Sunset at the bridge taken by Director of Research, Joy Maner

Denton County, Texas, once the epitome of the Wild West’s wide open spaces is for the most part an extension of nearby Dallas’ urban sprawl today, covered with high end single family developments and occasional horse farms. The area, once the center of cattle drives, old Chisholm Trail cowboys and wild gunfights between desperadoes and the outnumbered lawmen, has little to remind its new residents of those early days, but there are a few; one of which is the Old Alton Bridge, stretching its iron tendrils over the Hickory Creek, at a place where the infamous Sam Bass gang shot it out with a Texas Ranger patrol in the 1870’s.

Alton was the original county seat of Denton, a short lived claim to fame due to a falling water table that made potable water scarce, forcing local politicians to move to a new location in 1857. Today, Alton does not exist; not a building survives from the early days of the post-Republic conclave. The Alton Bridge was constructed many years after the collapse of the town that gave its name, intended to carry traffic from the old postal road and Ranger patrol trail, over the Hickory Creek at a location that once was a popular ford for crossing cattle.

The bridge, built by King Iron & Bridge Co. in 1884, is a through-truss iron construction and first served the community’s horse and pedestrian traffic and later trucks and automobiles for the next 100 years, until the State of Texas deemed it unsafe for vehicle traffic in the 1970’s. A new bridge was built adjacent to the old one in the early 1980’s and the original was declared a National Historic Place in 1988 and later refurbished to carry horse and pedestrian traffic on what is now the Elm Fork Equestrian and Hiking Trail, in 1992. Today, the Bridge is technically in the City of Copper Canyon, on the Pilot Knoll Trails, part of the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers park system; the bridge is now actively used by weekend cowboys on horseback, who can be heard talking to their stock brokers via cell phone while enjoying a ride in the woods, with joggers and hikers out for an afternoon trek, close at hand.

While the true history of the bridge is interesting, it has also gained a reputation as a “haunted place” for as long as local residents can remember, always being the spot that kids would flock to on Halloween night, in hopes of capturing a glimpse of a ghost who traversed the area late at night. The legend says that if you go to the bridge and honk your car horn twice at midnight; the ghost’s firry red eyes will appear on the bridge. For several generations teenagers from as far away as Dallas and Fort Worth have travel to the site, many later recounting stories about being scared away by unearthly sounds and unnatural shapes floating in the air in and near the bridge.

As most folk tales often do, the bridge takes on newer and more fanciful claims with every passing year. Some say that the bridge was once the site of an execution, another of a lynching; others say that an old goat herder was murdered on this spot, while still others believe it is the earthbound spirits of those killed in the Sam Bass – Texas Ranger’s shootout nearby. There are even claims of satanic devil worship being performed on the site, raising the specter of the devil himself on the bridge.

The Association for the Study of Unexplained Phenomenon in Texas (ASUP) was invited to come to the bridge to further the research efforts by Denton Paranormal Investigations, a group that has since merged with ASUP, who had made the bridge a pet project and are the official caretakers of the bridge as part of a county “Adopt a Highway” program.

ASUP of course is best known as the original 1970’s investigators of the Amityville Horror case and the book’s foremost debunkers. With over 35 years experience and hundreds of cases, ASUP uses state of the art “crime scene” techniques as well as a good deal of academic research on every case they investigate and the Old Alton Bridge was a perfect match to their expertise.

Sarah Blair, the ASUP’s lead field investigator in Texas noted that there was no doubt that the area was active from a paranormal perspective, but it was the job of the group’s lead researcher, Joy Maner to first dig into the facts surrounding the bridge. With her normal precision, Joy looked through old newspaper clippings, historical records, as well as anecdotal accounts from old books, to conclude that many of the fanciful claims attaching themselves to the bridge, had no basis in fact.

“I first looked into the possibility of a hanging or lynching from the bridge. Before 1923, the County Sheriff was responsible for carrying out state executions; Alton was the County seat from 1851 to 1856, 26 years before the bridge was constructed, long before the first public hanging in Denton County. There were only two executions in Denton before the state took over the task, the hanging of the Burns Brothers in 1879 and of one J. Q. Crews on January 14, 1895, both on the grounds of the Denton County Jail about 15 miles from the Alton Bridge site, the City of Denton.

“The local papers were very good at reporting on illegal activities back then, including lynchings, which were frequent in Dallas and other places all over the south, but there is not one reported lynching in Denton County, a crime that would definitely be reported in an area that was vehemently anti-lynching, at least in the newspapers.” Maner explains.

