--- Chapter 6 ---
HAUNTED TRACKS
AND ACCIDENT SITES
W hen you have hundreds of tons of iron, steel, diesel and steam engines, passengers, and freight skating along two thin rails, bad things are bound to happen. And when they do, bad things happen in spectacular fashion. Railroad crashes have caused thousands of deaths, injuries, and general misery. According to some paranormal theorists, residual spirits remain anchored to those accident sites.
The railroad industry was also known for labor strife. Management battled workers, workers battled management, and often workers—worried about losing their jobs—battled their fellow workers. This tension led to violence, which led to injuries and death. And those deaths, witnesses say, led to ghosts.
In this section, we’ll look at several haunted tales of ghosts and spirits that are connected to crash sites and scenes of unspeakable violence.
Eerie Echoes—The Return of the Red Arrow
Altoona, Pennsylvania
“People started screaming, and I braced myself against the windowsill,” is how one survivor, a seventeen-year-old sailor at the time, described the sheer terror of the crash of the Red Arrow, a train barreling around the Bennington Curve, located between Gallitzin and Altoona, Pennsylvania, in the wee hours of the morning on February 18, 1947.
It’s a scenic route. The Bennington Curve is near the highest point on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the Keystone State, according to author Dennis P. McIlnay.
“In Harrisburg, the railroad is only 310 feet above sea level, but by Altoona, the road rises to 1,174 feet above tide. In the next twelve miles, the railroad climbs almost one hundred feet per mile to nearly 2,200 feet above sea level at Bennington Curve,” McIlnay writes in The Wreck of the Red Arrow.
Running behind schedule and trying to make up time, the train crew attempted to increase the speed of the train as it bended around the curve. Too fast, it turned out. The train jumped the track and several cars plummeted down an embankment, killing twenty-four and injuring more than a hundred.
The death and injuries deeply affected the community, but Altoona was no stranger to train wrecks. To this day, no one could have predicted just how deeply this derailment would cut into the very fiber of time and space of the accident site. The Bennington area soon became a hot spot of haunted happenings, and many who witnessed the frightening activity at that site blame that accident on a cold winter night back in 1947 for unleashing the paranormal outbreak. These witnesses now report that Bennington, which, at the time of the crash, was basically an abandoned worker’s community that faded when the jobs left, is now a ghost town in more ways than one. And the population is reportedly booming.
According to the Big Book of Pennsylvania Ghost Stories, by Pennsylvania paranormal research legends Patty Wilson and Mark Nesbitt, the crash has generated some of the area’s spookiest ghost stories. The duo wrote that eerie echoes of the crash still linger.
Witnesses in the Bennington area say that, often, usually on the anniversary of the crash, they are stunned to hear the sounds of screeching metal and the tremendous thud of thousands of pounds of passenger train cars leaving the tracks and twisting down the embankment. Then, the eeriest part of all—total silence. Seconds after the definite sounds of a train crash, witnesses say the mountain and the valley become completely quiet, like a spontaneous moment of prayer or silent meditation has been called. Obviously, when they go to investigate, there’s no train wreck. And moments later, the area returns to normal.
Before you begin to brush off this as typical ghostlore, albeit super sad and creepy, Wilson blogs that some of these tales come from credible sources. She writes that two years after the wreck, a lineman, someone very familiar with the sounds of trains, heard the sounds of a crash—metallic crunches and earth-shaking thumps. He also heard screams of pain and fear. He ran to find the source of the sounds, but the area was completely deserted.
Then the silence followed, and he returned to work.
It was only later, once he had a chance to reflect on the incident, that he realized the day he had spent working near the Bennington Curve was the two-year anniversary of the crash.
The site has been supernaturally quiet lately, according to most accounts. But every once in a while, a new tale will crop up, often a slice of ghostlore that’s passed from person to person, but some are also first-hand accounts written on a website. Here’s one from the website Ghosts of America:
“We were driving down the road past the Red Arrow train track in the middle of the night, and about a hundred feet away we saw a floating train and shades covering the windows and behind those shades we saw figures … People … In a floating train… Bizarre! I never believed in the supernatural. We believe this is the train from the Red Arrow train wreck coming back.”
Perhaps the Red Arrow hasn’t quite reached its final stop.
