The Singing Scoutmaster: Old Alton Bridge

It was with great trepidation that I began my research into the peculiar events surrounding Old Alton Bridge, that weathered iron construct which spans the murky waters of Hickory Creek in Denton County, Texas. My grandfather's journals, discovered in a dust-laden trunk in his Arkham study, contained cryptic references to what he termed "the convergence at the goat-man's crossing," and it was these very notes that compelled me to abandon the comfort of New England for the sweltering South.

The locals spoke of it only in whispers, their eyes darting nervously as they recounted the tale of Oscar Washburn, known to them as the Goatman. But it was what they didn't say that drew my scholarly curiosity - the way their voices would trail off, the manner in which they would absently trace protective symbols on their palms when speaking his name.

I spent countless hours in the county archives, poring over yellowed newspapers from 1938. The official records spoke of a "disturbance" at the bridge that August, but the truth lurked in the margins of history, in the spaces between words, in the stories passed down through generations of trembling lips.

It was on my third night of investigation that I witnessed something that has since shattered my understanding of our rational world. I had stationed myself on the bridge near midnight, my grandfather's journals spread before me, attempting to decipher his rambling notes about "dimensional convergence points" and "nodes of metaphysical intersection."

The moon hung bloated and yellow above the twisted Texas oaks when I first heard it - a sound that might have been hooves upon iron, might have been laughter, might have been screaming. The air grew thick with an otherworldly miasma, and I observed with mounting horror that the bridge's shadows began to move contrary to all natural law.

What emerged from the darkness was neither man nor goat, yet somehow both - a geometric impossibility of flesh and horn and iron. I realized then that the Klan members hadn't killed Oscar Washburn that night in 1938. No, they had done something far worse - they had opened a door that was never meant to be opened.

The being I saw was not a ghost, but something that had always been there, something that had used Washburn's violent death as an anchor point between worlds. The bridge, I discovered, was built upon an ancient crossing point, its iron framework inadvertently forming a perfect geometric pattern that, when sanctified with blood sacrifice, became a permanent tear in the fabric of reality.

My grandfather had known. His calculations, which I now understand all too well, show that the King Iron Bridge Manufacturing Company had unknowingly used sacred geometries in their truss designs, creating a network of potential doorways across the American frontier. But only here, at Old Alton Bridge, had the proper conditions aligned - the ancient ford, the iron spans, and the sacrifice of an innocent.

I write this account from a sanitarium in Houston, where I have committed myself voluntarily. The doctors here believe my ravings are the result of heat stroke and an overactive imagination. But I know what lurks at that crossing over Hickory Creek. I know why travelers report being touched by unseen hands, why strange lights dance in the surrounding woods, why the very air seems to twist and distort on moonless nights.

The locals warn visitors not to cross the bridge without lights, believing they might encounter the Goatman's spirit. But I know now that lights do not matter. What waits there in the darkness is far older than Oscar Washburn, far older than the bridge itself. It merely wears the shape of local tragedy, feeding on our expectations, our fears, our guilt.

And it is spreading. Every night, the tear grows wider. Every night, the geometry grows stronger. Every night, somewhere in Denton County, something that is neither man nor goat watches from the shadows, and waits.

[I have sealed my grandfather's journals in a lead-lined box and buried them at coordinates I dare not reveal. Some knowledge is too dangerous to preserve, some doors too dangerous to open. To those who seek the truth about Old Alton Bridge, I offer only this warning: what you find there may wear the face of local legend, but beneath that mask lies something far more ancient, far more hungry, and far more patient than any ghost story could capture.]