One of the Most Haunted Bridges in Iowa Has Been Around Since the 1800s

Iowa is a lot more than a stop on a would-be President’s itinerary. It’s home to plenty of bridges and overpasses, many of them said to be haunted. One of the state’s oldest haunted bridges, the Banwell Bridge near Fort Dodge, is so old that no one is certain when it was built.

Like many mysteries, this haunted bridge has a few names. It was first known as Tara Bridge, named for a nearby town no longer in existence. Locals sometimes refer to it as Terror Bridge, but officially, it’s called Banwell Bridge. Bridgehunter, a national database of historic bridges, calls it the decidedly unthreatening “220th Street Overpass” and describes it as a “pony truss bridge.”

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Today, it's a modest one-lane bridge over Union Pacific Railroad tracks. And it's seen a lot of violent deaths, according to locals.

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The most famous one involves a mother who killed her children there. One version has her taking the kids to see the train pass below and throwing each one off the bridge as it approached. Then she jumped after them.

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She took her six children to the tracks and tied them down before hanging herself off the bridge.

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Locals say that if you drive to the bridge at night and turn off the engine, a female ghost will grab you and try to send you over the bridge, too.

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A young man named William Roberts was killed while working with a pile driver. A few years later, in 1893, the Fort Dodge Messenger reported several railroad workers heard clanging and the "dull thud" of a pile driver that was nowhere to be seen.

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Railway workers also told the Messenger about seeing and hearing a phantom train at night that approaches from a distance and melts away. And people have reported for years about hearing a moaning woman and crying children from under the bridge.

Is this bridge actually haunted? Old structures carry a lot of history, some of it frightening even if it’s mostly legend. Still, there’s no question that railroad work has always been dangerous. People understandably feel nervous when they’re around places with tragic histories.

These days, driving over any Iowa bridge can be dangerous. Iowa Rep. Abby Finkenauer warns on her Facebook page that Iowa leads the nation in “structurally deficient bridges.” It may be safest to view the Tara/Banwell/Terror Bridge from a distance!