Dead Railroad Men Do Tell Tales
Malvern, Pennsylvania
The world’s haunted railroad stories that we are exploring in this book are often described as folklore. Ghostly brakemen, specters of accident victims, and even entire ghost trains are a kind of folk fiction that grew up and spread in a time before television, movies, and electronic media became the storytelling media of choice. In those days, people told stories as a form of entertainment and, often, education. This partially explains the popularity of railroad folk legends, like Casey Jones, and offers an explanation of some of the stories in this volume.
But you’re making a mistake if you think that folklore explains all the stories, as the people of Malvern, Pennsylvania, recently learned. For decades, people ascribed reports of ghostly lights and spectral sightings on the railroad tracks near that site to a clever bit of railroad ghostlore. The ghost story indicated that the lights and ghostly experiences near the railroad tracks were tied to a bunch of railroad workers who died, or were killed, in Duffy’s Cut, an area near those tracks.
Just a silly ghost story, skeptics said—until some people decided to actually investigate. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson told CNN that their grandfather, an executive assistant at the Pennsylvania Railroad, revisited a ghost story every Thanksgiving. Bill and Frank’s granddad, who had kept the official files related to the haunting, told them that a man reported to officials that he saw the strangest sight during a walk by Duffy’s Cut one warm September night—orbs of green and blue light dancing in the mist. The witness even made an official report, and he believed the dancing lights were the ghosts of a group of Irish railroad workers who died from cholera.
In the report, the witness said, “I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a-dancing around the big trench where they were buried; it’s true, mister, it was awful.”
The documents quote the unnamed man’s description of the paranormal encounter, adding: “Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves … I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy.”
While most people in the area thought of the ghost story as just a fanciful legend, the Watson brothers thought a true piece of history may have inspired the ghost tale and they decided to investigate. When their grandfather died, they inherited his papers. In the stacks and stacks of railroad reports, the brothers discovered clues to the origin of the haunting.
According to one account, the workers were buried in an area near where they were helping to build a railroad bridge. The brothers decided to start their own dig and quickly uncovered some evidence that suggested they were on the right path. The brothers discovered forks and a pipe, emblazoned with an Irish flag. Bill called that a “Holy Grail” and indicated they needed some help.
A geophysicist from the University of Pennsylvania joined the excavation. The scientist brought along technology that helped them scan the area so that they could search underground for evidence without digging or drilling. They discovered one area in particular that suggested something solid rested deep under the surface of the turf. After pinpointing this area, the team discovered an initial find—a human bone. But the mystery was just getting warmed up. As the team uncovered the remains of what appeared to be a mass grave, they began to wonder about the accuracy of one of the folktales. One legend that passed around the area indicated that the ghosts were not only victims of a cholera outbreak but they were also the victims of prejudice at the time that kept the Catholic workers from receiving proper care and treatment for cholera at local hospitals.
Now, this team suspected that the remains of the fifty-seven people—probably all members of an Irish railroad crew—exhumed from the mass grave offer evidence that some of the dead may be not just disease victims but murder victims. Skulls show indentations and holes that may be evidence of bullet holes or strikes from a hammer. The researchers suggest that residents may have murdered the cholera victims because they were afraid the disease might spread into their communities.
The lack of official records and the hasty mass burial also indicate that the railroad bosses and local officials wanted to quickly cover up the incident.
The ghosts of the workers, though, had other ideas.
Bodies Exhumed, Spirits Remain
Paranormal investigators say that even though the mystery has been solved and the stories of the workers’ untimely end can be better known, supernatural activity at the site continues. Recently, facing a mixed reaction from the researchers who took part in the discovery, a group of paranormal researchers gained approval to conduct an investigation in the Duffy’s Cut area. Some of the team that discovered the mass grave criticized the ghost hunting effort as unscientific, but they eventually relented and let members of the Chester County Paranormal Research Society—CCPRS—on the site of the massacre and allowed them to collect data, according to a story posted on the Phantoms & Monsters blog. In fact, two of the members of the team that found and excavated the site accompanied the investigators and even asked the spirits questions during the session.
The team used camera equipment with motion sensors and detectors that can measure the electromagnetic field. Paranormal theorists say that the electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors can sense slight changes in the electromagnetic field, which they suggest could be the energy of spirits. They also brought along a device, which was mentioned earlier, that scans the AM radio band and blurts out snippets of sounds and people talking, called Frank’s Box, or the Ghost Box. Theorists also suggest that spirits can use this device to communicate with the living.
