driven by it a hundred times and heard the stories of our fellow family and friends, but one night my friends and I decided to see if all these legends and stories were true. We were only in the 6^th grade so we asked one of our older siblings to drive us there and they agreed. The whole trip there we were on the edge of ours seats sitting in complete silence all pondering what the fate of this trip might be. Then finally we arrived and pulled up onto the bridge, put our car in neutral and waited. I don’t know how long it was before the car started moving or how long we had waited but I do remember the second it did begin to move and the stillness of everyone in the car, the paleness of everyone’s faces and the utter silence that hung in the air. No one could believe it, we were actually moving! Once we had all gotten a hold of our senses and realized the situation we were in we all began to scream, “GO! GO! GO!” urging our shofar to put the car in drive and get the hell out of there. Just as the car ride there, the car ride back wasn’t much different. We all sat in silence, wide eyed staring at the road and out the windows not wanting to speak about what just happened.

            To this day I am still terrified of Jakes Bridge for I remember the experience I had, and even though I love being scared that was way too real for me and personally never wanted to experience something like that again. So I simply stayed away from there. Just as the two boys in “The Lonesome Place” were scared of the grain elevator and the area surrounding it, we were scared of Jakes Bridge. The locals all had their legends and very own stories to share and now so did I. I can relate to the boys in the short story because this was something that potentially could have been a figment of their own imaginations and it was as simple as them scaring themselves, but once the boy Bobby was killed in this area it became real, more real than the boys had ever imagined. So just like them I had always been afraid of Jakes Bridge and perhaps by going there and putting myself in the circumstances I did I made it real for myself and had justified for myself that Jake really was haunting this bridge.