Crybaby Bridge: An Urban Legend Come to Life

By Lisa Simpson

Written by Author & Editor, Lisa Simpson, this young adult paranormal will fill your heart with both fear and love.

 

No one really believes in Urban Legends, but Amanda finds there is a bit of truth to everything you hear…especially at Crybaby Bridge.

 

Sometimes you just have to believe…  

They say that if you go to the bridge and the moon smiles down at you, you should place powder on the hood of your car, then you shall see a baby's footprints and hear its horrific cry in the night…

 

In the seventies, poor little rich girl, Maddie Sheppard, becomes pregnant by a thing that she called the Shadow Man. Swearing he is Satan himself, Maddie hides the pregnancy from her parents, her town, and their God. 

Afraid her child will be born a 'monster', she has no choice but to give birth. The Shadow Man comes to claim his child and in a trance, Maddie throws the child over a county bridge, jumping over the side after him, killing them both.

 

Present Day – Amanda Sheppard begins having horrible dreams that she can't explain, or begin to understand.  With the help, support, and love from her friends and family, she finds a way to reach out to the woman haunting her dreams.

Maddie crosses time and the afterlife to reach Amanda, her great-niece, to ask for her help. Through a long journey, both awake and asleep, Amanda begins to relive Maddie's life and everything she had lived through. Amanda realizes that the only thing Maddie is after, is to be forgiven for killing her child.  Along the way, through many twists and turns, she ends up helping her grandfather meet the sister he never knew he had.

This is a story of sadness, faith, and love.  But most of all… it is about forgiveness. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: LS Book Services
• Release date: Jul 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781393363774

Lisa Simpson

Lisa Simpson is an active Author and Manuscript Editor. She is also the founder of the non-political social media platform AuthorWorld Connect. Originally from Shelbyville, Ky., she now lives and writes in Clearwater, Fl.  After first self-publishing in 2013, she had her first book signing in Shelbyville, KY; the setting of this book.  Hundreds of Crybaby Bridges reportedly exist.  As a teenager, she visited the one in her hometown. Although she swears she heard a baby cry, she never saw the powdered footprints that is a part of this legend.  Crybaby Bridge is her imagination of what might have happened many years ago. Author, Self-Publishing Help, Editor, and Founder of the Social Media Platform AuthorWorld Connect. visit websites at: www.LisaSimpsonBooks.com www.myawconnect.com

Book preview

Chapter 1

She had chosen to enter through the back door of the only doctors’ office in town. The door was small, almost hidden by the bushes and vines that nearly covered it. It separated the interior of the building from the rear parking lot that held at capacity, ten cars. 

She felt safer, knowing it was more private to enter through the single black door in the rear rather than through the front glass doors. Most normal people entered through the front. She was not most people. She was not normal. She was Maddie. She slipped quietly through the back.

The small hallway she stepped into was like nothing she had ever seen. The walls were brightly painted with lively colors instead of the everyday mundane white or beige. The wall to her right was covered in a dubious painting that lined from this end to that, with a fine copy of a simulated Norman Rockwell picture. 

Although having an aggravating queasiness in her stomach since she had woken that morning, Maddie felt instantly at ease. At the onset of her stomach problems, she had thought she was coming down with the flu. Her first ever. In the end, there had been no achy bones, no fever.

Smiling to herself, she wondered silently if she had given an overemphasis to this slight illness. She had never before in all of her eighteen years been inside a doctor’s office. She had never

needed to. Dr. Chapman had always been paid good money to

make house calls to the Sheppard family, though it was usually for her father, and not her.

Something in her gut told her that this was the one time that she needed to pay him a personal visit. After all, it was some thing in her gut that she was worried about.

Slowly, step by step, she made her way down the short yet

never ending hallway. She examined the painted scene with every inch she covered. 

A little child sat fishing on a grass covered creek bank. His pole, made from a branch and a string, had a cork bobber floating in the water. She smirked only a little when she realized the child would never catch the fish he was seeking.

There were no fish swimming below the waters’ surface. Instead, there were items one would find in a doctor’s office. A stethoscope, a small black medicine bag, tongue depressors that she vaguely thought looked like sticks from a Popsicle, a thermometer, and a few other medical items she could not name.  She eased her way through the door at the far end of the hallway.

This room confused her. Chairs were lined along the walls and she wondered if this was some type of room to wait until her turn with the doctor. Seeing this room for the first time, Maddie felt light-hearted. 

The paintings on these walls made her think of children smiling and happy times. What an odd thought. She wondered where such a thought had come from. She had never had happy times as a child.

Afraid that someone would walk in that knew her, she nervously glanced at the clock on the wall. Two-thirty. She was on time, so why wasn’t the doctor?