Early in the investigation, the team reported little interaction, but over the next few hours, as the night grew deeper, things heated up. They even had a purported conversation with the spirits, who expressed their anger at some of the parties that historians say played a role in the massacre. For example, a researcher asked whether the spirits knew “Duffy,” obviously referring to Philip Duffy, an Irish contractor who had hired the men, and grew rich from the contract to build the section of railroad.
The spirits replied through the Frank’s Box, “Yeah, the devil.”
Another reply to the question “Are you with God?” revealed their current torment: “No… no… abyss.”
Other paranormal buffs wonder whether the spirits that inhabit the massacre site are connected to some of the other supernatural activity that seems to envelope the town of Malvern. Some experts on the town’s hauntings wonder whether the ghosts of Duffy’s Cut aren’t the spirits behind the haunted activity at a nearby inn, the General Warren. Homeowners of properties close to the site have also complained of anomalous events that they ascribe to the influence of Duffy’s Cut’s ghosts.
In many stories of the paranormal, ghosts want some form of justice before their spirits can rest. Despite the best efforts to settle the souls who were struck down in Duffy’s Cut, it seems like the ghosts of these railroad workers are still restless and wandering.
The Legends of America’s
Most Haunted Railroad Crossing
San Antonio, Texas
For students, field trip day is one of the many highlights that dots the annual school calendar. Field trips allow students a chance to get out of the dreary confines of the classroom and see some of the sites. Win-win.
And spirits were still high for a busload of Catholic school students traveling back from a field trip that, according to locals, occurred sometime in the 1930s or 1940s near San Juan Mission. As some of the students talked and others snoozed in the back of the bus, the driver, a nun, carefully navigated the vehicle down Shane Road, just south of San Antonio, toward the railroad crossing. The bus lurched up the hump over the tracks and, just about halfway across the tracks, it suddenly stalled. The nun’s eyes widened as she looked up the track; she saw a train light appear in the darkness of the evening and lock right on the bus. At first, she tried desperately to start the engine. Again and again, she twisted the key and revved the gas pedal, but nothing happened. She tried not to panic her students.
Because the nun wanted to avoid a panic, she did not attempt to open the door and help the students evacuate to safety. That decision would haunt her for an eternity.
As she turned the key one last time to start the bus, the light from the train engine and the shrill sound of its horn flooded the bus. The children saw the danger too late. The massive locomotive cut through the bus the way a bullet pierces the skin of an apple. All the children died. The nun was tossed through the windshield and survived.
A few weeks later, the nun drove to the crossing and waited for the next train. She saw one coming down the line, shifted the car into drive, and stopped in the middle of the track, waiting for the train to end her misery and guilt.
But then she heard noises: they sounded like voices of small children. She could hear what sounded like tiny hands pounding and tapping on the back of her car. Seconds later, just as her fate seemed sealed, she felt the car begin to drift forward. She looked out the window and into the rearview mirror in a fit of desperation, but the nun couldn’t see anyone around. It seemed like an invisible force was moving her car. Mere seconds before the train would have hit her car and certainly ended her life, the vehicle slowly and effortlessly rolled off the tracks and into safety.
According to folklorists, this strange account contains the reason why the intersection of Villamain and Shane is haunted to this day.
But it’s only one story that explains the bizarre phenomena that occur at the crossing. Like a lot of ghostlore, a bunch of variations are combined and subtly altered. Another tale, for instance, indicates that a nun wasn’t behind the wheel of a bus; it was just a normal school bus crossing the tracks on its way to school when a train slammed into it.
While the details change, ever since the accident—or accidents—most people claim to have come into contact with the ghosts of these accident victims, and these encounters are among the most bizarre experiences in haunted railroad lore. People claim that they have heard the laughter of children and what sounds like small hands tapping on the back of their vehicle, just like the nun in the story. Some also report they have even felt their cars drift forward, like an invisible force was pushing their vehicles over the railroad crossing.
According to one legend that has been passed around the residents of the area, a skeptic went to the site with an ingenious experiment to either prove, or disprove, any supernatural phenomena at the railroad crossing. She drove to the railroad crossing and stopped. Then, she spread baby powder on the back of her car. When she put the car in neutral, she felt the car begin to drift over the railroad crossing. Seconds later, her car lurched safely to the other side. The witness then checked the baby powder and said she could see what looked like the swirl of palm and fingerprints embedded in the powder.
