Aerial survey · USDA NAIP · public domainA railroad overpass in Liberty Township linked to at least 36 deaths since the 1940s—including two engineers scalded to death in an 1909 boiler explosion beneath it.
6401 Maud Hughes Rd, Middletown, OH 45044
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Publicly accessible road and bridge; no entry fee
Access
Limited Access
Rural road with railroad overpass; no formal pedestrian facilities
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1909 · 1909 boiler explosion killed two Cincinnati-Hamilton-Dayton Railway engineers · At least 36 documented deaths from accidents and suicides since the 1940s · Long-documented regional dark-tourism site in Butler County
The bridge on Maud Hughes Road in Liberty Township carries a public road over a railroad corridor between Princeton and Millikin Roads. Its entrance into Butler County's dark history began definitively on October 24, 1909, when a steam locomotive on the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railway suffered a catastrophic boiler failure beneath the overpass. The explosion scalded two engineers to death—one of them an off-duty man hitching a ride home to Middletown—and injured three others. Investigators determined that the locomotive had been fully loaded with water when it departed Ivorydale in Cincinnati but lost most of it through a leak over the eleven-mile run, causing the boiler to fail catastrophically.
The bridge was rebuilt at some point in the early twenty-first century—local paranormal documentation notes the rebuild was completed around 2016—but the accumulated history of the site did not change with the new concrete. By that point, researchers tracking deaths at and near the bridge had documented at least 36 fatalities from accidents and suicides spanning the 1940s forward. The combination of the 1909 industrial disaster and the subsequent pattern of self-inflicted deaths gave the site a dual dark history that regional paranormal writers began documenting by the early 2000s.
The bridge sits in a stretch of rural Butler County that makes it feel more isolated than its proximity to Middletown would suggest. The railroad line below remains active.
Sources
The Screaming Bridge's paranormal reputation draws on both its industrial disaster history and its subsequent accumulation of suicides. The 1909 engineers are the oldest named figures associated with the site; accounts describe them or figures resembling them on or near the tracks below the bridge at night, though these reports are informal and difficult to source to firsthand accounts.
The name Screaming Bridge derives from the most commonly reported phenomenon: an audible screaming sound, attributed by different witnesses to a woman, that carries across the road and surrounding area at night. No historical incident specifically accounting for a screaming woman has been documented at the site, and the source of the name has been disputed among local historians.
Phantom train sounds—whistles, the grinding of wheels—have been reported by visitors standing on the bridge when no train is present. Orbs and mist are the most frequently photographed phenomena cited in paranormal accounts of the site. The Creepy Cincinnati blog's 2011 documentation of the site drew on the original compiled death records and remains the most thorough primary account of the bridge's history in the paranormal literature.
Notable Entities
Drive or walk to the railroad overpass on Maud Hughes Road in Liberty Township, where more than a century of accident and suicide deaths have accumulated. The bridge is publicly accessible from the road below. Visit in daylight for historical context; many visitors come at night to listen for reported phantom train sounds and apparitions.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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