--- Chapter 4 ---
In mythology and folklore, life is often likened to a journey. We arrive in this world from an uncertain origin and seem to forever trudge toward an equally uncertain destination. All that’s placed in between—all of our thoughts and actions, triumphs and struggles—we call life. We even use terms like “our station in life.” What better metaphor for life—this sacred spot between origin and destination—is the railroad station?
Is this metaphoric power the reason why, as you will read about in this chapter, railroad stations seem to attract so many spirits and specters, caught in their own journey between life and death?
It’s an interesting theory, but according to some paranormal experts it’s only one conjecture. Many people familiar with the ghosts that haunt railroad stations believe that it’s not some type of mythological metaphor that stirs up ghost stories within the walls of these structures—it’s the history of tragedies and triumphs that have occurred over the years. For decades, and in some cases more than a century, railroad stations served as a hub of life, and death, for communities scattered across the continent. They were spots where young parents, fresh from the maternity ward, waited for the arrival of the train that would carry the couples and their newborns back home, and places where distraught family and friends waited for the funeral train to arrive with their loved one’s casket stowed away—a strange, but not completely unheard of, railroad cargo in days gone by. If the walls of railroad stations could only talk, what tales they would tell—tales of victory and defeat, sickness and health, war and peace, love and hate, wealth and poverty and, yes, life and death.
Some say these railroad stations still do tell these stories—in the form of hauntings.
In the next pages, you’ll read about some of the most haunted examples of spooky spirit-filled stations. In Ogden, Utah, the ghost of a murder victim, along with the spirits of passengers and workers, may be behind rumors that one railroad station keeps such a busy paranormal schedule. In Nashville, a railroad station-turned-hotel has a few ghostly guests that staff blame on the building’s former use as a passenger hub, particularly during World War II.
The haunted station isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, either. In the UK, specters drift into and around the subterranean rail stations that the British affectionately refer to as the Tube. Some of the spooks that haunt these stations don’t just reflect the glory of England’s railroad past, but also seem connected to the kingdom’s darker history—its sometimes violent, tormented history.
We’ll punch our ticket for these tales of terror now.
Was a Weird Specter Seen at a Train Yard
Sent to Warn Workers, Residents?
Austin, Pennsylvania
In 1910, the workers at the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad saw a strange visitor walking along the tracks of their railyard near Austin, Pennsylvania. Tall and painfully thin, the bizarrely lanky figure was dressed all in black. The workers didn’t hold it against the man that he liked black clothes. But they found how he acted “queer” and “spooky,” which were words they used to describe his actions, according to both the Honesdale Citizen and The Clinton County—far more disturbing.
The man appeared suddenly, and then disappeared just as suddenly. Sometimes, workers found him hitching a ride in one of the passenger cars. Other times, they saw him just hanging out near the railroad tracks. Witnesses also watched the man run across cars and slither between them.
He didn’t look like any of the town’s residents and nobody had information of new—queer and spooky—employees working for the railroad company that primarily transported lumber from the area’s rich forests to market.
Why, you might ask, didn’t a group of strong railroad workers—usually not very permissive of interlopers in their place of work—grab the thin man and give him a stern warning to stay off railroad property?
According to the account that appeared in the Honesdale Citizen, the appearance of the man just freaked out these normally brave men. In fact, his presence seemed to stun them.
“The railroad men naturally felt uneasy or scared with a ghost riding their cars, and none of them attempted to put it off when they saw it crawling between and running over the cars,” the Honesdale Citizen article stated.
This fear of approaching the strange man, it turns out, may have led to disaster, people later speculated.
As more encounters with the railyard’s man-in-black piled up, a flood of reports eventually filtered into just about every home and business of hardworking Austin. Nobody could figure out who the stranger was, or where he had come from. Many in the town had an unsettling feeling, which they couldn’t articulate, that the ghostly figure of the railyard might be trying to tell them something, even warn them about something.
The people of Austin would not be the only ones who connected tales of the appearance of a monster or ghost with misfortune. In fact, Fortean history is full of such cryptozoological foul winds blowing into communities right before disaster struck. The most obvious occurred decades later in a West Virginia town ironically named Point Pleasant. Between 1966 and 1967, people in Point Pleasant reported sightings of a huge (some described it as being seven feet tall) winged creature who issued ear-shattering shrieks, like some species of demonic bat. They called him Mothman.
Over the next few months, witnesses said they saw the creature on highways and in local lovers’ lanes—and especially near an old chemical and munitions plant. More than 100 people said they saw it, leading to one of the world’s leading paranormal and Fortean writers to travel to the small town to investigate. His findings became the classic book, The Mothman Prophecies, which later served loosely as the inspiration for a movie starring Richard Gere.
Just like the people of Austin, the citizens of Point Pleasant struggled to make sense of the visitations. Some believed that Mothman could be a hybrid creature created when an experiment at the chemical plant went horribly awry. Others suggested that he might be the ghost of an old Native American chief whom early settlers had wronged. Only a few thought the beast might be some sort of winged prophet.
