Silver Bridge Site

Origin Story

The Silver Bridge was an eyebar-chain suspension bridge built in 1928, carrying U.S. Route 35 across the Ohio River between Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio. On the evening of December 15, 1967, with rush-hour traffic backed up across its full length, the bridge's entire 1,460-foot suspended span collapsed into the river in under a minute, taking about 32 vehicles down with it. Forty-six people died; two bodies were never recovered.

Evidence & Claims

A multi-year federal investigation traced the collapse to a single failed eyebar in the north suspension chain, a structural link that had developed a microscopic stress crack around one of its pins, invisible to the inspection methods of the time. Because the bridge's chain links relied on just two eyebars apiece rather than several, the failure of that one bar threw its full load onto its twin, which gave way within seconds. The disaster led directly to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, which created the first national bridge inspection standards in the country. In the years after, writer John Keel folded the collapse into his account of the Mothman sightings, noting that it came almost exactly thirteen months after the first reported encounter at the nearby TNT Area and framing the creature's appearances as a kind of warning that went unheeded.

Skeptical Explanations

Engineers and historians treat the collapse as a fully explained mechanical failure with no need for any other cause, and note that no one drew a line between the bridge and the Mothman sightings until Keel's book years later. The two events share a town and a rough timeframe, but the "omen" reading was assembled in hindsight rather than reported at the time.

A riverfront park now occupies the site of the 1967 collapse, with walking paths and river views -- a short walk from the Mothman Museum and statue downtown.