Maddie took her waiting moments to examine the walls in this room. Keeping the glass front door in her peripheral, she looked at the eastern wall. It was of leprechauns dancing around their pot of treasure at the end of a brightly painted rainbow. On the western wall, a serene setting sun. She liked the rainbow best even though all the gold and money in the world had never seemed to help her.

To his credit, the doc thought the paintings on the walls would

help his patients relax and divert their attention from the clean stench of alcohol and disinfectant that filled the air inside. He wanted all of his patients, both young and old, to feel comfortable when they had to make their dreaded visit to see him. 

A small television was placed on a wobbly table in the freshly

kempt corner of the room for the adults. Books for the children were strewn about on the floor in front of neatly lined shelves, centered underneath the rainbow. Toy trucks, cars, and dolls

were placed haphazardly in a turtle shaped box below a single, trivial window.

Since this was her first visit to this office, she saw nothing out of place. She did not feel the normal doom and gloom most patients felt when they visited. Just goes to show that the girl wasn’t right in the head to start with.

Before she had walked through that back door, she had had something that resembled a life. A bleak and dreary life but at least it had still been somewhat of a life. 

Now, nearly three quarters of an hour later, she had no choice but to dwell on those last fateful moments of doctor-patient confidentiality over and over again in her head. She knew only one thing. Life as she knew it was over.

The doctor had failed her. Her body had failed her. And that nasty smelling, grotesque thing, whatever it was, had succeeded.  No bright cheerful painting on any wall would help her now.  The moment the doctor had told her the awful truth, she determined at once that he was a mean, mean man.

How could that man ever call himself a doctor?  She had only heard good things from him during her lifetime. She had never been sick, and now...this?

Her parents had kept her to themselves.  By paying the doctor good money to come to their house, they knew that Maddie wouldn’t have to be subjected to other children, other sicknesses. Maybe they had been right all along to do it. The visit to his office today seemed to make her sickness worse.

She no longer smiled at the memory of the Rockwell-esque painting in the long back hallway. She no longer gazed in awe at the small greenish men basking in their gold at the end of rainbow. There would never be an ‘end of the rainbow’ for her

now. She had blindly walked past it all with pangs of guilt and dread.

She had walked straight past the wrinkled gray-haired lady behind the front desk, thinking as she looked at her, that wrinkled is not ever what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Walking out onto the sultry sunlit street, Maddie took no notice to the heat of the sun through her black dress, black hat, and black veil. Her world had just turned as black as her clothing.

Although there were less than twenty bodies walking along

the streets at this time of day, Maddie had an overwhelming feeling that hundreds of eyes were watching her every move. She cringed inward and prayed they would stop staring but not one had even noticed her.

She pulled the veil securely into place as her mind traveled in a thousand directions. She felt as if she had gotten lost at the last turn and would never find her way back to sanity...and there were no road signs to help her.

Try as she might, she couldn’t get the doctors words straightened out in her head. They simply made no sense to her.

Even the smallest piece of sanity was completely unobtainable to her after the conversation she had just finished with that awful man, with his coffee smelling breath and greasy gray-black hair.

He had to be lying to her. He must be playing a joke at her expense to teach her some kind of sick lesson. Somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind, she knew he was not.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to puke. She probably would have if it weren’t for fear that the vomit would stick to the veil covering her face, plaster itself to her hair and dangle from her chin.

The covering over her head was a bit confining but she was terribly grateful that no one could see her through the black atrocity. She was also grateful that the bile that was resting at the top of her throat had not revealed itself. Yet.

Maddie Sheppard had always been a rather plain and dowdy girl. She had never worn makeup. She never tried to dress like others her age. She had her own ‘un’distinguished look about her. It set her apart from everyone else. Today, her choice of

clothing had certainly been no exception.

Her life growing up could never be misconstrued as a life worth living, and this news today was only bound to make her life more unbearable. It had never been a life for a child who had strived for love and affection from the day she was born and had

never received it.

Her parents had kept her so close to their unloving vest, she had never known how to make friends. They had kept her sheltered in her home with a cook, a nanny, and a maid. She was homeschooled and taught manners but the most important, most

significant thing of all about Maddie...she was, and always planned to remain, a virgin.

All of her young life, she tried so hard to be noticed. To make friends. To be liked. But on this dreadful day she, for the very first time, was terrified of being recognized and was glad she had decided to dress the way she did for this horrific occasion.  She was glad no one could tell who was hiding in plain sight underneath the black costume.

She tried to recall exactly how and why something like this could have happened to her. It was a simple answer, yet not so simple.  It was kind of explainable, yet it was unexplainable.

Her mind reeled with a sickening anticipation of ghastly thoughts that she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Her heart thumped to the point of resounding pain. 

She was positive she could feel it trying to claw its way from her chest.  Her unstable legs kept buckling from underneath her, yet she had somehow found the strength to make her way of the mean man’s office. 