In 1967, the Silver Bridge—which spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant with Ohio—collapsed, killing forty-six people. Many townspeople were convinced that the figure so many residents had seen may have been more than a cryptozoological curiosity; it may have been a flying, shrieking omen.
On September 30, 1911, the workers of the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad and the townspeople of Austin received a terrible reply to their questions about why the creepy visitor had haunted their town. Known in regional history as the “Austin Horror,” a dam—one that had long caused worries in the town—that stretched across Freeman Run and helped power the Bayless Pulp & Paper Mill finally gave way. The rush of water and debris first destroyed the mill and then rushed downstream into Austin, destroying much of the community. When the wave finally subsided, rescuers found the town littered with smashed houses and buildings, automobile tires, and pieces of railroad equipment, most likely from the railyard the weird black-clad creature seemed to frantically investigate. When officials finally did a death count, they said the death toll was somewhere in the seventies, but other unofficial accounts put the number of deaths at eighty-eight.
The article suggested that one of Austin’s newspaper reporters, perhaps acting on a tip from the railyard’s man-in-black, escaped the calamity in time to give warning. He had recently discussed the apparition with people in the nearby town of Lock Haven.
“The man who brought tales of the apparition to Lock Haven, when the giant dressed in black was doing the ghost walk in Austin, figured prominently in the stories of the flood, as he was one of the many heroes of the disaster. He was a newspaper man and by good luck happened to be at home when the dam broke and sent out first news of the catastrophe, which was well written, considering the situation and the fearful story to tell the outside world,” the newspaper stated.
While reporters filed into the town to write about the tragedy, the townspeople, too beleaguered by the disaster and its aftermath, failed to mention the ghost to the journalists.
“Everybody who escaped death in the flood had a sad tale to tell the correspondents, but none of them mentioned the ghost,” the newspaper article continued. “If they did, one of the clever fellows might have begun his story of the flood with a ghost coming to Austin and being a spirit from the other side of life that came to warn the people of their danger and what was to follow; and that nobody cared to quiz the spook. The writer might have started his big news story truthfully. Who knows?”
Occult theorists are split on what the railroad prophet represents. As mentioned, he may have been a Mothmanesque creature who wanted to warn people about the impending disaster. There are others who suggest people didn’t see a monster, but a ghost. Devastating fires swept through the railroad shops on at least two occasions. There are no official reports of casualties, but if there were, it could certainly be fodder for ghost stories.
The last theory is perhaps the most intriguing. Reports of the man-in-black—abnormally tall and skinny—match up with paranormal tales of the Slenderman. The Slenderman recently appeared in pop culture, seemingly without pretext. However, within a few years, drawings and computer graphics of the scarecrow-like creature began to spread virally across the internet. People then claimed they actually saw Slenderman, and two disturbed girls even tried to murder a friend as a sacrifice to him. Those familiar with Tibetan mysticism cannot help but see the connection between Slenderman and a tulpa, which is a mind-generated spirit first described to westerners by mystic and adventurer Alexandra David-Neel. She wrote that by concentrating on a mental representation of a monk, she—and others—later saw the monk appear in real life.
Now, to transfer this theory to the railroad visitor, we have to realize that a year before the flood that destroyed Austin, just as this weird spirit began to show up, the dam nearly burst following a rainstorm. In fact, after the near rupture, some say the dam actually shifted downstream a bit. The event terrified the townspeople. Could that combined fear generate enough psychic energy to produce a tulpa, in this case, the slender railyard monster? Was it a warning from the collective consciousness?
It’s hard to answer, but according to most reports, we do know that after the disaster the strange man was never seen in Austin again.
Civil War Spirits Haunt Gettysburg Engine House
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
By most measures, the railroad shop, normally referred to as the Gettysburg Engine House, shouldn’t be haunted. After all, it’s a fairly new construction (built in 1991) compared to most haunted structures in Gettysburg. And it doesn’t look haunted. It’s just a common, practical metal building. When most of us think about haunted houses or paranormally active buildings, we think of abandoned mansions, or old factories leftover from a bygone era. Gettysburg has plenty of those types of structures.
According to ghost hunting teams that have investigated the engine house, its spooky reputation is earned through the primary law of haunted real estate: location, location, location. Situated near where the bloody fighting that broke out on the first day of the Gettysburg battle, the building may be attracting spirits who perished during the fight and who may be buried on the grounds, according to these paranormal theorists.
Since the engine house is on private property, not many people have had the chance to witness first-hand the spirit activity in the facility. However, Mark Nesbitt, paranormal researcher and the most highly regarded author on Gettysburg’s supernatural legacy, is one of the few who has been allowed to investigate the engine house. On one two-hour investigation, Nesbitt wrote in Civil War Ghost Trails: Stories from America’s Most Haunted Battlefields that he turned a few skeptics into believers with the electronic voice phenomena he collected from that ghost hunt.