Maner’s research was thorough; no reports of satanic groups were ever posted for the record in the County press, or of murders in the neighborhood. The gunfight between the Bass gang and Texas Rangers is documented in several places, although the official record of the incident was written in typical Ranger fashion, noting the number of rounds fired in the Hickory Creek incident; the Rangers were reimbursed for used ammo, it seems, not body count or miles traveled. The full documentation was found in an old memoir of the chase, which covered four counties, hundreds of miles and several dead on either side, with Hickory Creek holding only a minor roll in the unfolding drama that was later to become legend.
Sarah Blair did find some anecdotal evidence while assisting Maner in her due diligence. “In some research we found that in the late 1800s there was a man that reportedly lived out near the bridge, who owned several goats. The residents of what are now the cities of Argyle and Denton thought the man to be a bit of a loner and rather odd, but no one really knew all that much about him. The legend goes that he had a wife, who died mysteriously and that one night a group of drunken cowboys found the old man out crossing the bridge, herding his goats and drove the animals off the bridge, killing them in the fall. Apparently, hearing about this, the County Sheriff went out to check on the man’s welfare, but found neither the man nor the goats, dead or alive. Shortly afterwards, so the stories go, a family was passing over the bridge at night and encountered the old man, or at least his apparition, standing in front of them, a goats head tucked under each arm. But all of this is Internet talk, without corroboration,” Blair explains. The Sheriff’s archives made no mention of the event.

Other variations of the story are widely circulated in the area and on the World Wide Web. “The sounds of phantom hoof beats over the old wooden roadway of the bridge, splashing sounds coming from the creek below the bridge, maniacal laughter, growling sounds and a plethora of strange lights and colorful apparitions in the woods nearby,” Blair adds. “While we could write off the report of the old man and the cowboys killing his goats one night, the bridge has side rails that would make driving the animals off the span unlikely; the colorful apparitions presented a problem for us.”

With the written accounts and other research in hand, ASUP scheduled a series of visits to the bridge, which is easily accessible from the new roadway, adjacent to the site. Preliminary visits to the area prior to the full investigation found that there were colorful orange “clouds” or “fog” near the bridge, under otherwise perfect weather conditions and those anomalies were being caught on film, which is why Blair noted some problems for the group. The ASUP gets several e-mails each week, telling them about what others have seen at the site as well, many including photos!

The final selection of the investigation team included Blair, a public safety specialist and Lead Field Investigator, Joy Maner the lead researcher, functioning as a field investigator along with fellow investigators, Joi Kate Moran, a paramedic, Brian Mollenkopf, a trained archeologist and cartographer, and Dave Watson on later visits, an engineer serving as technical specialist. The youngest member of the team was Ty Watson, the group’s naturalist and survival specialist, with Rick Moran, the ASUP’s co-founder and coordinator observing and assisting as needed.

This team’s first visit to the site was, to put in mildly, interesting! It was the night of a new moon, thus eliminating excessive natural light. The ambient air was a comfortable 72 degrees, no wind, clear skies with some high clouds, dry conditions, with very low humidity. The exact location of the bridge was fixed at 33◦07.760’ North by 097◦06.243 West, at approximately 544 feet above sea level, according to confirmed GPS readings. The bridge is suspended 27.5’ over the creek bed and is 140’ long, roughly placed on a north-south axis over Hickory Creek, which at this time is mostly dry, with some small pools, due to a continued drought.

Arriving an hour before dark, the group deployed both still and video cameras on tripods adjacent to the bridge and made note of geographic points nearby, including a tall radio/cellular tower at some distance to the south of the site. By group policy, the team members never work alone, always working in pairs, each with two-way radios, as well as basic equipment including non-contact thermal measuring devices, digital cameras and recorders. A “gatekeeper” was assigned to the base camp to keep track of each team’s location and movement, as well as to keep track of any “visitors” who might walk into the area. Two recorders, one analog the second digital were fixed to the bridge uprights, as well.

One team was dispatched to the north side of the creek bed, another to the south side, while the fixed cameras and recorders were being monitored by the gatekeeper at the south end of the bridge itself.  Team one, on the footpath on the north-west side of the bridge almost immediately called the base camp by radio, “Rick, can you come over here?” Blair asked. Rick Moran walked over the bridge and down the path to a point about 50 yards to the north-west of the bridge to find Blair’s team looking at a bright orange “cloud” hovering about 6 feet off the ground to the south when he arrived. Moran noted that there was no chance of it being backlighting or any ambient light, the area was pitch-black.

