Some hundred years ago, an Amish family moved from Pennsylvania to Sarasota to establish a celery farm. Every week the eldest son, Amos, would load a train car full of celery and accompany it to it’s destination. On one such trip, he caught the gaze of a beautiful young girl hanging laundry on her family’s farm just north of the Phillippi Creek rail bridge. Her name was Ingrid, and the two soon fell in love with all the fondness of their true hearts and began secretly meeting beneath the bridge, for such a relationship between an Amish boy and an English girl was strictly forbidden. One evening Amos was preparing to meet Ingrid, when his father became suspicious and forbade him to leave the house. As she waited, the young girl strolled back and forth along the shore of the creek gathering a bouquet of wild irises when she lost her footing and fell into the creek, tearing her dress and injuring her hand. She discarded the wet clothing in the creek and hurried home to mend her wound. When Amos’s father finally fell asleep he was able to sneak out of the house and hasten to the bridge. There, he found Ingrid’s clothes floating in the water and the blood soaked bouquet of irises strewn upon the shore. As he desperately searched the waters, the fiery eyes of an alligator were revealed by his lamplight, leaving him no doubt of his beloved’s terrible fate. Full of sorrow, he made his way onto the bridge, walked down the iron rail, onto a wooden plank and threw himself off it’s edge onto the Southern shore. The next day Ingrid saw Amos’s lifeless body from across the creek. Believing she could never be happy without him, she threw herself off the bridge, ending her life just as he had on the opposing shore. Unfortunately for them, their story did not end with death, as they had hoped. Ever since that fateful night the restless spirits of these forlorn lovers have haunted that bridge, forever searching for one another but unable to leave their places of death, Amos on the South shore and Ingrid on the North, from time to time hastily dragging an innocent passerby off the bridge, mistaking them for one another.