Chapter 2

The Veterans Park in the middle of the city had always been, she thought, the most beautiful place she had ever seen; albeit very solemn. It was the only place she could be herself. Here with her only friend...nature. Her only serenity outside of her room.

She would come here day after day and watch the birds being fed by older folks who had nothing better to do with their time. 

When the strength returned to her wobbly legs, Maddie left the sidewalk where she had been glued during her moments of panic and crossed the street. As she did so, she watched as three squirrels climbed a single dogwood tree flowering in pink and white buds, without inhibition. Oh, to be so carefree!

A statue of a lone soldier holding his flag was firmly settled in the middle of the park. Benches were placed around its circumference for those who chose to rest there. 

Twenty yards away, tucked in a corner of its own, was a rather large fountain of a woman which looked eerily sad and alone.

Water oozed out of her eyes, drained down her arms, poured off the tips of the fingers into the small pool below only to be recycled and repeat itself. There was no nameplate in which to tell the story behind this miserable looking woman or who she represented. All who watched the water flow, knew that she continuously seemed to be crying.

Maddie always felt a warm kinship with this fountain. Both

she and the concrete woman were so unhappy. As she looked from the fountain of the weeping woman to the activity of the park, she felt what little bit of the beautiful quietness she did have in her life, begin to dissipate.

She sat, tired and spent, onto one of the benches. She again tried to get her thoughts in order and wondered what had hap-

pened to her. And when?

Stupid question, Maddie. You know when, her brain insisted. Though she didn’t know the ‘what’.

Reaching underneath the long black veil that still covered her face, she tried to wipe clean her tears and sweat. The pain and anxiety remained, refusing to be cleared away.

She could not, for the life of her, fathom being with-child.  She wondered silently how it was even possible for a virgin to be carrying a child inside her nerve ridden stomach.

She had been raised knowing the story of the Virgin Mary and the Blessed Conception. She was nothing like the Virgin Mary. Not even a close comparison. Divine Intervention had not caused this to happen to her. Intervention yes, but surely not a Divine one. 

A sick, twisted intrusion of her body had taken place, and it had definitely not been by God. Somehow she, a virgin, was now pregnant with only God knew what. She quickly decided to leave God out of the equation. There was no room for Him now.

Maddie slowly began forcing herself out of her dark thoughts. She knew she needed to relax, or at least slow her heart rate down before she gave herself a stroke as well.

She surveyed her surroundings and vaguely saw the flowery landscaping that had been planted by the high school FFA. Beautiful Chrysanthemums, hardy China Berry and Cockscomb grew rampant to enhance the beauty of this place.

Vines of Clematis which were growing in a clump along the ground had begun to wind their way up a wooden lattice archway that had been strategically placed at the back exit.

Maddie felt that the vines that were growing up the arch resembled the lianas in her mind, winding and wrapping themselves around the words the doctor had told her, holding them tight, making them repeat over and over in her head like a record

player stuck on replay.

Each one of those words kept hitting her like a ton of bricks, and each one of those bricks felt like they were falling, one by one, down on top of her, never ending. The pounding in her head was proof positive of that.

They weren’t just words that the doctor had spoken to her. The terminology he had used was ‘pregnant’ and he had said it

very skeptically to her. He had known that Maddie had never had a boyfriend and she had definitely never made love. The examination had proven that.  It had left him scratching his head.

For her, to have a boyfriend or have the opportunity to make love to someone, would imply that she had some type of love in her life.  She knew better than anyone that she did not.

No, nothing had ever been inside her body. No one had bedded her with or without love. That one simple word would have made her life, and any type of intercourse bearable, or unbearable, depending on which way you chose to look at it. ‘Love’.  That word had never been introduced into her vocabulary. Not as a child, not as a teenager, not by anyone.

She had never felt, in all her life, that anyone could ever love her. She had never felt that she was even worthy of that kind of love. No, Maddie wouldn’t know what love was if it hit her in the stomach. Maybe love had never punched her in the gut but something sure as hell did.

Leaning forward on the bench, she took a second look at the young soldier statue. Her stomach lurched. She ran behind the monument, gathered her long black hair and veil in one hand, and tried to throw up all the evil inside her. This...thing that happened to her; she knew it could only be pure evil.

She didn’t understand it, she couldn’t wrap her hands or her mind around it, and she couldn’t throw it up.

Pulling herself together as best as she could, she apologized to the stone boy for her disrespect, gave a small weak salute to the flag, and left the small park.

***

This was the time of day when the individual storekeepers had begun to sweep the sidewalks in front of their stores. It was an old-time town, so they still did things the old-time way. It was their time to get outside for a breath of fresh air and yell their afternoon greetings to one another.