Cynics may scoff at the evidence—palm and finger patterns could be whipped up by the breeze of a moving car, for example —but at least the results of the experiment satisfied this now-former skeptic.
It’s not just kid-powered cars and baby-powdered trunks that make people believe spirits are present on this stretch of tracks. Witnesses have heard and even seen ghosts in this spot, sometimes referred to as one of Texas’s most paranormally active locales.
Some say they’ve heard the distinctive blast of a steam engine whistle, the rumble of wheels chugging down the line, and the grind of brakes attempting to slow the big machine. But, after a few minutes, no train ever passes and there’s no sign of any engine, especially a steam engine, when they look up and down the line.
In another famous ghost tale told about Shane Road, a woman was driving toward the crossing at night. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw a little girl standing at the side of the road. It’s not safe walking at night on the road, the woman instinctively thought. She pulled over and offered the girl a lift to her home. The girl climbed in and gave the driver directions to her home. Perhaps the girl tried to run away from her parents, the woman thought.
Once at the house, the woman told the girl to stay put and she would smooth things over with her parents. She started toward the house and decided, for some reason, to check on the girl. When she looked back, the girl had vanished. But the woman had never heard the car door open or slam shut. The woman ran back toward the car and saw that the girl was nowhere to be found.
But the seatbelt was still buckled.
In another version of the tale, people say that the ghost of a little girl who carries a teddy bear haunts the railroad crossing. She even turns up in photos.
And other people have passed on accounts that the ghosts of the railroad crossing reveal themselves in even stranger ways. While one bird enthusiast drove a new pet parakeet home, she noticed something strange. The bird happily chirped and sang constantly from the moment it was placed in the convertible for the ride. Then, the witness slowed her car down to cross the track. The bird suddenly quit singing. For a spooky few seconds, the formerly chipper parakeet became dead silent, until they crossed the tracks and moved out of the area. Then the parakeet started to sing again.
We know that coal miners often used canaries to warn of impending mining disasters. Can parakeets somehow sense the paranormal forces that emanate from haunted railroad locales?
Historic Evidence?
As compelling as the story of the ill-fated bus and children ghost rescuers is, there’s a problem with the tale. Nobody can find any evidence that a bus accident ever occurred at the crossing. One headline in the San Antonio Express from 1938 does detail the gruesome train-bus collision during a snowstorm that claimed the lives of several student passengers. But that occurred in Utah. Could that tale somehow have been mixed up with the Shane Road legend? That’s a possibility. Other theorists suggest that the tale is based on a car accident that occurred long, long in the past. Over the years, it morphed into the legend of the suicidal nun and the accident-prone field trippers.
That, however, is something for future debunkers—or believers—to investigate.
Spirit Photography Captures Eerie Signs
of Haunted Railroad History
Hamilton, Ontario
On a cold, early February night in Ontario, George Brady, along with his wife Cathy and other members of the Hamilton Paranormal team, headed off toward their objective: the Sydenham Railroad Bridge, one of the most haunted spots in the Hamilton region, which is an area noted for the number of railroad sites that are rumored to have high levels of supernatural activity.
George reported on his organization’s website that as they started toward the bridge, the beam of his teammate’s flashlight swung toward the set of stairs that climbed the bridge.
George, who has seen a lot in his years as a paranormal investigator, couldn’t believe his eyes. He saw the dark yet unmistakable shape of a man standing right outside the edge of the flashlight’s circle of illumination. And it wasn’t a shadow.
“The shadowy figure of the man was in an upright position, not on the ground like a shadow, and there was no other light source coming from behind us so it could not have been a trick of the light,” George explained on his blog. “We did all agree that we could feel something in the area and knew this would be a good night in spite of the light snow.”
As the beam of light swung toward the shadowy figure, the spirit—or whatever it was—walked away. Only George saw the shape, but the weird night was only just beginning and pretty much everyone on the investigation seemed to have an encounter. During the evening, the members would snap numerous pictures that revealed light anomalies, weird mists, and strange orbs. George and his team believe that the resulting treasure trove of pictures is evidence of the extensive haunted activity at the railroad property.
Just a week earlier, they had already collected a bunch of evidence. According to George, team members reported hearing faint voices and weird noises emanate from the woods around the tracks. When they analyzed the pictures taken during this time, one photo appeared to contain a creepy mist. The team also labeled a perfectly round orb that appeared in the dead center of the path an “angel” spirit.
