Seven Bridges Road
Check your eyes and count again if you can. We’re keeping it east this week in Nash and Edgecombe counties.
You may have heard of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It’s a good sized town, with a population well above 50,000.
I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard of Leggett, NC.
Leggett is a truly tiny little town, with population that hovers around 70. There literally isn’t much there. It’s what’s between Rocky Mount and Leggett that catches my attention.
Welcome to the anomaly of Seven Bridges Road.
A Google search of “seven bridges road nc” will mostly bring up business addresses and a gruesome criminal case that plagues Nash and Edgecome. Over the past six or seven years, ten women have disappeared in the area. Nine bodies have been found, the tenth still missing. They’ve arrested one man for one of the murders and there’s suspicion he may actually be involved in the rest of them. Many of the bodies were found dumped along Seven Bridges Road, in the woods. The victims were women of all ages, many involved in drugs, and most of them in prostitution. It’s a tragic case that casts a shadow over a relatively peaceful part of the state.
But amongst the crime articles, the talk of a serial killer, the innocuous business addresses, is a truly unique bit of information that I can’t seem to track down much further. I first ran across this legend in Weird Carolinas a few years ago.
The story is short and simple. Seven Bridges Road is named for the seven bridges that lie along its route. You start in Rocky Mount and drive toward Leggett, and while you go, you count the bridges until you reach your destination. There are seven.
That’s when it gets spooky.
Drive back towards Rocky Mount and count the bridges again.
According to the story, you’ll only count six.
I couldn’t find anything more regarding this tale, as far as how old it was, or what the source is, or even any theories as to why one of the bridges disappears.
Definitely one of the weirdest corners of North Carolina.
Weirdly Awesome North Carolina 