The Bridge of Lost Souls

In fairy tales and nursery rhymes, only trolls live under bridges; in the real world, you often find people down on their luck. But there’s a bridge somewhere in Los Angeles inhabited by strange creatures neither living nor dead, creatures that almost claimed the life of two lost friends.

Derek writes to tell me the story of what happened to him and his friend, Ian, one August night. Derek and Ian both grew up in Los Angeles, but now Derek was attending college on the east coast. At the end of summer break, Ian offered to drive Derek to the airport.

Getting to the airport is a hassle no matter where you live, but especially so in Los Angeles’s tangle of freeways. Compounding the problem was the fact that road construction season was in full swing. Ian and Derek, reminiscing over the summer and making plans for winter break, were not paying as close attention to the road as they should have.

“There was so much construction going on,” Derek tells me, “that we didn’t even realize we weren’t on the right road for a long time.” Before they knew it, Derek and Ian were heading away from the airport.

“I told Ian to just take the next exit and we’ll find some place to turn around,” Derek recalls. Unfortunately, the next exit was a dead end. The road that Derek and Ian found themselves on took them further and further away from the highway. “It was starting to get dark,” Derek remembers, “and I was afraid I was going to miss my flight.”


The portable GPS system Ian had in his car was of little use. The construction had altered the roadways so much that relying on the device’s map was chancy. Instead, the two friends were trying to spot the freeway and drive in its general direction.

Ian and Derek found themselves driving through a decrepit, antediluvian industrial park. Weeds and scrub brush competed with cracked sidewalks and chain link fencing to frame the shells of abandoned factories and obscure machinery. Whatever commercial impetus first breathed life into this place, it had long ago been extinguished.

“I saw an overpass and thought it must lead to the road, any road,” Derek recalls. Ian headed for the overpass, looking out for highway signs that would lead them away from this place, but the only sign the two could see was the strange graffiti that covered the derelict buildings they passed by.

“Somebody had spray-painted things like Turn Back and Danger in Spanish on the buildings,” Derek tells me. “We thought it was kinda funny, kinda silly.” But as Derek and Ian approached the overpass, their amusement turned to disappointment. What looked like a highway overpass in the distance was just an old bridge up close.

“While I was swearing, Ian was telling me to shut up and look at the weird bridge,” Derek remembers. Covering the old bridge’s stonework was a swirling, psychedelic paint job, a seeming kaleidoscope of lines and colors.

As the sun set, the old bridge took on ominous proportions in the car’s headlights. It loomed above the car like some grand funerary monument built by the long-dead kings of a more civilized age. The road that Derek and Ian followed had led them into the shadow of the old bridge. 

“That’s when I saw that the paint job wasn’t as funky as I thought,” Derek tells me. The old bridge was covered not in random whirls of paint, but in words, words written in spray paint and marker, words gouged and scratched into the stone, words scrawled in finely flowing script almost too small to read.

Ian slowly coasted the car under the gloom of the old bridge and, in the fading light of day, the two friends could just make out what the words said. “They were people’s names,” Derek recalls. “Thousands of names.” In the half-light, the names seemed to flicker with an eerie luminescence, and Derek and Ian could scarcely discern a greater pattern to the arrangement of the names, as if they formed images of faces and bodies lost to agony and torment.

The car slowly rolled out from under the bridge, leaving Ian and Derek relieved to be away from the strangely luminous words. Ian slowed the car and brought it to a stop. He turned to Derek and they shared a short puzzled look.

“Ian was all about the GPS,” Derek recalls, “so he wanted to check out the map and find the road and get the hell out of there.” As Ian studied the tiny glowing screen, Derek pondered the deep darkness beyond the car’s headlights. “I realized I couldn’t see any lights around us,” Derek tells me. “That doesn’t happen in LA very often.”

Ian called Derek’s attention to the GPS map in front of him. Derek could see that the area they seemed to be in the middle of was a greyed-out rectangle on the tiny map. The roads that surrounded the area bent around it or stopped squarely at its border. They were lost in some sort of dead zone.

“Then I looked out the back window,” Derek recalls, “back toward the bridge. I don’t know why I looked, I just had a funny feeling.” There at the mouth of the old bridge, illuminated in the car’s red brakes, several gaunt figures slowly shambled forward.

“I told Ian to get us out the hell out of there,” Derek tells me. Ian took one quick glance behind, and gunned it. Derek saw the figures disappear back into shadow as the brake lights turned off. The car jumped forward for a moment before Ian slammed on the brakes. In front of them the road ended in a pile of industrial debris and garbage. They were trapped.

“We both turned around at the same time,” Derek tells me. “I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t not look.” There they were, behind the car, more figures slowly advancing in a jerky, stiff-legged gait. Bathed in lurid red light, Derek and Ian could see the tattered shrouds, the dull lifeless eyes, the outstretched and wickedly-clawed hands, the skin pulled taut across the skulls of the living dead.

“When we saw what was back there,” Derek recalls, “we both started screaming like little girls.” Ian put the gas pedal to the floor and the car shot forward into the barrier ahead. “We blew through the garbage, jumped a drainage ditch, and ended up on some dirt path that led to an access road,” Derek says. “Ian’s car pulled off a miracle.”

Derek caught his flight with only minutes to spare. In the coming months, Ian attempted to retrace the pair’s steps and locate the strange old bridge, but construction had again altered the highway, seemingly sealing up the dead zone it had previously opened. Although Derek and Ian are convinced that their frightening encounter was genuine, they remain unsure as to what they saw and the significance of the mysterious words written on the old bridge. Does the writing record the names of the dead that are cursed to haunt the bridge? Or, like a giant tombstone, does it memorialize their victims?

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