Tom Kacich: The legend of Piatt County's Crybaby Bridge
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It's a tale without a head, without any sources or origin or documentation. But there it is on maps and street signs and embedded in the lore of Monticello and Piatt County.
It's called Crybaby Bridge. And although the current version of the bridge is nothing like the one-lane, century-old, anxiety-producing iron-and-wood structure that was torn down in 2001, the name and the legend continue. The new bridge is more than a football field long and carries the road named after it across the Sangamon River about 3 miles north of downtown Monticello in an area of woods, rolling hills and roads that refuse to follow a straight line.
In the daylight, there is nothing unnerving about the bridge. But in the dark — isolated and dark and noisy, with the sound of flowing waters and wildlife and tall trees rubbing against each other in the wind — it doesn't take much of an imagination to believe that something macabre could have happened here.
"The only story I'd ever heard was that a baby was thrown over the bridge into the water," said Lisa Winters, a board member at the Piatt County Historical and Genealogical Society, and a local resident for 50 years. "No timeline, no other details. I really don't know anything about it that was documented."
"I have absolutely no real hard date or anything else to support this spooky story," said Piatt County Board member Kathleen Piatt, who lives not far from the bridge. "The story was it was a dark and stormy night, like all good scary stories, and a family was driving in a car in a storm and it ran into a railing on the old truss bridge and a door flew open and an infant just fell out of the car into the water. The baby was swept into the river by the storm and was never found.
"And folks have been listening for the cries of the infant out here for years. That's the version of the story that I've heard for years. I don't think there's any truth to it. But it's a good location for something with a name like that."
Piatt said she's never heard the baby's cry, but that the bridge has always been a popular place for local teenagers to meet, listen for the infant's wail and get into other mischief.
Mark Dixon, who grew up in Monticello, recalled that high-school-age youth would congregate at the old bridge, the boys stashing cans of beer at the bottom of the structure in the cold waters of the Sangamon and recounting the spine-chilling story to their girlfriends. It also was a rite of passage, said the president of the Atkins Group in Urbana, for Monticello driver's-ed instructors to test novice drivers on the old, narrow Crybaby Bridge.
Dixon's brother Mike, who has been director of the Piatt County Forest Preserve District for 35 years, said he heard a much different version of the origin of Crybaby Bridge.
"I heard this from Bob Valentine, who was a really neat guy who owned an apple orchard in Monticello and whose dad farmed with Mr. (William) Lodge," who once owned the nearby property now known as Lodge Park, said Mike Dixon. "Crybaby was an old wood bridge and then a metal bridge, and what Bob told me was that they probably heard a bobcat screaming in the woods but they named it Crybaby Bridge.
"Bobcats are native to Illinois and they're back. We've got a few in Lodge Park here now," he added. "If you've ever heard a bobcat, it doesn't sound like a baby much, but it sounds like a woman screaming in the woods. That's what I got from Bob and the other old-timers. They're all gone now. Those were the guys I would go to when I wanted the history of stuff around here."
Piatt County's is hardly the only Crybaby Bridge. Structures of the same name exist in at least 13 states, including one in Monmouth. There also are Crybaby Hills, Crybaby Mountains, Crybaby Creeks and a Crybaby Lane. There's even a book full of eerie "Crybaby Bridge" stories. The genre is as American as haunted houses and spooky cemeteries. Most of the tales involve babies cruelly thrown from bridges and whose cries bedevil those in the surrounding area.
My own theory for the genesis of the name — carefully crafted after about 30 minutes of driving and walking around the area as opposed to living there for decades — is that Crybaby Bridge is linked to another Piatt County legend, the tale of Buck's Pond and two Native American maidens.
In short, the legend of Buck's Pond — and this story has some authenticity, because it's contained on a plaque just up a hill from the pond in Lodge Park — is that two young maidens of the Delaware tribe fell in love with a young chief while camped with the Kickapoo. One of the maidens, Chesita, gave birth to twins. According to Native American law, the plaque states, if the babies lived through the day, the mother would become the chief's wife.
But the babies were killed and the second maiden, Manasua, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by stoning. The only way Manasua could be saved is by marrying an Indian chief. Old Buck, a Kickapoo whose wife had died, agreed to marry Manasua. But both were banished from the tribe and moved to the area of Lodge Park. Manasua died in 1834 and Old Buck, before he moved west to the Indian Territory, buried her a short distance from what is now known as Buck's Pond.
So, I suggested, couldn't those crying babies be the ones Chesita gave birth to some 200 years ago? After all, Buck's Pond can't be but a mile or two from Crybaby Bridge.
Everyone to whom I offered that theory rejected it immediately.
"It has nothing to do with Buck's Pond," said Mike Dixon.
"I don't think it's related at all," said Winters. "I don't know why, but it isn't."
They're right, of course. What good is a long-held, deep, dark local mystery if it can be explained? What fun is there in that, even if it is only slightly logical?
Let the legend of Crybaby Bridge, and those babies or baby, rest in peace. Except at night. In the warmth of summer. When a storm is approaching.
