It was believed the ghost of a witch lurked beneath this bridge (or its precursor) over the River Ancholme, and would come out to push people into the water. Daniel Codd, in Mysterious Lincolnshire (2007), gives a precis of the legend. Three parsons are said to have gone to the bridge to confront the spirit, and asked what it wanted. ‘Life I want, and life I’ll have’, came the reply, at which point the parsons threw a live cockerel into the water, the spirit tore it to bits, and the parsons trapped the malevolent entity in an iron pot, which was buried at the site. In the 1930s, the folklorist Ethel Rudkin explored this, and found people who said that, should the pot be exhumed, the spirit would return.