White ladies and haunted bridges
ALAN MURDIE ponders the ubiquity of White Lady ghosts and their attraction to river crossings
Crossing a bridge at the right time can prove a wonderful, liberating experience, conveying sensations of expectation, escape or freedom. For the poet Wordsworth passing over Westminster Bridge in 1802 it proved revelatory, granting him a mystical vision of London ( Upon
Westminster Bridge). But for those traversing a bridge near the town of Campo Viera, in the far northeastern corner of Argentina, the experience is increasingly one of terror. Locals insist that the bridge spanning a stream known as ‘the Yaza’, along National Highway 14, is the scene of numerous encounters between motorists and a ghostly woman in white who causes traffic accidents. Her apparition materialises on the road ahead of drivers, just as they come on to the bridge, causing them to swerve into the bridge or collide with other vehicles.
Sightings of the ghost are being logged officially. In 2013, a truck driver told police that he had run into a woman crossing the bridge – but when officers reached the scene there was no signs of a victim or any accident. A short while after, an engineer from Zona Centro claimed a similar experience, whilst in 2016 two different motorists reported separate sightings on the same day. All drivers concerned were badly shaken, convinced they had run down a real woman who had suddenly crossed in front of their vehicles.
The bridge is become notorious as an accident black spot that has claimed at least three lives in the last six years. Fatal crashes on the bridge occurred in 2011 and 2012. The first was when a lorry crossing the bridge collided with a car killing its occupants Ruben Omar Antoneta (39) and Humberto César De Olivera (44). In October 2012 a policeman, Juan Zurakowski (25), died after his car hit the guardrail over the bridge. There have also been a number of other non-fatal collisions and lucky escapes, the most recent accident being on 15 March 2017 when a Mercedes-Benz truck loaded with seven tonnes of tobacco veered off the road and plunged into the stream, though miraculously the driver and two colleagues were unharmed. The police declared that the cause of this accident was a faulty steering wheel (or brake failure), but locals are blaming the ghost.
Fears concerning the area intensified two months later with the mysterious death of an 18-year-old man who went missing on 18 May, having suddenly left home without telling his family where he was going. After a week of extensive searches his body was found on the riverbank near the bridge. Since there was no obvious cause of death nor signs of any injury on his body, an autopsy was ordered. Whatever its verdict, it is unlikely to quell the popular apprehension concerning the bridge. Even residents who refuse to believe in the ghost now speak of the ‘Curse of the Yaza’.
Local inhabitants point to the history of the bridge, which was constructed during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976-83. The regime committed numerous human rights abuses, and it is claimed that the bodies of dissidents killed in the period were dumped from the bridge, or even buried in the concrete used to build it. The lady in white is believed by some to be the spirit of a political activist who helped the peasantry and was murdered; another story holds her to be a local schoolteacher who became pregnant out of wedlock and committed suicide. ( Sources Misiones Online http://misionesonline.net/2017/03/21/ misiones-aseguran-fantasma-una-mujerprovoca-accidentes-automovilisticos-puente/ 16+21 Mar 2017).
Of course, bridges, like all crossing places over bodies of water, can be treacherous, and especially when situated above large bodies of water with fast flowing currents. Aside from the peril associated with falling into water, crossing an isolated bridge in the countryside at night a may prove an unsettling experience as routes of escape are curtailed if any threat or danger is encountered. The literature of psychoanalysis recognises in neurotic cases a specific fear of bridges: gephyrophobia (from the Greek gephyra for bridge). Worldwide, certain bridges possess an attraction for suicides.
Folklorists and mythographers interested in the physical locations that attract ghost stories will recognise a bridge as a liminal
The ghostly woman materialises ahead of drivers just as they come onto the bridge
point, connecting two places, yet being in neither. With all bridges, travellers who cross are temporarily between two localities, symbolic of being in a transient state. Rivers or seas long featured in mythology to illustrate the separation of the living from the dead, and those who attempt crossing over them may find their immortal souls imperilled. Such mythical bridges are often the point that distinguishes between the righteous and the damned and the fate of the soul determined.