As Maddie left the confines of the park, she found herself

having to weave in and out through the assembly of sweepers with their brooms.

She marveled that this was such a small town, and everyone

knew everyone. They all spoke to each other as if they were family. No one ever spoke to Maddie.

They simply stared at the dark figure silently meandering amongst them but never once tried to speak to her. Very few would have admitted that they heard a few sniffles from underneath the cloth because if they had, that would have meant that they would have had to speak to the strange one walking among them. That just would not do.

Maddie found herself thinking to herself as she stepped around the activity. Long gone were her dreams of someday finding true love with a husband who would worship her; reinforced were the ever-present feelings of no one ever wanting her, of ever loving her. She instinctively knew she would most definitely never find that kind of happiness now. She had become wasted goods for sure.

She could see it in her mind. If she told her parents she was carrying a child inside her womb, they would believe the worst.  That she had gone out, disgracing them to their friends by asking for this.  But they would have no indication of what ‘worst’ was.  They would never believe this thing was not her fault.

She knew that in their own minds, they would believe that this was their payback for loving her too much, keeping her too close. Their belief would be that no respectable unmarried girl would ever let herself become pregnant, let alone have unmarried sex, especially their respectable unmarried daughter of eighteen.

Her parents both had been raised with a rich air about them. They had both come from old money, which meant they were old school, just like all of the others in this town. Old thoughts,

old beliefs. One just doesn’t go out, spread their legs and get pregnant, unless one is married to a fine respectable young man. 

And the marriage must absolutely come first. Maddie had done neither. She had never found anyone remotely interested in her except for the Shadow Man.

Chapter 3

How It All Began

The interior of the cozy, white brick church was decorated with yellow lilies and red puffy carnations. Long flowing ribbons tied in large bows were attached to the ends of each pew, the satin strands draping to the floor. It was gaudy but she could almost ‘feel’ the aroma inside.

A dark red, not white, runner was placed down the aisle where she would float to the forefront to take her man’s hand in Holy Matrimony.

Small sconces of soft candlelight cast shadows on the eggshell painted walls, which put off the softest fluorescent glow.  An oversized candelabra which branched five golden tapers was purposefully placed just behind the preacher revealing a magnificent halo above his head. This, and the faint sunlight that softly cascaded its way through the stained-glass windows, were the only light she dared let in.

It was Madelyn Sheppard’s wedding day. She had never in her wildest dreams thought that she would ever find someone to love her, especially this wonderful man.  He was everything her parents ever wanted for her.

In her mind he was tall, dark and handsome but what counted most to her parents was that he owned a chain of funeral homes and was the most eligible bachelor in Shelby County.

She felt truly loved for the first time in her life even though something deep inside her gave her the impression that this had

been an arranged union. It didn’t matter to her, because for the first time in her life she could finally make her parents proud.  And she would feel loved! The quiet blissful kind of love that one finds only once in a lifetime.

Her dress was a white tea-length that hung at her ankles, al-

though the fit was not quite right. It was a little longer than normal and held no billow or flow. How she had talked her parents out of the traditional wedding gown her mother had chosen for her was beyond her comprehension, but they had finally given in to her. After all, they were surprised that this groom had ever agreed to marry her in the first place. They took categorically no chances that this wedding would never happen.

The dress she had chosen was almost as plain as the bride.  It had only the lightest touch of lace. Maddie wore just the slightest hint of mascara and lip gloss. She needed no blush, for this day literally made her the blushing bride.

The single part of the bridal outfit that was agreed upon by all parties, was the veil. The cloth was silk tulle; outlined in a leafy vine pattern with pink pearl flowers. It laid flat upon her head just as the veil Princess Grace’s head adorned back in nineteen fifty-six. Longer than the dress, it was truly the only piece of her attire that was absolutely magnificent. Still, she felt beautiful in her own awkward way.

Her long straight hair was worn down. A few wisps of bangs framed her face. The contrast of her black hair against her face showed a milky opaqueness that would have sent

Casper running. Although this day made her feel the most beautiful she had ever felt, she still considered herself un-noticeable.

The music on the organ played Cannon in D through long flowing wooden reed pipes as she began walking up the aisle.  Her father held her arm to lead her toward this love of her lifetime. The guests in the small church stood smiling at her, as did the groom. At least she imagined that he smiled. So strange. She saw a blurry emptiness where his face should have been.

It made no never mind to her. As she refocused on her steps, and the gathering of people in the rows of the church, it amazed her that she actually had guests at all. She found it unbelievable that people from this town had shown up to watch her take this

first step into becoming the woman she had only dreamed of being.

She felt somewhat foolish when she saw that these people whom had never paid any attention to her at any other time in her life came to show that they cared for her. Well, maybe they didn’t care about her. Maybe they came for her parents. They

must have at least cared about them or they wouldn’t