--- Chapter 5 ---
The construction of railroad tunnels represents some of the most impressive architectural and engineering feats of their day. These passageways blasted through mountains and dipped under bodies of water to take passengers from here to there faster and more efficiently.
In spiritual and mythological symbolism, tunnels and caves represent something a little deeper. They represent a change in state. They can represent a change from the mundane to the magical and from the temporal to the eternal. For example, near-death experiencers say they encounter tunnels that lead them from their current reality to an afterlife state.
In the next stories, these two seemingly different structures—the railroad tunnel and the mythological tunnel—have more in common than you might have guessed. Railroad tunnels aren’t just practical conduits to get people from point A to point B in the quickest way possible; in haunted railroad lore they are passageways into the paranormal.
To tour the first haunted railroad tunnel, we will revisit the haunted railroad capital, Altoona, Pennsylvania.
The Haunted Horseshoe Curve
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Above the city of Altoona, not too far from the Railroaders Memorial Museum, rests an architectural marvel that has served as an iconic landmark for the city and its historic connection to the railroad industry. The Horseshoe Curve is an achingly long 2,375-foot curve perched about 1,600 feet up in the majestic Allegheny Mountains.
The Curve isn’t just noted because it’s a prime example of railroad engineering, which it is. People also say it’s a prime example of haunted railroad property. In fact, a couple locations at the historic site and near the historic site are considered haunted. For decades, people have told ghost stories about the tunnels at the Curve, but one in particular has resonated for generations.
This story starts with a young and beautiful Irish woman, one of the many railroader wives who married the men that labored to create the Horseshoe Curve. The work was hard and often dangerous. Each evening, according to one version of the legend, this young woman would head to the end of the tunnel and wait for her husband to walk through this long, dark, and empty tube. One evening, as the sun began to set over the Alleghenies that tower over the work site, she stood at the opening of the tunnel, but her husband didn’t show up at the regular time.
She waited. And waited.
With each passing second she could feel panic and dread well up inside her. Finally, she saw a shadowy shape shuffling through the tunnel, heading toward the light. But when this figure appeared on the other side, it wasn’t her husband. It was a company representative bearing horrible news: her husband had died in an accident.
A freight train pulling sixty cars is shown on the famous Horseshoe Curve in Pennsylvania, circa 1907.
Since then, people have claimed to see a woman dressed in a long white dress pacing outside the entrance to the tunnels that still remain near the Horseshoe Curve site. Some say she can even be summoned. In one technique, the ghost hunting hopeful is told to drive to the tunnel around midnight and then beep the car horn three times. Supposedly, people have seen a woman in a white dress appear and quickly fade away. Others say they’ve heard the voice of a woman. More ominously, there are those who said they saw nothing, but when they looked later, they saw handprints on their vehicle.
That’s all pretty good ghostlore, right? And it’s fairly typical for Pennsylvania ghostlore. Just up the road from this site, for example, people have claimed to have seen the ultimate example
of ghostly folklore characters: the Woman in White, or the Lady of the Buckhorn. She is alleged to be the spirit of a car accident victim who appears to drivers daring to enter the forest after dark. But has anyone actually had a real run-in with this railroad widow?
Some say they’ve had encounters with the ghost of the tunnels, or at least experienced bizarre activity while investigating, or just visiting, the structures. A few commenters on Discovery PA, a blog dedicated to Pennsylvania travel, for instance, have left tantalizing clues that—ghostlore or not—something weird is definitely going on there.
One commenter wrote that she placed a recording device on the roof of her car. She waited for a few minutes but began to feel “very heavy” and left to analyze any evidence she collected. Later, while listening to the playback, she heard a “horrible growl.”
“I still have that EVP and it still creeps me out,” she wrote.
Another witness wrote that he and a group of friends heard either a group of children laughing, or a girl laughing, when they were in the tunnel.
The folks from JABA, whom we met in the story about the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona, report they have had their own strange experiences in the haunted tunnel. In an email interview, John Albert said he and his JABA team had heard the rumors about the tunnel and decided to check on it themselves. He wrote that at about 10:00 p.m., he, his wife Beth, and a few friends made their way through the tunnel. About halfway through the tunnel, Beth, an empath who feels connected to the spirit world, stumbled backwards. John checked and saw no rocks or obstacles that could have tripped her. Beth thought one of her friends had tugged hard on her shirt. She said it felt like more than just a tug—the force of it pulled her back.
“She quickly realized there was no one behind her and those of us on her sides were not close enough to each other to have grabbed her shirt from behind, let alone be able to tug her enough to cause her to stumble,” wrote John.