One spirit, whom Nesbitt said was named “Em,” spoke so loudly that it distorted the recording. In fact, she spoke so loudly that Nesbitt did what most paranormal investigators would never request from a ghost: he asked her to speak more softly.
Several stunned skeptics listened as Nesbitt played the recording and they plainly heard a voice say, “I’ll be quiet.” The voice did not sound like anyone else on the team.
On several other occasions, the author and his team saw unseen forces kick a barrel off a tire and heard the sound of footsteps. In most haunted spots, these footsteps—a type of haunting referred to as an aural haunting—last a few seconds, just a few taps and a couple of squeaks. But Nesbitt said that whatever spirit was walking around in the engine house was putting in some serious paces. The distinct sounds lasted for about eight minutes.
Nesbitt and other paranormal researchers have come in contact with a few female spirits. Some suggest that ghosts of railroad workers and train passengers may be among the many spirits that haunt the property.
The Ghost Adventures crew—who visited the battlefield on the anniversary of the first day of battle—also checked out the area near the Engine House. They heard stories that a bunch of shadows could be seen walking along the ridge line at night. Another witness, a ghost hunter who investigated the Engine House, claimed that soldiers—Union and Confederate—have been seen in the building and also among the railroad cars inside and outside of the structure.
One legend suggests one possible reason the Engine House is so active, despite being constructed long after the battle. According to the story, when construction crews were digging a railroad cut through the terrain they found dozens of skulls, which may have been remnants of unmarked graves. The disturbed graves may have unleashed a torrent of supernatural energy, leading to these spirit encounters.
Of course, the restless spirits of the railroad workers and passengers seem to be pretty easy to explain too. With all the thousands, or maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of souls who passed by the hauntingly beautiful fields and ridges of Gettysburg, more than a few must have gotten attached. Really attached.
Tracking Ogden’s Historic Railroad Past
and Its Haunted Present
Ogden, Utah
Frank Yentzer went to work at the Ogden Union Station on the day before Valentine’s Day in 1923 just as he had done so many times before. Little did he know that a deadly confluence of mistakes, greed, and just plain bad luck would send his world crumbling down on him. The results, paranormal researchers say, would echo into eternity.
This view is of the north-facing entrance of the Ogden arsenal’s locomotive repair shop.
Ogden Union Station, or just Union Station, at one time served as the hub between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. As such, the busy station buzzed with passengers and railroad workers. To handle the influx of tourists and business travelers, the railroad companies constructed an impressive depot that featured a thirty-three-room hotel, restaurant, and even a barber shop. A majestic clocktower—an important reminder that railroads ran not on steam and steel, but on time—silently stood watch over the operation. Time, though, eventually took its toll on the operation. New forms of transportation to tote passengers and freight cooled the railroad economy. In 1923, a fire broke out in one of the hotel rooms, nearly gutting the place. Remarkably, even as citizens begged the company to raze what was left in the building and construct a new facility, the company insisted that work go on. Even as they contemplated their next move, a horrible accident forced their hand.
While Yentzer toiled away, a stone in the fire-damaged clock tower broke loose and fell right on an industrious worker, killing him instantly.
Facing criticism and increased scrutiny, the company immediately decided to replace the building, but according to paranormal investigators and folklorists, a piece of the past and that tragedy—Frank Yentzer—remains. There are those who say he can still be seen in the lobby of the building, toiling away.
An Ongoing Investigation
Jennifer Jones, an expert on the folklore and hauntings of the Ogden area and writer of the Dead History blog, has conducted numerous investigations of the paranormal activity going on at Union Station. She likes investigating the building because, first, a lot of the history that’s discussed in the haunting is factual and, second, it’s full of surprises.
“The Union Station is one of those buildings that seems to be hot or cold paranormally speaking,” Jones wrote in an email. “When it’s active, it’s pretty active.”
Over the years, Jones has seen shadow figures, experienced a range of paranormal encounters, and collected some compelling EVPs while investigating Union Station.
According to Jones, the most haunted spot in Union Station seems to be what’s now called the Browning Theater, but used to be the mailroom when the building served as a train station and depot. She added that the spirits there seem to be playful, or more accurately, the spirits there like to toy with people.
“You would hear an odd noise on the other end of the building, head down that way, and then you would hear the same noise from where you had just been,” Jones wrote. “We captured EVPs of what sounded like children and also women.”
She believes that the theater is so haunted because of its use as a hospital and morgue after a railroad disaster, which will be discussed shortly.
“My team captured EVPs of what sounded like children on the stage in the theater and I have to think it’s connected to that train wreck,” she wrote. “There was an entire family killed in the accident, including two young girls.”
It’s pretty common to hear the sounds of footsteps pounding up and down the floor where the train platform once sat, too, Jones added.
Yahudi
Ghosts are also suspected in the conspicuous elevator rides that happen in the building. Suzan Crawford, a former Union State museum worker, told the Deseret News that her employees—especially the ones who work during the night—told her they have seen the elevator go up or down and, when the door opens, there’s no one onboard. Likewise, they’ve watched, mystified, as some force opens and closes a window.
