THE BRIDE OF BELLAMY BRIDGE: Florida’s Oldest Ghost Story Is Still Being Told

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — North of Marianna, a rusting steel bridge crosses the Chipola River at the end of a half-mile trail through the swamp. People have been seeing a woman there for more than 130 years.

The bridge standing today was built in 1914 — the oldest surviving bridge of its type in Florida. But the story belongs to Elizabeth Jane Croom Bellamy. Here is what the records actually say: Elizabeth married Dr. Samuel C. Bellamy in North Carolina in 1834. She died on May 11, 1837, at just 18 years old — of fever, most likely malaria, the killer that haunted early Florida settlements. Her infant son died a week later. Samuel, who never remarried, died by suicide in 1853. Elizabeth was buried in a grove near the river, a few hundred yards from where the bridge now stands.

Now here is the legend Florida chose to remember instead: that Elizabeth married Samuel in a Marianna rose garden in 1837, and that on her wedding night her gown brushed a candle and burst into flames; that she ran, burning, toward the river; and that having vowed to love him forever, she walks the bridge still — a glowing white figure in the woods, seen in print as early as the 1890s, when a newspaper noted “the lady of Bellamy Bridge has been seen of late.”

Historian Dale Cox, who has researched this story for years, believes the fiery wedding may have been borrowed from an antebellum novel. The fever is in the records. The fire is in the folklore. Both are part of why people still walk that trail at dusk.

Join the conversation: Have you seen anything on the Bellamy Bridge Heritage Trail? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.

Sources: Explore Southern History (historian Dale Cox); Visit Jackson County; Bellamy Bridge Heritage Trail.

Illustration: Florida Chatter (no free photograph of the actual bridge exists — this is an artist’s rendering, not the real location).