Update 11/08/08: The bridge
was destroyed by an arsonist. The cache was not in the bridge and
should still be there. Not sure what they will do with the area
now. I had heard they were going to tear the bridge down and build
something new anyway... so we will have to see what
happens.
From
haunted creeks to haunted bridges…this is the tale of Gudgeon
the Mule and his bridge of doom. No, we did not see the ghosts
said to haunt the location. But the very setting itself is
enough to haunt the soul. And the stories touch the
heart.
Erie County, PA is home to
three remaining beautiful covered bridges. One of these bridges
lies south of Girard - The Gudgeonville Bridge. Gudgeonville is not
a town, it never was. It is in actuality a memorial. As we drove
along the winding woods cloaked Gudgeonville Road, we caught
glimpses of a curving stretch of high sheer cliffs through the
trees.
These high banks appeared
almost unnaturally smooth, like they were made of a fine poured
cement or dark ceramic of some sort. This is The Devil's Backbone,
a stretch of alternating bank cliffs along Elk Creek - bare gouges
where the native soft gray shale is exposed and becomes a
featureless clay-like wall. Unearthly is the word… and there it
sat, under the eaves of the Devil's Backbone, guarding Elk Creek
like a wooden knight.
Two ghosts are said to
haunt the bridge. One is that of a little girl from a nearby
family, who was playing too near the shale cliffs by the bridge,
and fell to her death sometime back in the 1940s or 50s. She is
said to walk the bridge on moonless nights. The other ghost that
has been seen on rare occasions is not human. It is instead the
ghost of a mule named Gudgeon. Maybe a legend, but based enough on
fact to allow the local Erie County historians to take a certain
amount of pride in its uniqueness.
Sometime around 1855, a man
from Kentucky by the name of Obadiah Will was delivering a mule to
a fellow in Meadville, PA. As fate would have it, Will and his mule
had just reached the bridge over Elk Creek at the same time as a
couple of barges were coming up the Beaver and Erie canal, which
ran only a short distance from the creek. On board the barges was a
circus - the Girard based "Dan Rice's Circus". On one of the
barges, a calliope began playing. When the squawking roaring
hooting of the calliope reached the ears of Gudgeon the mule, the
animal supposedly dug its hooves into the bridge, and dropped dead
from fright.
A second (and less poetic)
version says that the mule froze in fright, but that Mr. Will took
a large stick to the beast to try to get it to move, but ended up
hitting Gudgeon hard enough to kill him! In either case, the final
irony of the situation was that the calliope had supposedly been
playing "My Old Kentucky Home" at the time. Obadiah Will was given
permission to bury Gudgeon on the west bank of the creek. To
further commemorate his poor Gudgeon, Will hired a local painter to
paint the words "Gudgeonville Bridge" on either end of the bridge.
One source claims that Will later attempted to pursue litigation
against the circus, but the result of this is
unknown.
The circus owner, Dan Rice,
did apparently feel bad enough about the whole matter that he wrote
up the tale in a eulogy form. And indeed, for whatever the truth of
the matter, Gudgeon the Mule has at least been commemorated with a
bridge and a road for all time!
Please replace container and
log exactly as found.
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