In one of the more mystifying acts, Crawford reported, the window in the grand lobby was forced open, but nobody could figure out who opened it. The window is situated far above the ground, far above the height of the workers. To open it, a person would likely need a ladder. In fact, it was so difficult to reach that the mysteriously opened window remained untouched for a few weeks until—just as mysteriously—someone closed it.
That someone could have been the spirit of Yentzer, some paranormal theorists speculate. But the ghost of the unlucky accident victim isn’t the only spirit that gets the blame. It might be a mischievous spirit that people-in-the-know call “Yahudi,” or, to his friends, just plain Hoody.
Why So Haunted?
Frank, Yahudi, and a bunch of other spirits are just some of the many ghosts that haunt the building, which now serves as a local history museum—and actually it contains a couple of museums, including the Utah State Railroad Museum, the Eccles Rail Center, the John M. Browning Firearms Museum, Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Browning-Kimball Classic Car Museum.
According to Jones, the thing that makes investigating the building so interesting is its varied history.
As mentioned, some of the haunted activity in the building may be related to its use as a makeshift morgue following a horrific train accident.
“There was a bad train wreck just outside of Ogden and they brought the dead and injured back to the mailroom as like a triage station,” Jones wrote. “The living were moved on to the hospital and the dead were left there until they could be transported to local funeral homes and have families notified.”
The shadow figure—and some of the other haunted happenings—might be related to a suicide victim.
“I tend to think that the ghost that is often seen there as a shadow figure is a man who killed himself in what was the mailroom back in the day, I can’t remember the exact year offhand,” Jones wrote. “I have seen this shadow figure myself and it was on the train platform, which is now an enclosed breezeway. It connects right to the theater.”
Bloody Luggage
There’s another reason that the station might be haunted. And this could possibly be the saddest, weirdest reason for a haunting ever.
According to Jones, a grisly discovery may have sent the supernatural activity in Union Station down the express tracks.
It all started on March 19, 1924. Alexander Brown served as a baggage handler and electrician at Union Station, which handled tons of mail and cargo that moved through the busy station. Brown noticed something weird about a trunk that he was loading into the train. As he packed the trunk on the train, he decided to tie an Airedale Terrier to the trunk. A soldier was transferring the terrier to his new base in Denver, according to the story. The dog, however, reacted strongly against his travel accommodations. He began to howl and growl at the big trunk. The dog only calmed down when the handlers moved him away from the trunk.
Then, when he tried to move a big trunk, the package handler slipped. Brown examined why he almost fell. A small, dark pool of fluid coagulated at his feet. When he bent down for a closer look, he realized the substance was blood and it appeared to be leaking from the trunk.
Brown immediately called for a railroad investigator who quickly showed up on the scene.
When the inspector came and opened the trunk, they found the body of a woman, wrapped in two carpets. They noted that the woman had suffered head injuries.
Detectives investigating the case found bogus names and addresses were used for the shipment of the trunk from Denver. But a few witnesses stepped forward and identified the man who was conspicuously dragging the trunk through the streets of Denver—Fred Janssen. He was arrested and eventually confessed to killing his wife.
Ogden Exchange Building
Another railroad-related paranormal hotspot in Ogden is the Ogden Exchange Building. Jones points out that the Ogden Exchange Building housed railroad offices, as well as work spaces for employees who worked at the nearby stockyards.
Over the years, it’s gained a reputation as one of the most haunted places in the city, but its recent use as a haunted house adventure site seems to have blurred folklore, storytelling, and actual paranormal encounters.
For example, several paranormal research teams have investigated the place and say they’ve collected decent evidence to back up the rumor that something truly anomalous is going on in the Exchange Building.
The Deseret News reported that one team videoed “mist and shadowy figures” traipsing through the halls of the building. They also used digital recorders to collect electronic voice phenomena—or EVPs—which are voices and noises that people typically can’t hear during the investigation, but can be heard among the static and white noise of a sound file.
Billy Shields, an investigator for the Salt Lake Ghost Hunters Society, told the newspaper that one of the most convincing EVPs came during an investigation of the Exchange Building. Late at night, while he reviewed the files they recorded during the investigation, he didn’t pick up a voice, or strange noise, actually. He heard a song.
“While I was listening to the tape, I distinctly heard a little girl singing ‘Ring Around the Rosie,’” said Shields. “That’s pretty creepy when you’re sitting at your desk late at night, all alone.” He paused and laughed. “But I suppose if you’re going to listen to the ramblings of a ghost, there is no better time than late at night.”
While paranormal research groups believe there does seem to be something weird happening in the Exchange Building, Jones isn’t so sure. The building’s use in the haunted house entertainment industry might be unwittingly leading to the confusion of fact and fiction. For example, the hauntings are often linked to two incidents, said Jones, and both of them are either untrue, or are based on faulty information. A triple homicide at the Exchange Building is often given as the reason why paranormal occurrences happen at the building. But that doesn’t seem to be true. At least two people died of natural causes in the building and body parts from a homicide were discovered near the site, but no murders were ever reported in the building.
