Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainThe Vanishing Hitchhiker of Jamestown
430 E Main St, Jamestown, NC 27282
Research updated October 2026
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A public sidewalk beneath the railroad bridge leads to the Lydia's Bridge historical marker.
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Limited Access
0.6-mile public sidewalk beneath the railroad bridge, joining the existing sidewalks into historic downtown Jamestown.
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North Carolina Folklore · Historical Marker Site · 1920s Urban Legend
The structure popularly called Lydia's Bridge is a railroad underpass on East Main Street in Jamestown, North Carolina, between Greensboro and High Point, on the alignment of the old High Point Road that later carried US Highway 70. The original concrete underpass was built in 1916. It was abandoned decades ago when a newer bridge opened roughly 100 meters away, and the older road beneath the railroad bridge became narrow and overgrown with vines and brush. In 2021 Jamestown completed a 0.6-mile sidewalk there, giving pedestrians and bicyclists a safe connection to downtown.
The legend was traced to a real death by paranormal researchers and authors Michael Renegar and Amy Greer, whose book Looking for Lydia: The Thirty-Year Search for the Jamestown Hitchhiker (CaryPress, 2018) followed a 2017 archival find. A Greensboro Daily News article from June 1920 reported that Miss Annie L. Jackson, born 1885, died when the automobile in which she was riding turned over on a wet curve of the High Point Road about three miles from High Point around 10 p.m. Two other passengers were injured, and the driver left the scene and was later arrested. Jackson was a Guilford County native who worked at a cigar factory and lived in a Greensboro boarding house. Renegar and Greer concluded that her middle initial L was the likely origin of the name Lydia. She is buried in the family plot at Holts Chapel Cemetery in Greensboro. Renegar died in October 2020.
On May 5, 2023, a Legends and Lore marker funded by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, in partnership with the North Carolina Folklife Institute and with Carolina Haints, Inc. as grant recipient, was unveiled on the Jamestown side of the underpass at 430 East Main Street. Mayor Lynn Montgomery and storyteller Cynthia Moore Brown spoke at the dedication. The marker reads: "Since the 1920s, apparition of a young woman has been seen hitchhiking here, only to disappear when drivers come to her aid." It is the first formal historical recognition of the site.
Sources
The Lydia story is one of the most documented American examples of the vanishing-hitchhiker legend, a type that folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey catalogued nationally in the California Folklore Quarterly in 1943. The Jamestown version entered print with Nancy Roberts, whose 1959 book An Illustrated Guide to Ghosts and Mysterious Occurrences in the Old North State recorded the account of Burke Hardison. Hardison said that around 1924, while a student at North Carolina State College driving home to High Point on a rainy, foggy night, he stopped for a young woman in a white gown who signaled from the roadside near the underpass and asked for a ride to High Point. She vanished from the car before they reached the address, and a woman at the house told him her daughter had died near the bridge years earlier. Laura E. Sutton examined the tale in the North Carolina Folklore Journal in 2000.
The retold version has stayed consistent for a century: a young woman in a white evening dress, usually on a rainy or foggy night, sometimes said to be returning from a dance in 1923, who gives her name as Lydia and disappears from the passenger seat. Local variants disagree on which bridge is hers; the 1916 underpass, the newer replacement beside it, and a creek bridge about two miles away have all been claimed. Amy Greer told Triad City Beat that a friend reported a sighting as late as 2012.
Greer and Renegar treat the figure as folklore attached to the documented 1920 death of Annie L. Jackson rather than as evidence of a haunting, and NCpedia presents the identification as plausible but unproven. The 2023 Pomeroy Foundation marker commemorates the legend as cultural heritage.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk the 0.6-mile public sidewalk that passes beneath the railroad bridge to see the underpass and the Lydia's Bridge historical marker that the William G. Pomeroy Foundation installed in 2023. Watch for road traffic nearby and for the active railroad.
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