About This Location
The longest steel arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere at 3,030 feet, spanning the New River Gorge at a height of 876 feet. Completed in 1977, the bridge replaced a treacherous winding road that descended into the gorge. Bridge Day, held annually in October, is the only day pedestrians are allowed on the bridge.
The Ghost Story
The New River Gorge Bridge near Fayetteville is an engineering marvel that carries a heavy burden of human loss. Completed in 1977 after three years of construction, the steel arch bridge spans 3,030 feet across the gorge and stands 876 feet above the New River below -- making it one of the highest vehicular bridges in the world. The bridge transformed travel in southern West Virginia, reducing a forty-minute descent into the gorge and climb back out to a forty-five-second crossing. But the gorge it spans has been a place of death for far longer than the bridge has stood above it.
The New River, despite its name, is one of the oldest rivers in the world, and the gorge it carved through the Appalachian Plateau has been a site of human tragedy for centuries. During the coal boom that transformed southern West Virginia from the 1870s through the 1950s, miners lived and died in the gorge's narrow valleys. The ghost towns of Thurmond and Nuttallburg, visible from the bridge's walkways, once teemed with thousands of workers extracting coal under brutal conditions. Nearby, the construction of Hawk's Nest Tunnel in the early 1930s killed over 1,000 workers from silicosis -- one of the worst industrial disasters in American history. The energy left behind from these working men, locals say, has never fully dissipated.
The bridge itself has become associated with death in ways its builders never intended. Multiple people have fallen or jumped from its span over the decades, and locals confirm a higher number of fatalities than official records suggest. During Bridge Day -- the annual October festival where hundreds of BASE jumpers legally leap from the bridge -- tragedy has also struck. In 1983, Michael Glenn Williams of Birmingham, Alabama, drowned after a successful jump when his gear was caught in the current and the single rescue boat on the river was occupied with other jumpers.
Paranormal reports in the New River Gorge area are extensive and varied. Hikers along the trails below the bridge have reported seeing a ghost train moving along the abandoned railroad tracks at Kaymoor Bottom -- a phantom locomotive with lit windows carrying spectral passengers through the darkness. Miners have been seen walking along sidetracks that no longer exist, their figures fading into glowing orbs of light as witnesses approach. At Thurmond, the once-rowdy Wild West coal town that now sits nearly abandoned within the national park, visitors report full-body apparitions, shadow figures, and the unnerving sensation of being touched by unseen hands. Some claim the spirits follow them home.
At Nuttallburg, where the intact coal tipple and brick sidewalks of a vanished community still stand, the phantom sound of mining carts being pushed up nonexistent railroad tracks is a commonly reported phenomenon. Visitors hear voices, screams, and the sound of a train engine that is never seen. At Sandstone Falls downstream, the ghost of Samuel Richmond -- a canoe ferryman and Union sympathizer killed during the Civil War -- is said to wander the river carrying a light, his lantern visible moving up and down the water on dark nights.
The bridge now stands at the heart of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, designated in 2020 as America's newest national park. ACE Adventure Resort offers paranormal investigations in Thurmond using K2 meters, spirit boxes, and SLS cameras, with special access to restricted areas of the ghost town. But you don't need equipment to feel the weight of history in the gorge. Stand on the bridge at dusk and look down 876 feet to where the New River curves through the remains of a world built on coal and blood, and the question is not whether the gorge is haunted -- it is how it could possibly not be.