Jones also adds that, while the building did serve as a community mental health and addiction treatment center, it never served as an asylum for the mentally ill. A group of paranormal entrepreneurs cooked up that tale as part of their back story for a haunted house project they had staged at the Exchange Building. Unfortunately, it began to spread as a true piece of history.
But that doesn’t seem to stop people from investigating and debating the once-proud piece of Ogden, Utah’s railroad past.
Ghosts on the Waterfront
Vancouver, Canada
During the heyday of train travel and transportation, when money was streaming into the coffers of the world’s railroad companies, railroad barons, these men of industry, did not spare any expense. Just look at the grandeur of Vancouver’s Waterfront Station. A beautiful example of neoclassical architecture, the main building is framed with ionic columns and red brick. Millions of visitors, passengers, workers, and staff have stepped through this impressive depot.
The classic architecture must be exceptionally beautiful because not all of these people have left.
According to ghost hunters, Waterfront Station, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway, is among the most haunted places in Vancouver, Canada’s jewel of the Northwest. And that’s saying something because, as many experts on Canadian ghost stories point out, Vancouver is really haunted.
Waterfront Station, like so many other tales of haunted railroad, may have gathered much of its paranormal activity from its role as a travel and transportation hub. The people who came through these halls carried more than just their luggage: they also carried their stories and their problems. They toted their emotions and desires. They were also susceptible to deadly accidents and acts of violence. Paranormal theorists suggest that highly charged, emotional events can generate paranormal activity. If so, Waterfront Station qualifies.
One of those highly charged emotional events happened to a railroad brakeman working at the station, according to folklorists. They say that in 1928, the worker, known as Hub Clark, toiled in the yard, checking on the trains and the rails, while also making small repairs. There’s no record of how it happened, but somehow the brakeman was decapitated. Now, people claim that a ghost—in the shape of a man without a head—can be seen wandering around the train tracks near the building. The odd specter holds a single lantern, they say.
While the headless brakeman is a standard bit of railroad ghostlore, other stories of spirits haunting Waterfront Station are harder to explain away as mere mythology. Many of these accounts come from security teams that patrol the station, often late at night or early in the morning. One guard reports that during his routine patrol of the west side of the building, he saw an unusual sight. As he peered down the dark, empty corridor, he saw the apparition of a woman, coiffed and attired in the fashion of the 1920s, dancing by herself. He didn’t just see her dance. He said he could hear the music—much like the music from the ’20s—that caused the ghostly figure to dance. As he moved in to get a better look, the woman suddenly disappeared and the music abruptly stopped.
Others have verified the nightwatchman’s tale of sonic spookiness. Many have said that while they didn’t see the dancing woman, they have heard the faint strands of music from a bygone era mentioned by the guard, even though the loudspeaker system doesn’t play music.
Another guard tells a much different tale. He said that during his rounds he entered what he expected would be an empty room in the northwest corner of the building. But the room wasn’t empty. A strange white glow pulsed in the room. Guards are used to chasing out vandals and keeping a watch out for burglars, but this night watchman was completely unprepared to confront this intruder. When the guard squinted his eyes and looked more closely, he saw the white glow emanated from the ghost of an old woman. The guard added that the woman wore a sad expression on her face.
His flight-or-fight response got stuck. He couldn’t move, the guard later reported. He just stood in awe.
The ghost seemed to acknowledge the man’s presence. She suddenly stood straight and then floated toward the guard. Now, his flight-or-fight response finally kicked in. And he wasn’t about to fight a ghost. The guard turned and ran out of the room.
Another guard experienced a type of haunting that most parapsychologists would term either an intelligent haunting, or a poltergeist encounter. In one of the most frightening tales told about Waterfront Station’s supposed haunting, the night watchman reported that he walked into a room used to store old desks. As he made his way into the center of the room, the desks seemed to take on a life of their own. The pieces of furniture moved around him, like they were trying to surround him.
The guard jumped onto one of the attacking desks and vaulted out of the room.
In a similar story, a night watchman, wielding his trusty flashlight, walked into a storage room in the basement. After a few minutes of fruitless searching for an item, he found himself deep within the cavernous room. He turned to exit. But his flashlight fell on an unexpected impediment—a wall of boxes. While he searched, someone had built a wall of boxes that stretched across the room, essentially walling him in the creepy, dark room.
I’ll Come Back Another Time
In Haunted Canada, Joel Sutherland wrote that you don’t have to wait until night to see a ghost at Waterfront Station—and some of these spirits apparently don’t really care about your privacy. In one tale, an employee was chatting with a co-worker in the restroom.
Another woman approached the two and joined them. Neither of the ladies knew the woman and an awkward silence draped over the conversation. The witnesses noted that the woman had long wavy brown hair and seemed attired splendidly, but in an old-fashioned way.