Often, skeptics insist on seeing some sort of physical evidence. But often investigators process a paranormal encounter on an emotional—and purely subjective—level. In this case, the group could certainly feel the haunting.
“There is so much energy in this area it’s hard to believe,” George wrote. “The area itself is very active with sounds, soft voices, cracking of wood or branches, feelings of being watched, seeing shadows moving about you, getting a spider web effect on one’s body, feelings of headaches, unexplained noises.”
What’s Behind the Haunting?
The folks in Hamilton Paranormal suggest this little stretch of railroad line is an incredibly haunted spot—and their pictures seem to back up their assumptions that weird forces are at work here. What could be causing a seemingly innocuous piece of railroad real estate to be so paranormally active? Paranormal researchers and railroad historians think it’s related to a violent train crash that happened there well over a century ago.
The Hamilton Paranormal team and their friends dug into the local public library archives to find stories from the April 2, 1859 issue of Harper’s Weekly and the March 21, 1859 issue of the Times to offer an explanation for the haunting. According to those accounts, which team members posted on their website, a Great Western Railway freight train had just passed over an embankment near where the haunted activity is centered and encountered no trouble. However, a heavy rain shortly after the train had passed sent plumes of water down the earthen embankment, causing it to give way. The next locomotive to pass—the Express Train East—barreled into what was now a twenty-foot deep chasm. One after another, the engine, the tender, and four more cars fell into the hole. The train carried about sixty passengers that night. Several passengers, the engineer, and a brakeman were listed among the dead. The newspaper reporter indicated that besides the death and injury, the atmosphere that surrounded the accident made the event even more confusing and scary.
The reporter wrote: “The raging of the storm and the darkness of the night added greatly to the intense horrors of the scene and it was some time before the real extent of the calamity was properly understood.”
Deaths and intense emotions are often blamed for causing hauntings. Could it be that the deaths, along with the high emotion of this railway accident, are behind the ghostly events near Sydenham Railroad Bridge? It could be. But there might be more to the story and the history of Sydenham Railroad Bridge that is kicking up the supernatural energy.
Other Witnesses
It’s not just paranormal researchers who are experiencing weird phenomena at the bridge site.
According to one reader of the Hamilton Paranormal blog, named Mike, he had an unexpected brush with the unknown when he and a friend were walking near the scene of the accident in the 1990s. The two were lost in conversation when they heard sounds coming from the top of a nearby cliff. They heard sticks snapping and rocks skipping down the side of the escarpment. The hikers, however, ignored the sounds and kept walking on—until they were forced to pay attention.
Mike said that they continued to cross the bridge’s walkway and the sounds continued unabated. Eventually, the sounds seemed to echo from a point directly across from the hikers. Their minds raced to find an explanation—a wild animal? Another hiker?
The hikers moved back toward the path. The sounds kept on their trail.
“There’s something there,” the friend said.
A debate ensued. Mike said the noises were nothing—just their collective imagination. Mike’s friend disagreed. Then, the friend noticed something—and it, whatever it was—was either getting bigger, or it was definitely moving toward them.
Witnesses tell us that in these ghostly standoffs, there are two reactions: fight or flight. The writer of the account said he chose the former, at least initially. Mike squatted down and picked up a rock. He boldly announced: “If there’s someone over there, I’m throwing a rock!”
The fight strategy didn’t last very long. The mysterious figure picked up speed and came so close that the stone limply fell from the witness’s hand.
That’s when the flight response turned on. The two hikers ran through the trees, thorn bushes ripping at their flesh, and headed toward the safety of a nearby clearing. They turned to see if anything followed them, but whatever was chasing them had stopped the hunt. Their lungs heaving as they tried to catch their breath, the two friends began to compare notes about the strange thing they saw near the railroad tracks to make sure both accounts matched.
“I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know what you saw, but this is what I saw…’ and I went on to describe it as a large translucent triangle about 2.5–3 feet across with rounded corners,” Mike wrote. “It was sort of patchy, it almost looked like a dirty mirror. After my explanation of what I saw, tears started to drip from his eyes, and he said, ‘that’s exactly what I saw.’”
These would-be paranormal researchers had a few theories of their own. Besides the railroad accident that had occurred just a few yards from where they saw the floating object, they also knew a suicide had occurred near the tracks and that several deadly accidents had happened at a nearby quarry.
Like the investigators of Hamilton Paranormal, Mike’s encounter with the railroad spirits of the Sydenham Railroad Bridge was a life-altering experience.
