Nowadays, folks will tell you head down Bloody Bucket Road to get to get to Bloody Bucket Bridge. But it was once just the Griffin Road Bridge. What led to such as gruesome renaming? Some good old-fashioned Florida Folklore, of course!
Originating just after the Civil War, the legend of the Bloody Bucket Bridge is still told in hushed tones by the residents of Wauchula, Florida. They say a newly-freed slave woman settled in the area just after the war and began serving as the local midwife. She and her husband seemed to fit right into the neighborhood nicely, except for the fact that she was secretly smothering some of the babies as she delivered them. She would tell the family it was stillborn and sneak off with the tiny corpse.
She would carry the dead babies and buckets of blood and birthing fluids to the now notorious bridge. She would dispose of the bloody buckets in the water and then bury the bodies along the bank beneath the bridge.
Some say she’d stolen those innocent lives because she had her own children taken from her when she was a slave. Others say it was her insane way of ‘helping’ those she felt had too many children already, and couldn’t possibly afford more.
As the number of “stillbirths” during her deliveries rose, people grew suspicious… or at least superstitious and stopped using her midwife services. This only worsened her mental state. She went stark raving mad, rambling on and on about being haunted by the spirits of dead babies. Had her conscience finally gotten to her? Was she really being tormented by spirits? Either way, she spent the rest of her life wandering the Florida swamps, hearing the cries of the babies she’d murdered.
The stories go on to say, that she began seeing her bucket fill up with blood all on its own, over and over. She could be seen carrying her bucket down to the bridge to dump its contents (which only she could see) into the river.
Then one day she simply lost her footing, fell into the river, and drowned. They say the river ran red with her blood that day, and for several days following her death. According to legend, if you dare to venture out to the Bloody Bucket Bridge on the night of a full moon, you’ll see the river runs red with blood still.
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