After about ten seconds of silence, the woman said, in what was described as an ethereal way, “I’ll come back another time.”
And vanished.
Groups of Ghosts
It’s not just the employees who see ghosts in Waterfront Station. For instance, travelers have seen other ghosts, and even groups of ghosts, while passing through the station. Tourists claimed they saw the spirits of three old women sitting on a bench.
And, finally, there are other hints that supernatural powers are punching their ticket at the transportation center. People hear hurried footsteps click-clacking along a tiled floor. But when they look around to find the source of the sound, no one’s behind them.
It seems everyone is in a hurry in Waterfront Station, even the passengers trying to catch a train in the spirit world.
Tubes of Terror:
The UK’s Supernatural Subway System
United Kingdom
If you’re in the United States, the best chance—or worst chance, for those of you who fear paranormal encounters—to run into a railroad ghost is to see one above ground—for example, along a solemn bridge, or at a lonely railroad crossing. But in the United Kingdom, a whole genre of ghost stories are buried just a few dozen feet below the roads and sidewalks of England’s most populated cities.
England’s storied subway system, or Tube, as it often called by Londoners, is apparently the most haunted place in the country. And that’s saying a lot, because uber-spooky England is home to the world’s most famous ghosts and the planet’s most well-known haunted castles and manors. The interesting thing about the Tube ghosts, however, is that the stories aren’t relegated to the past. New ones are cropping up all the time in the media and are spreading through various social media channels as you read this. We’ll take a look at just a few of those tales of subterranean terror now.
South Kensington Station
The underground trains that snake under London are primarily utilitarian. They get you from point A to point B without the hassles of city traffic. But some people recognize the true architectural marvel and historical importance of the Tube, and these folks try to collect photographic and video mementos of their visits to the subway when they ride. And, sometimes, they get more than just mementos of architecture and history, they get evidence of the paranormal.
One rider in the Tube, standing in the Knightsbridge station, located in West London, decided to film his visit. He swept his smartphone’s camera around the station, back and forth. As he did, he saw a flash of light in the dark tunnel. He reviewed the footage over and over again. He realized that it was no ordinary burst of anomalous electronic interference. The flash seemed to show a ghost lurking in the tunnel.
The witness later turned in the video to reporters, who immediately posted it online. The video went viral, landing on sites such as the UK’s Daily Star.
According to some skeptics, the footage has an easy and natural explanation. Any bit of reflective material can be picked up by the smartphone’s camera and anthropomorphized into the image of a man, or, in this case, a ghost. But believers suggest that the location of the sighting and the anomalous shape point to supernatural forces. They remind skeptics that this area was once an ancient burial pit. During the Great Plague of the 1600s, thousands of bodies were stacked there.
And that’s led to more questions. Could this footage show one of those victims? Are there more lurking in these seemingly innocuous subway stations?
Bethnal Green
During World War II, as German Luftwaffe bombers and fighters prowled overhead, the English people, displaying the unique British ability to mix innovation with practicality, used the Tube not for transportation, necessarily—or for hunting ghosts—but they did use the city’s extensive underground transportation system as an impromptu bomb shelter. And the Tube system held up pretty well for that use, too.
However, on March 3, 1943, the air raid siren sounded and thousands of Londoners filed orderly into the Bethnal Green Tube station. At first, everything went well, but, according to later reports, a mother and child fell down, leading to a chain reaction. Person after person fell as hundreds of others began to tumble. It quickly turned into a panic. By the time the situation was sorted out and emergency officials arrived on scene, 173 people—mostly women and children—had died, crushed and asphyxiated to death, medical reports indicated.
Echoes of one of the worst civilian disasters in England’s World War II history continue to reverberate through the halls of the Tube station even today, according to several reports.
In one story, a worker said he was going through his end-of-night routine before he went home. He knew the last train had departed the station and all the passengers had gone with it. In fact, as far as he knew, all his coworkers were on their way home, too. He locked up and turned off the lights when he remembered he had a few bits of administrative work to finish. The man went back into the office. Suddenly, he was no longer sure he was alone.
The man claimed he heard children crying. But he kept working. However, the sobbing grew louder and louder. A few seconds later, he heard women screaming and the sounds of what he could best describe as the chaotic din of people panicking.
For fifteen minutes or so, the noises and phantom voices grew to a crescendo. Work ethic, or not, the man had had enough. He ran out of his office.
After consulting with his colleagues, the worker learned that he was by no means the only person who’d heard these strange noises, which most people took as ghostly echoes of the 1943 tragedy.
And, no doubt, he wouldn’t be the last.
Liverpool Street Station
One Tube station in central London is considered another piece of the city’s haunted Underground, but the origin of its spooky reputation may rest outside of the typical reasons, like accidents and murders, that ghosts lurk in London’s subways. People say Liverpool Street Station’s unique proximity to one of the most infamous institutions in English psychiatric history causes most of the supernatural activity there. They say that the station’s location is so close to the Bethlem Royal Hospital that, every once in a while, a paranormal piece of the haunted site leaves the asylum grounds and takes a little stroll down the street to the station.
The Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as the Bethlem lunatic asylum, is where we get the word “bedlam.” And, apparently, bedlam is an apt descriptor of the goings-on at the hospital. Early on, the treatment of patients bordered on torture. Neighbors of the facility complained about hearing the screams and shrieks erupting out of the facility. Then, there was the matter of burying the patients who died in the hospital—and there were thousands of poor souls. Staff members reportedly buried the corpses in what was basically the asylum’s backyard.
Construction workers building the Liverpool Street Station reportedly came across some of those remains. And one way to stir up haunts is to disturb graves. If this didn’t start the hauntings at Liverpool Street Station, paranormal theorists are convinced that, at the very least, it ratcheted up the activity.
One of Liverpool Street Station’s most famous ghosts is the spirit of Rebecca Griffiths, a young woman who allegedly resided as a patient in the asylum. According to one legend, Rebecca was buried with her favorite coin in her hands. However, workers disturbed her grave during one of the construction projects for Liverpool Street Station. As a result, the coin slipped from her grasp. Now people claim to hear a horrific shriek that experts on the haunting say is Rebecca screaming in anguish as she attempts to find the missing coin.
And Rebecca has company.
In 2000, a worker monitoring the security camera feeds noticed something out of place. He saw a man wearing white overalls in the station. The station was supposed to be empty at that time, so the worker called the station supervisor, who decided to investigate. After a quick check, the supervisor radioed to his colleague that he couldn’t find the man in overalls. The worker checked the cameras again and the figure in white overalls stood practically right next to his supervisor. The supervisor checked again and still couldn’t see the intruder. Wisely, the supervisor decided to call off the search. On the way back to consult with the worker, however, the supervisor noticed something strange on the bench: a pair of white coveralls.
Maybe it was just a super-stealthy, super-quick human intruder. Or, it could be just another spirit permanently waiting for a ride in Liverpool Street Station.
Becontree Station
The Becontree Station is actually an above-ground station located in east London, but it’s got such a reputation for paranormal activity—and features one of the creepiest tales in London’s haunted lore—that leaving it out of this collection didn’t seem right.
The station was built in 1932 and remained a calm hub for London’s commuters, but the rumors that supernatural forces stalked the station began to spread after a horrific accident in 1958. Two trains collided immediately after leaving the Becontree Station, resulting in ten deaths.
After the accident, the busy but quiet station was never the same. People began to report strange occurrences soon after. Some of the reports are fairly standard in paranormal literature: noises and voices that issue from no visible source, objects that move on their own, and brief flashes of shapes and shadows at the edges of the witnesses’ peripheral vision. However, one station supervisor had an encounter so brazen it stands out among the regular stories told about the paranormal in Becontree Station.
One night, the story goes, the supervisor settled in for his night shift. It’s usually the quietest shift compared to the hustle and bustle of daylight commutes. But it’s busier in other ways and in other dimensions. The supervisor said he busied himself in the office when the door rattled three distinct times. He checked—then double-checked—to see who was behind the interruption, but there was no one there. The platform, which the door faced, remained empty. An unsettling feeling washed over the man, who decided to take a break and walk to visit a colleague. After a nice chat, he walked down the platform, all the while feeling as if someone was walking behind him, or, to be more accurate, stalking him. He turned around and confronted a scene he would likely never forget. There, in front of him, stood a woman. He plainly saw that she wore a white dress and sported long blonde hair.
But, she had no face!
The supervisor stared for a few seconds, which seemed like hours, until the apparition faded away.
When he consulted his colleague, his co-worker reluctantly admitted that he, too, had seen the woman with the blank face.
People familiar with the haunting suggest that the account of the ghost of the faceless woman is a clue that the haunting of Becontree Station is related to that 1958 train collision. But skeptics say that the haunting has a more prosaic origin: tired people working long hours during the night may be susceptible to their overactive imaginations.
However, believers point to the Becontree Station not just as an example of real paranormal activity, but as evidence that—above ground or below—the rails around London carry more than just freight and passengers; they carry proof that the supernatural exists and it’s not going away.
Union Station and the Ghost of Abigail
Nashville, Tennessee
If you stroll through the magnificent lobby and wander down the halls of the Union Station Hotel, gazing at the Italian marble, intricately carved wood, and cavernous ceilings, you can understand why someone might want to stay forever. And someone has.
According to guests and workers, along with folklorists and paranormal researchers, the Union Station Hotel has a visitor who checked in decades ago—and never left. They also think this long-term guest’s stay is directly related to the hotel’s past as a once-bustling railroad depot.
Believers suspect a few ghosts haunt the former Union Station, which was built in 1900 to become Music City’s most important railroad station. It became a hub where fans arrived to visit country music’s mecca, musicians departed for their national tours, and soldiers and sailors exchanged trains during the country’s conflicts. All that passion, fear, and excitement translated into haunted activity, according to paranormal believers. They call one of those ghosts Abigail.
