Looney's Bridge: The Real Story Behind the Legend
Looney's Bridge as it may have looked in the 1880s. Image created by Josh Dukes In a quiet hollow not far from Johnsonville, SC a stretch of weathered road crosses Mill Creek on a simple bridge where there once stood a rickety wooden span. Both bridges are remembered as Looney’s Bridge—a place where a ghost story tied to a teenage right-of-passage and a forgotten local tragedy mix like the dark waters of the creek. The original bridge here spanned Mill Creek just off the current footprint of Gaster Road near Johnson Cemetery. "There is a clay hill on the back side of the old McCall property and the original roadbed is still there," remembers Benjie McCall. The McCall family owned the surrounding farm from 1970 to 2015, with the opposite bank once part of the Ned Huggins hog farm. More than a century earlier, George Samuel Briley Huggins' homeplace was near this place, as were those of Springs, Huggins, and Timmons families who lived within a mile of one ano...