Emily’s Bridge

Gold Brook Covered Bridge, also called the Stowe Hollow Bridge and, far more often, Emily's Bridge, carries Covered Bridge Road over Gold Brook in the Stowe Hollow corner of south-eastern Stowe, Vermont. John W. Smith built it around 1844, only four years after the Howe truss was patented, and it is the state's only surviving 19th-century wooden Howe truss bridge still carrying a public road. It is a small single span, 48.5 feet long and 17 feet wide, on dry-laid stone abutments, with a gabled metal roof and vertical board siding stopping short of the eaves. In 1969 the town voted to maintain it in perpetuity. It is the last covered bridge left in Stowe.

Emily is the bridge's ghost. The legend says she was a young woman, sometime between 1849 and 1949, who was jilted by a lover and died at the bridge, by accident or by her own hand, and has haunted it since; people report lights, sounds and apparitions, and it is often called the most haunted spot in Vermont. Paranormal investigators were still working it in September 2025.

The trail of the story is its own small mystery. Nearly 40 years before anyone wrote about Emily, a man named Bigelow published a history of Stowe that discussed the bridge without a word about a ghost. The first published account came in the early 1970s, in the local historian Bob Hagerman's book on Lamoille County bridges, and Hagerman's source was a high-school paper by a student named Susan. In the copy at the Vermont Historical Society, she set out several versions of the tale and judged the most plausible a mundane one in which nobody died. Decades later the historian Jill Mudgett telephoned her: Susan said she had never believed in the ghost, and that most of the teenagers who visited the bridge for thrills did not either. In a 1978 newspaper interview, Hagerman said one of Susan's friends eventually confessed that the two girls had used a Ouija board to conjure part of the paper.

No record has ever been found of anyone dying at the bridge, and the story seems to date from the late 1960s or early 1970s. Mudgett points out that Parker Brothers had taken over the Ouija board in 1966, and that the Nancy Drew mystery The Haunted Bridge was still popular. None of it has slowed the visitors. The bridge stays open to traffic, and every autumn, when the maples turn, photographers crowd it with tripods at dawn and dusk.