PURPLE HEAD BRIDGE

"I'm just a ghost in this house
I'm shadow upon these walls,
As quietly as a mouse
I haunt these halls."
- Allison Krauss, Ghost in This House

Purple Head Bridge in Vincennes, Indiana is a decrepid train bridge with most of the ties now missing, leaving holes through its span like gaps of rotten teeth. The rusted metal frame however still spans the Wabash, an echo of the might of the former rail traffic that connected a nation.

I have heard varying stories on how exactly you are supposed to see the spirits. Some people claim that you must drive your car onto the bridge, and wait for strange things to happen. Others state you need only be close to the bridge. Given its decrepit state, and the pieces missing from the bridge, I would highly advice against trying to find a way to get your car onto it.

According to local legends one of the spirits of the Purple Head Bridge is visible only during storms. Supposedly a man once decided to kill himself by hanging himself from one of the trestles during a storm. Something went terribly wrong and he was decapitated in the fall. Today you can see his head floating along the bridge, and near the river.

There are also stories that the Ku Klux Klan was popular in this area during the 1960s, and often used the bridge as one of their favorite lynching spots. Now the dying screams of their victims can be heard late at night. It is worthwhile to note that the KKK was quite active in Indiana during this time.

During the bloody years of the French and Indian War, and in the early days of settlement thereafter in the land that only later came to be called Indiana, skirmishes between white settlers and Native Americans were fought continually along the banks of the Wabash, leaving many dead on both sides. And as is the way with war, many a time bodies of those fallen would not receive proper burial.

So it went for one particular shaman of one of the local tribes. Killed in one of the early outbreaks of fighting, his body, despite the best efforts of his own people to get it back out of the captured land, did not receive proper burial, and his soul was not properly sent into the next realm. According to local Vincennes lore, if you make your way out across the bridge and wait near the center of the precipitous drop, the bloated purple head of the lost shaman will appear before you, lumious and pale, begging and pleading to be properly buried and released from his earthly imprisonment. The shaman's head has been seen by many witnesses over the years, but the color does not always ring true. One witness who encountered the shaman's head swore that it's actually blue.