Stuckey’s Bridge and the ghost of Old Man Stuckey

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This article was a stub by Leo S. 🙏🏽 written in 2020. Verified and published by Danijel in February 2025

Stuckey’s Bridge, located 12 miles southwest of Meridian, the eighth most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi, is a dilapidated truss-style bridge crossing the Chunky River, a tributary of the Chickasawhay River.
Documents in the Lauderdale County Archives reveal the contract to construct a bridge there was written in 1847, and estimates place the its construction date around 1850.
A new bridge replaced the old one in 1901, built by the Virginia Bridge and Iron Company.
Designated a Mississippi Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the old bridge has long been closed to vehicles.
Yet still today many a visitor still ventures out onto Stuckey’s Bridge in search of the ghost of Old Man Stuckey.

According to local lore, the infamous train-robbing Dalton Gang, a group of outlaws in the American Old West during 1890–1892, passed through Meridian in the late 1800s, leaving behind a member of their group, Stuckey, who made his way down the old dirt stage road along the Chunky River and established an inn beside its banks.
At dusk, he would cross the bridge with his lantern and call out to exhausted travelers wandering around the river to stop for the night for a hot meal and comfortable bed.
The hapless guests would be robbed, murdered and buried in shallow riverside graves.
As story goes, after murdering more than twenty people, the local sheriff eventually caught up with Stuckey and hanged him from the newly constructed bridge located on the site of his murders, which he reportedly haunts to this day.
His body swung for five days over the Chunky River before the noose was cut and he dropped to the water.
But, in addition to it, people reported sightings of an old man carrying a lantern along the river’s edge, loud splashes that supposedly represent Stuckey’s body hitting the water after his noose was cut, and visions of his lifeless corpse hanging from the bridge.
Others even claim that the angry ghost pushed them off the bridge.
Either way the bridge was featured on the Travel Channel’s Most Terrifying Places in America in 2018.