The legend of Cry Baby bridge is rather muddled at this point in time and has been muddled since 1999 when the legend was propagated and spread in order to sell tourist books and attract Internet users. In my essay, I describe the legend of Cry Baby Bridge and the controversy surrounding the cheap exploitation of the legend to make money.
The legend mostly involves the fact people claim they can hear babies crying when standing on top of the bridges. There has never been any proof of this crying noise. The best evidence that a noise even exists at all is a recording of the wind blowing through the bridges and carrying the sound of the birds singing from the other side. If the idea of a baby crying is implanted in a person’s head prior to hearing this sound, then they are led to believe that the sound is a baby crying. However, people that have never heard the legend of Cry Baby bridge have said the sound sounds like a cat whining, or like birds singing, or like an old-fashion analogue radio.
The controversy around the legend is less to do with the sound phenomenon and more to do with its exploitation by people selling “Most Haunted” books and material of that nature. In 1999, Jesse Glass proved that several cases of Baby Cry bridges do not even count as US folklore. He proved that the legend was taken from one area and then applied to numerous other places in the US. That is why Wikipedia is now full of locations for Baby Cry bridges, with many of the legends being similar.
For example, the legend where black babies were thrown over the bridge is too common for it to be true. There is only a report of one such incident, and yet the story seems to have been applied to many different bridges. With the exception of the one location, there were no reports of such incidents in newspapers or diaries until the publication of haunted and tourist books in the 90s. The spread of the legend seems to sit in parallel with the publication of books and later with the spread of the Internet. The Internet was used to help push these lies on other people and convince them that their bridges were also Baby Cry bridges.
Is there really such a thing as Cry Baby Bridges? There are no bridges in the US where you may hear the sound of a ghost baby (or any type of ghost) crying. However, there are bridges in different locations that have a history that ties in with the idea of a ghostly bridge. These include baby killings and suicides from the bridges. Still, there has never been any proof of actual ghosts or ghostly sounds, only proof of distorted bird songs and the wind. It is a nice idea to think that a ghost lives on after the tragic circumstances involving a bridge, but there is simply no proof despite the fact that so many bridges are claimed to be Cry Baby bridges.
Conclusion
The most obvious conclusion is that the legend is not true for three reasons. Firstly, there are no such things as ghosts, so there is no way ghostly children could be heard crying. Secondly, the story has been propagated for the sake of making money. Thirdly, any tests done on the Cry Baby bridges around the US have never shown anything other than the howling of the wind. The fact there are so many cases of Cry Baby bridges is partly due to the exploitation of the legend by soulless moneymakers, and partly due to the way the bridges are constructed where they apparently make a noise when the wind hits them in a certain way.