In order to gauge its exact location, Moran requested Brian Mollenkopf to move westward on the other side of the creek with a flashlight to signal his location. Upon doing so the “cloud” was fixed on the south side of the creek and when Moran walked toward it, the “cloud” moved slowly from west to east in front of him, dipping at one point to eye level, about 4 feet off the ground. He noted that the “cloud” was not transparent, as it passed between himself and Brian’s flashlight, the light was blocked from view. Moran continued to approach the object until it disappeared about 10 minutes after Moran first saw it. Two investigators were able to capture the image on their digital cameras, one of those photos was taken 90 minutes after the first sighting.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the creek, Mollenkopf and Joy Maner were having their own experiences. Approximately 100 yards down the trail, near a “Y” in the road, they experienced a cold spot. Backing up, they noted the temperature to be at a constant 72 degrees, but there was a shaft of cold that registered 48 degrees on Maner’s non-contact gun thermometer, before disappearing. Continuing on the trail, they encountered the similar cold spots several times, appearing and disappearing at will, registering 70-72 degrees, then instantly changing to 48 and later as low at 36 degrees.

Maner also noted that at one point she felt what was like a cold pressure on her left arm, through the sleeve of her shirt, which disappeared before they could take a temperature reading. She also noted on her field report that she had placed new batteries in her digital recorder before affixing it to the bridge that evening, at approximately 8 p.m. but upon retrieving it at 10 p.m., the unit was dead. This unit normally has a recording life of at least 12 hours. Likewise, Moran’s analog recorder, with a normal 3 hour life, was found dead and no recording was made.

According to Joi Moran, the organization’s administrator and seasoned veteran in the field of paranormal investigations, the area around the bridge was calming and not at all threatening. That being said, she made note in her field report that while sitting on a bench at the base camp on the south east end of the bridge, looking to the west, she clearly saw what she described as a back-lit cloud, outlining the distinctive features of a person on the pathway. The apparition floated about a foot off the path, was not at all threatening, but was obviously not a real person. At the time, she had been the “gatekeeper” and the only access to that site was past her and she was well aware of everyone’s location at that moment, thanks to the group’s radio system. Unfortunately, all the cameras at that the base location were mounted and fixed on tripods pointed some 90 degrees north of the occurrence, directly toward the bridge itself and she was unable to photograph the anomaly.

There were other unexpected developments for the teams, first because they expected that if there were any anomalies to be found, they would be on the bridge, not in the woods adjacent to the structure and secondly, that the sightings were, at least to some degree, reoccurring. “My feeling was that something was out there, hiding from us, playing hide and seek, if you will,” Joi Moran explained later. ”But my feeling is that there is no doubt there is something out there and it’s been there for some time.”

Since that initial visit, ASUP has returned to the site several times, locating landmarks in the photos that showed anomalies and to rule out other light sources. During these investigations, the group has set up complete weather stations to record, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and dew point, as well as wind speed and direction.

Ty Watson, Rick Moran, and Fran Cook in Old Alton Park taken by Director of Tech. Support, Larry Cline

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the secondary visits have raised more questions than they might otherwise have answered, including additional photographic anomalies and cold spots on bright, sunny days where the physical environmental data would suggest it impossible. They have also recorded the sound of horses hooves crossing the bridge, when there were no horses present and one investigator, walking with her German shepherd dog, has seen a horseman, dressed in dark clothing, galloping toward them, then disappearing, without leaving tracks on the path. “Both the dog and I heard and saw him, but he disappeared as he made a turn under some bushes and didn’t emerge on the other side. The ground was damp and hoof prints should have been obvious, but I couldn’t find any!” she noted.

To this point investigators have no idea the source of what they had seen at and around the bridge, but according to Sarah Blair the groups investigation of the bridge and surrounding woods is far from over

“Our job is to investigate and report. If there is a rational explanation for what we have seen, we will find it, but for right now, I think I’d have to categorize the Old Alton Bridge as an active site. We try not to use clichés like “haunted” or “ghosts” when we investigate, but there is definitely something out there!”

©2007 – ASUP (All Rights Reserved)

Larry Cline and Julie Davis on Old Alton Bridge taken by Joy Maner

©2007 – ASUP (All Rights Reserved)