Visiting a spooky place in broad daylight

Ever so often I think about my trip earlier this summer to visit West Virginia’s metal monster, the New River Gorge Bridge. I was playing back a couple of videos I recorded while traversing the catwalk. I decided to upload one of these, as it is rather unlike most others I had seen. I believe my video caught the spookiness of the experience, especially with regards to the sounds. Several times in my life I have been stopped on a road beneath a busy freeway overpass, but the noise of the traffic on the New River Gorge Bridge is nothing like that at all. You may wonder how being on a bridge in broad daylight (with other people around) can be spooky. Oh, but it can – and it was! What the video didn’t capture was the shaking and shuddering of the steel behemoth beneath my feet and all around me. That added to the weirdness of the experience exponentially. Imagine standing on something that is anchored to solid ground, something that should itself be rigid and still. Yet it is anything but! You could tell when one or more big rigs was thundering across the road above because then it really started bouncing up and down! It was a rather unnerving feeling to be standing upon that which is supposedly strong and sturdy and to have it move like that. According to the tour guide, the bridge can move up to seventeen inches in any direction. While that isn’t much compared to, say, a suspension bridge, it’s plenty enough to notice! Obviously there has to be some movement on very large structures like that, but I would have thought such motion would not really be that perceptible. So there’s the eerie noise of the traffic above, the wind whistling thru the crossbeams, the great height and then the bouncing and shaking….if you have never been in a place like that, you just can’t imagine it.

https://vimeo.com/1004343442?share=copy