Bay Bridge

Construction on the Bay Bridge began in 1933 and it opened in 1936. Its ghost story belongs to the evening of 17 October 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake dropped a fifty-foot section of the upper deck onto the deck below and closed the crossing for about a month. Sixty-three people died across the Bay Area that day. Only one died on the bridge itself: roughly half an hour after the shaking stopped, a driver who appears not to have known the deck was broken took her car over the gap at speed. Drivers on the lower deck heading toward Oakland have since reported a figure running alongside their cars at highway speed — described as headless, and sometimes as rapping on the glass before it is gone.