“Anyway that’s my story … believe it or not,” he concluded. “It has changed my way of thinking.”
The Case of the Chatsworth Disaster
and the Glowing Grave
Chatsworth, Illinois
If you’re in Chatsworth, Illinois, a small town about an hour east of Peoria, and it’s a quiet August evening, you might want to stop, stand still, and listen.
Then again, maybe you don’t.
Witnesses claim that you can hear the echoes of a train crash from the late 1800s, a train crash so violent that the little town of Chatsworth has never been the same. These witnesses report they’ve heard the terrible reverberations of twisted locomotive metal and the piercing shrieks of the dying and injured shatter the calmness of a late summer night in an otherwise nondescript Midwestern town.
The story starts on August 11, 1887. It was the early morning and an excursion train was chugging across the dry fields, made exceptionally dry by the scorching heat and lack of rain that summer. Excursion trains operated throughout the country back then, allowing people relatively quick trips to places like Niagara Falls, New York, and Hot Springs, Arkansas. The tourists on this excursion train were just coming back from Niagara Falls, but they had no idea that, for many of the passengers, it would soon turn into an eternal excursion to an unknown destination.
Earlier the previous afternoon, work crews had cleared weeds and brush along the tracks. The men then burned the brush. They were pretty sure they had extinguished the fire before knocking off for the day.
Pretty sure.
A full view of the accident that occurred in Chatsworth, Illinois, on August 11, 1887.
But later that night a wooden bridge near where the men had been working suddenly caught on fire. Some faulted the controlled burn. Some said that was just a coincidence—sparks from a train caused the brush under the bridge to catch fire and eventually spread to the structure itself.
The debate on what had caused the fire, like the fire itself, continues to rage. But there can be no doubt that the fire caused severe damage to the bridge and that the engineer of the excursion train speeding along the long, straight stretch leading out of Chatsworth had no chance to avoid a devastating accident.
According to most accounts, including one that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1887, the train, pulled by two engines, rounded the top of a small hill, giving the engineer a glimpse of the danger ahead. He saw the trestle, now engulfed in flames. But there was no time to stop. Even as he applied the brakes, the first engine passed easily over the bridge, but the engineer said later that he could feel the compromised bridge begin to buckle when the second engine crossed over. The trestle eventually collapsed completely and mayhem soon followed.
The second engine—which was, by the way, officially designated as Engine Number 13—tipped off the tracks. One by one, the following coaches, filled with hundreds of passengers, slammed into the derailed engines and exploded into a mangled heap of metal.
The scene, in a word, was horrifying. But things would get worse. The wreckage caught fire. Passengers caught under parts of the wreckage, or just too injured to move, now found themselves in the midst of a raging brush fire.
Screams and shrieks filled the night air.
Somehow, the first engine stayed on the tracks and two members of the crew commandeered the train and rushed off to get help, blowing the whistle and ringing the bells in alarm. Another crew member ran for help in the opposite direction.
Some survivors, desperately and uselessly, tossed handfuls of dirt onto the blaze.
When the rescuers eventually arrived on the scene, most would carry the horrible memories of the dead and injured with them the rest of their lives. They said the chain reaction seemed to turn the splintering metal into the churning, chaotic blades of some type of monstrous harvester. The bodies were ripped apart and tossed across the land like a thresher discards unusable stalks.
The mixture of terror and tragedy almost guarantees that tales of the supernatural would forever cling to the fields where the accident took so many lives, which, according to various tallies, fluctuated between eighty-one and eighty-five deaths. And those ghost tales still echo. It’s not just the scene of the accident that is draped in the anguished cries and shrieks of the past. Some say that the ghosts can also be seen and felt in the buildings of nearby Chatsworth, where bodies were stored awaiting identification and the injured attempted to recover from their wounds. Others say they have watched an odd assortment of lights bobbing through the air near where the excursion train crashed. Experts on the legend suggest these ghostly lights are a supernatural reply to the moment when lantern-wielding rescue workers stumbled onto the horrific accident scene.
Perhaps the weirdest tale is from a graveyard just outside of Chillicothe, Illinois, named LaSalle Cemetery. This story indicates that a survivor of the crash searched through the walls of flames and carnage for his wife. He never found her. In the chaos that followed, somehow the body of his wife was identified as the wife of another man and buried in that man’s family plot.
