One Teen Dead, Another in Serious Condition after Being Struck by Train on Pope Lick Bridge

Pope Lick Bridge (Chris Nicholson / Facebook)

One girl is dead and another remains in serious condition following the two teens being struck by a train while walking along Pope Lick bridge in Louisville, Kentucky on May 28th.

Savanna Bright, 15, was declared dead at the scene, while her friend Kaylee Keeling, 16, was taken to University of Louisville Hospital.

According to Kaylee's friend, Julianna Zurschmeide, although the swelling in her brain has gone down, she remains in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Although no one can say for certain why the girls were on the bridge, it is a popular spot for monster hunting; tales of the Pope Lick Monster date back decades. The monster is described most often as a human-goat hybrid, and according to some accounts, is said to lure passersby to their deaths—others say that he may be summoned by traversing the precarious trestle bridge.

There are no official records documenting the number of lives lost to the hunt for the legendary goatman, but Louisville’s Courier Journal reported in a 2016 interview with Wayne Gentry that the retired train engineer said he had been involved in 43 collisions during his 34 year career with Norfolk Southern. Not every collision took place on the Pope Lick bridge, but Gentry did say that some of his fellow engineers refused to travel over the bridge because of the trauma involved in its frequent accidents.

Part of the bridge’s inherent danger is that there is no way to avoid an oncoming train once someone has walked out onto the bridge. Platforms that had previously been placed along the bridge were taken down to deter pedestrians from walking along it.

Greg Erhard, the father of one of Savanna’s friends, said “I'm almost 50 years old, and since I was a kid, people have been getting killed up there."

Only three years prior to this tragedy, 26-year-old Ohio woman Roquel Bain was struck and killed in 2016 while searching for the monster with her boyfriend.

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