According to several sources, Abigail is the ghost of a young woman who haunted the railroad station and continues to prowl the hotel. While she’s been seen in several spots around the hotel, she seems to like room 711 the most. Far from trying to exorcise that ghost, hotel staff say they try to make her feel right at home. The room has been decorated to suit her, according to hotel officials.
“It’s meant to kind of be an homage to her,” Kate Thompson, a sales and marketing director for the hotel, told a reporter from television station WKRN.
Hotel ghostlore states that Abigail was once the girlfriend of a soldier on his way to France to fight in World War II. She promised him that she would be right there, on the platform of Nashville’s busy train station, when he came back. Good to her word, Abigail stood on the platform waiting for her boyfriend when he was expected back from the war. But she received devastating news. Not long after her boyfriend sent her the word that he would be shipped back to the States, he was killed in action.
The Union Station in Nashville, Tennessee, circa 1900.
In a state of shock and grief, Abigail threw herself off the platform and into the path of an oncoming train. Abigail died instantly.
Thompson and other staff members at the hotel have experienced a range of paranormal phenomena and they’ve also listened to hundreds of visitors tell their own stories about encounters with Abigail, or whoever is haunting the hotel. For example, people hear the ringing of a phantom phone but they can’t locate the source of the noise, and lights turn on and off by themselves. More troubling, random sounds erupt above the room too. The trouble with that is Room 711 is on the top floor: there shouldn’t be anyone walking around on the roof.
Thompson told another guest’s ghost story. She said that one guest who stayed in the haunted room heard the noises, but he was able to better identify the noises than most guests.
“We had a gentleman who was actually working for the company who stayed in this room and heard dragging noises above his head, and he said it sounded like furniture, like they were moving heavy pieces of furniture and just dragging it and dragging it,” Thompson told the reporter.
It’s more than just sounds. People see things—and people feel things.
On the seventh floor, especially, witnesses claim to see silhouettes drift down the halls, or catch shadows darting across the room from the corners of their eyes. Some folks even report the sensation that someone is in the room with them, or that an unseen presence is watching them.
First-Hand Account
Linda, a commenter on the Ghostvillage blog, corroborates much of what the staff and guests have experienced. The commenter stayed in the Union Station Hotel for a few days during a business conference. Initially, she was intrigued about the hotel’s haunted reputation, even requesting a room on one of the “haunted” floors, but that interest would change as her stay wore on and the paranormal activity heated up.
Initially, at least for the first few days, nothing happened. The room seemed quiet and completely ghost-free.
On the fourth night, the exhausted business traveler decided to stay in while her colleagues hit the town. Like others who have experienced the Abigail haunting, the activity started with a “weird feeling,” Linda wrote, adding that she felt “like I wasn’t alone.”
The feeling was so powerful that she turned on the TV and lamp and clutched the cordless phone, just in case she needed to call for help.
She began to drift off, eventually falling into a well-needed sleep. But a loud bang immediately woke her. She sat up but remained immobilized with fear.
The pounding exploded around her again.
Linda figured other guests would have heard the knockings too. Finally summoning the courage she needed, Linda walked across the room to the door and looked out the peephole into the hallway. She gazed on a quiet and empty hall. She turned to walk back to the bed when the knocking erupted again. This time, she just yelled, “Who is it?” but was met with a foreboding silence.
Linda called for security, who came to her room instantly. The officers told her they discovered nothing amiss and could find no natural explanation for the weird knocks. Linda stayed in bed, called her husband, and requested he talk to her until she finally fell asleep.
Her paranormal adventures, however, were just beginning. When she heard her husband snoring on the other end of the line, she knew she was on her own. In no time, the television suddenly clicked off, so she turned it back on.
Then the television and a lamp simultaneously switched off. Linda freaked out, ran to the bathroom, and switched on those lights. Still not wanting to admit paranormal forces were at work, she desperately tried to find the problem with the television and lamp. She found nothing out of the ordinary. There’s reason to believe that Linda never heard about all of the supernatural phenomena others had experienced in the hotel, but the erratic light show was described in numerous encounters with Abigail.
She called maintenance and a man came to repair the light.
Linda mentioned the strange activity to the repairman. He told her he’d never seen a ghost, but he’d heard that others had experienced many of the effects—loud knocks, electrical device malfunction, etc.—that Linda had experienced. In a way, that made her feel good, but in a way, it scared her even more.
Linda did not experience any more paranormal activity during her stay, but she told the repairman before he left that her experiences made a lasting change. She believed that maybe Abigail sensed Linda’s doubt and wanted to make her presence known.
“Then I told him I had requested this floor because I was told it was the most active, but I guess deep down I didn’t really believe it,” Linda wrote. “We laughed about it a little and I told him I certainly believe now and whoever or whatever it is can quit trying to prove it to me because I got it—point taken.”