The stories of deaths on the Yaza river may evoke even more primitive beliefs concerning rivers and bridges that demand periodic sacrifices. British folklore contains examples such as the River Dart in Devon recorded in verse: ‘Dart, Dart, Cruel Dart, Every year thou claimest a heart.’ Similar traditions attach to the Ribble river in Lancashire where ‘Peg O’Nell’, a fearsome spirit, is blamed for drownings (see ‘Death by Rivers and Sacrifice’ (1998) by Jeremy Harte: www.whitedragon.org.uk/ articles/rivers.htm). Oral historian George Ewart Evans believed that stories were the faint echo of archaic human sacrifices in the remote past. (See Ask the Fellows Who Cut
the Hay, 1956). However, as Argentine commentators point out, popular myths and folklore do not make complaints to the authorities. Simply identifying a bridge as a liminal place in folklore or a physically dangerous location fails to explain just why sightings of apparitions should be occurring in the 21st century. Reports are apparently coming from actual witnesses, a number of whom appear to have been strangers to the neighbourhood, convinced that their spontaneous experiences are real.
Rather than viewing the bridge as being of central importance, in my opinion, the more significant element is what is being seen, namely the apparition of a woman in white who walks in front of a traveller or visitor. Reading these accounts from Argentine media sources, I was at once reminded of the discussion of White Lady ghosts published by the Jungian psychologist Aniela Jaffe in her book Apparitions (1963). Her work focused upon a collection of testimony originally gathered through public appeals in 1953-54 by a Swiss newspaper asking readers to send in personal uncanny experiences. Like many such popular appeals, it drew in a wealth of material – some 1,200 letters. One of the categories immediately discernible in accounts was apparitions fitting the traditional ‘White Lady’ motif. For instance, a female correspondent in her sixties wrote of a childhood encounter, circa 1900, on the bridge at Ames in Switzerland with the figure of a woman “not very tall and snow-white. She floated along in front of me… I could not see her face; the figure was wrapped from top to toe in a very fine veil.”
Examining accounts from a Jungian standpoint, Jaffe found such apparitions to be ubiquitous and highly impersonal in nature, viewing them as archetypal forms present within the unconscious mind. They were also consistent with traditional stories of such ghosts from European and North American folklore. Usually there is a tragic story or legend of violence, betrayal
or ill treatment inflicted in the past upon a woman or her children.
It seems unlikely that the local purveyors of these tales near Campo Viera today have been drawing upon Jaffe’s 1963 book. Can one realistically credit any that separate Argentine motorists have been inspired by reading Jaffe’s book to the point of inventing an identical sighting on the Yaza bridge and duly going to the police station to report it? Similarly, there is no identifiable transmission link connecting the spectre of the Yaza bridge with, for example, the Dame Blanche, who haunts “narrow bridges, thorn-filled ditches and river crossings” in Normandy (see Night of Witches: Folklore, traditional recipes for celebrating (2011) by Linda Raedisch) or “the Lady of Millinocket”, a White Lady ghost who prowls a bridge located on Route 11 on the Brownville Road outside Millinocket, Maine. (See Haunted Bridges: 300 of America’s Creepiest
Crossings (2016) by Rich Newman). In the absence of an identifiable transmission route, the psychosocial hypothesis, and notions that witnesses are bizarrely acting out some folktale before the police for reasons known only to themselves, begin to look decidedly shaky.
Of course, one never knows just how far esoteric traditions penetrate. Doubtless some folklorists might insist that just such a transmission has somehow occurred, a variation of the phantom hitchhiker story which enjoys its resonance from the satisfaction of having a beginning, middle and end, providing a measure of entertainment value. But first-hand witnesses to the hitchhiker and verifiable details always prove lacking, in contrast to the numerous individuals who have encountered White Ladies over the years.
Of course, judging by the UK, there is a small section of the public, often afflicted by mental disorders, who are attentionseeking fantasists, waste police time, make groundless complaints or even falsely confess to crimes they never committed. But why this form of false complaint? From the surfeit of reports of White Lady ghosts, past and present, at the very least, there is a cross-cultural hallucinatory disorder, hitherto unclassified by psychiatrists, causing otherwise sane individuals to perceive White Lady apparitions. These appearances are not confined by any means to bridges, but manifest in many different locations. There is scarcely a district in the UK of any size that does not claim at least one ‘White Lady’ or ‘Grey Lady’. Undoubtedly, oral tradition keeps these stories going, but they are reinforced by actual experience. They continue to be reported, and may appear on a moonlit summer’s night, in dense autumnal fog or in the depths of winter when the snow lies