Horsing Around at Poinsett Bridge

 

 

The Ghost PRO team was intrigued by this recounting of a reader's own experience at Poinsett Bridge.  Whether or not it is paranormal, we can not say, as we were not here with Dan, the writer.  But Dan's experience is not entirely unfamiliar to us......
 
"After I had an interesting experience yesterday at the Poinsett Bridge in Greenville County, SC, I decided to peruse the web to see what I could find and stumbled upon your site.
 
I live about 10 miles as the crow flies from the Poinsett Bridge and had never visited the site before in the nearly 20 years I have lived in the area (I'm actually in Polk County, NC). So, on a whim I decided to traipse over from the farm with my horse and horse trailer and satisfy my historian's natural curiosity (my degrees are in History) and get some good riding in at the same time. I had never heard anything about any supernatural activity at the bridge until I spotted your website. What happened yesterday was somewhat unsettling after the fact (and after a friend told me that I had experienced one of the ghosts there), and prompted me to do some research.
 
At any rate, I visited the bridge at about 2:30 PM yesterday (weather: about 38degrees, clear, sunny, no wind) and started snooping around. I was on horseback and tied the horse off so I could wander around and take a few pictures. At first, a few text-book phenomena occurred: I took a few pictures with a digital camera (fresh batteries) and the batteries went dead as a door nail. I replaced the batteries, booted up the camera, took two more pictures and – whammo! -- the batteries went dead. Third set of batteries and the same thing happened again. Being ever the skeptic, I blamed the engineers who designed the camera, of course.
 
After complaining to myself out loud about modern technology not made in the US, I walked to the far side of the bridge. It was then that I clearly (just like someone was standing behind me about two feet away) heard a female voice, "William?" (it was like someone was asking a question). The horse stared straight at me over the center  of the bridge to me with her ears forward. The horse appeared to hear it too.
 
Chalking it off to the 'babbling brook' phenomenon, I remounted the horse to ride back to the trailer. I got on the asphalt road and head it again, but this time it said, "Willie". The horse spun around to look. I rode towards the bridge, across the bridge and back and heard nothing more. Oddly enough, it didn't spook the horse but got its attention, and mine also, I might add. My reaction was mostly curiosity but I do have to say, I was suddenly struck with a sense of 'dread' for lack of a better term. Actually, it was like I was sensing someone else's sense of dread (like you are witnessing someone else in distress).  

I've always been a skeptic about the paranormal. I did some work about 25 years ago with a few friends who insisted upon investigating paranormal activities but only saw a few very strange incidents that couldn't be explained (lots of 'technical' evidence but no real definitive personal experiences to correlate with the evidence). This incident yesterday was purely 'personal' and the reactions of the horse seemed to indicate that the horse heard it too. I've witnessed a lot of events that would be considered 'paranormal' but nothing that would leave me the least bit phases (but sent other people running for the hills, so to speak). The disembodied voice at the bridge wasn't anything that would bother me except this incident has been, pardon the term, haunting me, because it gave me the distinct impression that something was trying to communicate with me. Dumb-ass me, I didn't think about trying to talk to whatever it was. I just wrote the whole thing of as something in the environment playing tricks with my senses.   Best regards,  Dan"