The investigators reported the experience was enough for them to not necessarily attribute all the activity to mere folklore.
“We had no other experience there, but to us, that was a credible paranormal incident,” John wrote.
It’s important to add here again that investigating or ghost hunting or just wandering around on railroad properties is dangerous and, in some cases, illegal. To stay safe and out of trouble, people are advised to tag along with an experienced team—they know where you should and shouldn’t ghost hunt—and they should definitely get permission.
Tunnel of Terror—
Sensabaugh Tunnel’s Dark Past May Shed Light on Its Current Paranormal Popularity
Sensabaugh, Tennessee
Railroad ghosts are always on the move. This volume of haunted railroad stories offers several accounts of haunted railroad people and places that, somehow, can affect the surrounding community. Ghosts of train accident victims may wander away from the tragic site and inhabit nearby homes and communities, for example. Our next story is a little different. If the legend is to be believed, the ghosts that haunt this piece of haunted railroad real estate may be spirits of victims who were killed during a murderous rampage. However, that’s just one of the legends buried deep in the dark, foreboding Sensabaugh Tunnel, one of Tennessee’s great haunted railroad mysteries.
This mystery starts decades ago at a family home tucked into the crevices of a lonely country road that snakes through Sensabaugh Hollow, just north of Kingsport, Tennessee, on the Hawkins and Sullivan County lines. The date of the actual incident, if there actually was one, is hard to pinpoint exactly. According to the story, residents of this normally quiet section of the community woke up one morning to hear the dreadful news that the husband of a small family in the hollow went berserk and killed his whole family, including a baby. The wife, one grisly report suggested, held the baby in her arms as the bullets ripped into her flesh. Even at death, she refused to let her baby leave her arms.
That’s the story, at least. But there are dozens of legends about the incident, including one tale where the husband was actually the hero, chasing after a kidnapper who took the baby through the woods and toward a stream, only to find that the madman had drowned the baby.
It’s hard to say whether there is any truth to these stories. The years, memories, and fertile imagination seem to have painted over the facts, like the graffiti messages plastered on the walls of the Sensabaugh Tunnel. But the tunnel continues to yield new dimensions of the legend. According to locals, you might not be able to discover facts about the murder, but you can still hear the voices of the victims. Witnesses say they have heard a baby’s cry echoing down the tunnel’s walls. Voices and, even more frighteningly, screams, have been heard in the tunnel too.
Other people say they’ve even dared to summon the spirits. They have driven to the tunnel at night and turned off the headlights of their vehicle. The car begins to shake, an imperceptible vibration at first, but then the vehicle starts to rock, really rock. Believers say it’s the spirits desperately trying to crawl their way into the safety of the car. In another twist of this tale, some witnesses claim that they’ve tried to restart their car after trying to contact the spirits and the engine refuses to turn over, at least initially.
So, is this all just some fun folk tales and ghostlore, wrapped into some adolescent fun?
Well, although not everyone can agree about the details behind the haunting, or even agree if there is a haunting, this has not stopped paranormal enthusiasts from investigating. One group, Knox Paranormal Researchers, released a few videos of their investigations into the alleged supernatural activity in the tunnel. Their conclusion offers a mixed bag of evidence into the authenticity of any phenomena at Sensabaugh Tunnels. For instance, they performed a car test to see if their vehicle would stall after shutting it off at the tunnel site; it fired right back up. They didn’t observe or sense anything strange while in the tunnel, either.
The researchers were just about ready to call the tunnel investigation a bust when they discovered a weird bit of evidence. In another video posted by the investigators, the team offers one interesting bit of EVP. Paranormal researchers say that, often, the team’s digital recording devices pick up noises and voices that are inaudible to them at the time of the recordings. In this case, the EVP seems to reveal the sound of a crying baby, echoing, just as legend has it, from the end of the tunnel.
Here’s another bit of evidence that suggests the tunnel’s reputation is more than just a flight of folkloric fancy. One night, close to Halloween, a freight train was barreling through the section of tracks near the Sensabaugh Tunnel when the engineer saw a woman on the tracks. Certain that the train hit her, he slammed on the brakes and brought the train, eventually, to a dead stop. The engineer shouted to the conductor to call the police and an ambulance. Police and rescue crews rushed to the scene to find a visibly shaken engineer. He described the woman as white and wearing a black shirt and white pants.
The rescuers scoured the area but never recovered a body.
Police had an easy answer for the incident: a bunch of jerky Halloween pranksters put a mannequin or scarecrow on the tracks.
Here’s how the police report puts it: “Our town has had some vandalism over the past few days, including the taking of some of the scarecrows off the utility poles on Main Street. Some were found standing in and near the Sensabaugh Tunnel. We believe that, as a prank, one of the missing scarecrows was placed on the tracks to make the conductor think it was a real person.’’
