Mary's Bridge

There’s a rural bridge in Louisiana between the little villages of St. Martinville and Broussard with a terrible story attached, a sad tale of a young girl’s horrible death.  The bridge on Bayou Tortue (Turtle Bayou Road) crosses an eerie stretch of swamp where tall cypress trees draped with Spanish moss grow in profusion and alligators and deadly water moccasins wait for their next meal in the dark shadows.  But dangerous creatures of this world are not what keep the locals away from this particular bridge when darkness falls.

In the late 1940’s, a teenage Cajun girl named Mary was, against her parent’s wishes, dating a non-Cajun boy. Not only was he not a Cajun, he had an unsavory reputation for a bad temper and had been locked up in the county jail a number of times for minor, but troubling offenses. Mary was in love with him though and like a lot of teenage girls, thought her parents didn’t understand how much he meant to her. No matter the tension it created at home, she couldn’t stay away from her bad-boy paramour.

In spite of this, Mary was a good Catholic girl and wouldn’t give in to her boyfriend’s sexual advances. No matter how much he pleaded and cajoled, she always stopped him from going beyond what good girls should allow.  One night after meeting up with him in town, she consented to go for a drive. Cruising around the local dirt roads, the boy was drinking moonshine from a quart jar he pulled from under the seat. Mary demanded she be taken home, but as they came to the little Bayou Tortue bridge, her now dead drunk boyfriend stopped the car and demanded she give him what he wanted or he would throw her in the swamp. Poor Mary, totally frightened, began crying and begging for him to just take her home, but her pleas fell on deaf ears. When he reached out and tore the front of her dress, Mary jumped out of the car and began to flee.

As Mary ran across the bridge, her boyfriend managed to catch her and when she began to struggle against him, he smashed the heavy quart jar over her head, knocking her unconscious. In his drunken mind, he thought he had killed her and in an attempt to hide all evidence of his crime, he dumped her into the swamp. The water must have shocked Mary back into wakefulness and her moans let the boyfriend know she wasn't dead after all. As he tried to think what his next move should be, he heard several splashes from the banks of the swamp and saw a glint of light from the car's headlamps reflected in 2 pairs of eyes moving low in the water. Mary's screams indicated the alligators had not gone hungry on this night.

In spite of an intense search by police and volunteers, Mary’s body was never found.  The boyfriend was brought in for questioning, but even though everyone knew he was the last person seen with her when she was alive, police were unable to gather the proof needed to arrest him. Word got out that he had confessed the awful details of his crime to a confident, but bragged he would never be convicted because the police would never find Mary’s body. Several weeks later, the boyfriend himself mysteriously vanished, leaving behind all of his belongings at his parent’s house. It was widely rumored that Mary’s father had seen to it the boyfriend suffered the same fate as his daughter, but the police never saw fit to question him and unofficially seemed to say good riddance.

The case of missing Mary has never been solved or closed and nobody expects it ever will. To this day though, if you go to the bridge at midnight, the same time poor Mary was being thrown to the alligators, turn off your car and call out, “Mary, Mary, Mary,” your car will not start and you will have to push it off the bridge before it will start running again. That’s strange enough, but the locals say if you go there at midnight on the anniversary of her terrible death, you will see poor Mary frantically running up and down the bridge, wearing the long white dress she was wearing when she died, her soul forever imprisoned on the Bayou Tortue Bridge when her life was brutally cut short by a murderous boyfriend.