Concord Covered Bridge

HAUNTED BRIDGE OF COBB COUNTY...map
From Concord Cover...



There are 16 covered bridges left in the State of Georgia. All but two of them are within about two and a half hours of Atlanta. The only one in Atlanta that is still in use today is the Concord Covered Bridge (Alternately known as the Nickajack Creek Bridge) in Smyrna (Cobb County).


You can if you so choose drive your car across it. It has only one lane, being built in 1872, when cars were barely even thought of. It stands 131 feet long and 16 feet wide spanning the Nickajack Creek on Concord Road.


Now, I do plan on photographing all twelve Georgia Covered Bridges. But the reason I trekked to this one was because of what I read in Weird Georgia . Apparently, some people claim that its haunted.

The story goes something like this. If you park your car on the bridge, turn off your lights, and place a Snickers Bar on your roof, you will hear the scurrying of feet and hands on your car roof, and the Snickers bar will be gone because Snickers really satisfies the dead. It is supposedly the ghosts of some children, who drowned (or were drowned) in the creek below. Well that’s the story.


First problem, if you get your car onto the bridge at night, and turn off your lights, the road is busy enough that you will be either crashed into, or honked at to move before the ghostly kids can do their thing. Second Problem is that the Snickers bar will melt in the Atlanta heat on your car roof making a mess that even living children wouldn’t touch. I brought Snickers bar and the only thing it attracted was ants. If someone sees it differently let me know.


But, it is an interesting piece of Americana, with a Historic Marker sign. It is also very near the Historic Ruff’s Mill (where a civil war battle was fought), the Heritage Park Trail with great mill ruins, and the Silver Comet Trail for Biking enthusiasts.

9 comments:

  1. I grew up knowing that story. I can remember telling that story to people back in the early 80's. It's neat to know that the story is still floating around. The street was pretty busy back then too. Just up stream a little was the railroad track, and if you walked up the railroad track a little just inside the woods there was a cemetery and some people called it the Witches Grave Yard and there was stories about there too and no one went there at mid night alone.

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  2. For ten years, 1976-86, I lived in the Ruff Mill house beside the bridge. Though I was aware of the lore, I never caught a glimpse of the "water-heads", as local referred to them as. There was a death of one of the Ruff children, which occurred in the grist mill. The child apparently got caught in the gearing of the grist. The story was that the childs' ghost would fly from the mill over to the balcony of the house. Although occasionally, odd noises could be heard, she never revealed herself to me.

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  3. I grew up in a house bordering the forest that contains Nickajack creek, and as kids we would often make this entire forested area our playground. I always heard stories about the Concord Covered Bridge, Ruff's Mill, and the Witch's Graveyard (Concord Cemetery). Not once in 12 years of living there (83-95) did I see anything, though. However, we used to shoot bottle rockets from behind tombstones in the Witch's Graveyard at teenagers who were making out in cars at the dead end of Fowler Rd. Fun times.

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  4. There's a covered bridge in Tunnel Hill, GA, very near the Civil War battlefield. I've heard that the battlefield and historic railroad tunnel there are haunted.
    I can send a photo of the Tunnel Hill covered bridge if you'd like.
    beejw@charter.net

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  5. The story I grew knowing about Concord Covered Bridge was that many years ago there was a couple walking across the bridge when a car came and hit the girl. She died from so much blood loss and if you sit under the bridge at night you can still hear her blood dripping from the boards.

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  6. I fed the waterheads Snickers bars on several nights during the summer of 1986. We parked the car in the middle of the bridge with the lights off at 2 AM, and placed the candy bar on the hood. Waited a while then turned the lights on to find the Snickers bar gone. They stopped taking the bar at some point and we guessed they moved to another bridge. Some say they moved to North Georgia to be with family.

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  7. lol back in 91 to 95ish me and a group of friends routinely went there on weekends mostly and would climb up in the rafters and wait on the people who would stop and do the light flashing thing then we'd drop down from rafters in black clothes and step on the top of cars making noises etc.people would scream yell and burn out to drive off as fast as they could then sometimes be people at our high schools talking about what happened.and passing o nthe legends was good to eat the snicker bars to for a mild nights work~

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  8. My older brother and sister told me about "water heads" while waiting to cross the RR tracks at Cooperlake near the old divided underpass (which is now the Silver Comet Bridge). That was late '70s.

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  9. i visited this bridge last night but we didnt use a snickers bar or anything, we passed the bridge and slowed down and stopped under the bridge and we saw little kids looking down at us, more like little shadows but i caught one looking at me dead in the eyes. the radio stations were changing but once i started screaming it stopped, and the trunk popped open. when we got home we noticed little finger prints and hand prints all over the car.

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