Here’s the thing, believers point out: the crews, who searched for the body and came up empty, also, allegedly, couldn’t find a shred or a thread of evidence that even a scarecrow was used in the prank.
Cloaked in tales of murder and veiled in a mixture of true stories and flights of folklore, skeptics and believers alike will continue to dig into the stories of Sensabaugh Tunnel, trying to find the truth.
Flinderation and the Supernatural Railroad Nation
Salem, West Virginia
Tunnels are just creepy places, even the non-haunted ones.
They’re dark, dirty, dusty, and dangerous. They have all the charm of a coal mine—without the mineral wealth.
Whether any of these thoughts drifted through the minds of the three-man railroad working gang tasked back in the day with repairing the tracks in the Flinderation Tunnel, also known as the Brandy Gap Tunnel, we’ll never know. They didn’t live long enough to tell us.
Most of the workers in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century knew how difficult and dangerous repairs in the tunnel could be, but few internalized just how quickly and silently death could be brought on. According to one legend about the haunted tunnel, the three workers laboring in the dank, 1,086-foot long tunnel near Salem, West Virginia, never heard the sound of an unscheduled train barreling down the tracks.
Only one worker, according to one version of the tale, cleared the tracks before the train hit him. But the other two workers didn’t—and were killed instantly by the impact of the massive train engine.
And the Flinderation Tunnel—once a busy section of the B&O and CSX mainline—has been haunted ever since.
While it’s hard to find any news stories about this accident, it’s pretty easy to find stories about the haunting. There’s a wide range of supernatural phenomena reported there. For example, some people claim to have seen the ghosts of the two workers, but others say they’ve witnessed a ghost train—complete with lights and roaring engine—dashing into the tunnel, perhaps in an eternal reenactment of the moment when the two workers met their ultimate fate. Still other witnesses say they haven’t seen the ghost train, but they’ve heard it. The clank of a bell, the shrill scream of the whistle, and the hiss of the steam engine can be heard on some dark nights.
Paranormal investigators have collected what they consider evidence that some sort of railroad-related accident is causing the haunting. The investigators say they’ve examined digital audio files containing EVPs that they’ve collected at the site and could hear the unmistakable sounds of sobbing and ear-piercing screams.
Other people hear the pounding of feet coming toward them. Is it just their imagination, or the footsteps—perhaps of those workers trying desperately to outrun the train—echoing throughout eternity?
“Pushing Out of the Way”
One paranormal investigator writes about his investigation on the website Ghosts and Stories. He started his investigation at about 8:00 p.m. and came equipped with an arsenal of equipment to gather evidence about the haunting in the Flinderation Tunnel: digital recorder, laser thermometer, camera, camcorder, and trigger objects, which are objects from the past that might attract a ghost’s interest. For example, a ghost hunter might use an old tool that the workers from the tunnel might have been familiar with, or a pocket watch that most railroaders kept on hand.
The ghost hunter began to ask questions about the accident out loud and, specifically, inquired what duties the men had when the tragedy struck. All the while, he made sure to switch on the digital recorder and camera, ready to collect any evidence.
He didn’t have to wait long. The sound of footsteps walking past him caught his immediate attention. The investigator kept asking questions.
Without warning, a force pushed him to the tunnel wall.
He then asked, “What are you doing, trying to scare me?”
The answer came through the investigator’s “Frank’s Box,” a device that gathers random bursts of words by sweeping through the AM radio frequency. It said, “No, pushing out of the way!”
Haunted tunnel believers would suggest that one of the spirits involved in the tunnel tragedy—perhaps even the ghost of the man who survived the incident—may have issued this strange warning. Some witnesses, for instance, have heard a voice shout, “Quit pushing!” and “Help me!” during visits to the tunnel.
Other Spectral Suspects
Not every expert on the Flinderation Tunnel believes the two dead railroad workers are the source of all the haunted activity going on at the site. The variety of ghostly tales seem to indicate another source, or, better yet, multiple sources for the activity. Some believe that the Ku Klux Klan held lynching parties near the tunnel and the ghosts seen here are sorrowful, or maybe vengeful, victims of those horrific crimes. There are some who suggest the top of the hill that the tunnel burrows into was once the site of a cemetery.
What makes the tales of railroad sounds and ghostly train lights even more suspicious is that crews tore up the tracks some time ago to help make the tunnel part of the popular North Bend Rail Trail.
But it might be that the trail isn’t just popular with hikers and exercise fanatics. It might be popular with old railroad ghosts too.