Eventually, authorities straightened out the whole mess and the woman was reburied in LaSalle Cemetery. But a whole other mess was just starting. Over the years, people wandering by or through the cemetery noticed something strange about the woman’s tombstone—it glowed at certain times and on certain nights. The grave became a supernatural tourist attraction for teens looking for a late-night thrill and people interested in exploring the supernatural. The eerie glow on the tombstone convinced many that supernatural forces were at work.
Because the accounts were so numerous and because the phenomena appeared so regularly, skeptics also became interested in the site. Their conclusion: headlights, not ghost lights, produced the weird glow on the tombstone. They suggested that if the headlights of cars zooming around the nearby road can catch the stone at just the right angle and at just the right time, the stone looks like it’s glowing.
The Screaming Bridge
Avon, Indiana
The bridge that spans White Lick Creek near the town of Avon, Indiana, is an impressive structure to look at. Its concrete spandrel arches and sturdy turn-of-the-twentieth-century construction look particularly picturesque in October when fall foliage is at its height in the Midwest.
That’s also the worst time to visit if you’re afraid of being exposed to paranormal activity, according to locals. They say that run-ins with the supernatural increase at the Avon Bridge right around Halloween.
What kinds of paranormal activity?
According to people familiar with the bridge haunting, you can hear the ghost of a railroad worker who died during the construction of the bridge. Some say you can hear him moan; others say he screams.
As legend has it, residents of the area considered the construction of the bridge, which is about 70 feet high and 300 feet long, a bit of an engineering marvel for that time period, especially in that area, which, at the time, was largely undeveloped. The project to complete the bridge required considerable expense. And that expense didn’t just come in the form of dollars and cents notched down in the ledgers of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railway, also known as the Big Four Railroad, which built the bridge. The cost also reportedly came in the form of a precious human life.
In one of the more popular renditions of the story, supervisors tasked a group of workers to build support pylons. They framed up the sides and poured the concrete into the center of the structure. Workers considered it a grueling, nerve-rattling, and dangerous task. Standing dozens of feet off the ground and creek, the workers knew that one wrong move, one unfortunate slip, would lead to a deadly fall. The workers, though, in their worse imaginations, could not fathom what happened next. While most of the crew worried more about falling back into the creek bed, one worker fell forward, diving directly into the stony soup of concrete. The mixture quickly enveloped him. For as long as they would live, his colleagues would never quite get over the shriek of the man, nor would they forget his gurgling moans as he finally succumbed to his horrific fate.
The death was reported to the company officials, who made a cold-hearted decision. There would be no attempted rescue effort —he was certainly dead—nor would there be a recovery effort. Building the bridge was costly enough—trying to find the body in the rapidly drying concrete and bringing it back to the surface would cost too much and delay construction too long. The body would remain entombed in the bridge pylon and the bridge would serve as the unfortunate worker’s grave.
We mentioned earlier that the sounds of the worker’s final shrieks and moans would haunt the surviving workers for the rest of their lives. But that wasn’t the only sound that would haunt the men. Later that night, long after quitting time, as the men lingered at the job site, chatting about the day’s events in the evening’s cool, muted breeze, and as they gathered at fires along the creek bed, the men swore they heard the beating, pounding rhythms of someone slamming their fists against the bridge. There didn’t seem to be anyone near the structure, though. Even weirder, the pounding sounded like it was coming from within the bridge. Alone with their thoughts of the terrible accident that day, the workers began to wonder if that noise wasn’t the sound of the spirit of the dead bridge builder, trying to get out of his concrete tomb.
Ever since then, people have claimed they can hear the same terrifying noises issuing from the bridge—sometimes a rhythmic pounding, not unlike the beats that the bridge builders heard decades ago, but at other times, people say they heard moans waft out of the bridge, and, for the very unlucky, the sounds of shrieks and screams echoing out of the site and reverberating down the creek bed.
Legend also states that the phenomena increase in intensity on the spookiest night of the year: Halloween.
Like a lot of good ghostlore, the tale of Avon’s haunted bridge has more than one story attached to it. Another tale identifies a mother who dropped her baby from the bridge as the source of the spectral screams.
Skeptics have an explanation for the phenomena. Since the pylons and other sections of the bridge are hollow, the interior of those supports acts like a huge cement megaphone. When trains go over the bridge, the sounds of their squeaking wheels and clanging cars are amplified. For someone with a good imagination stoked by the creepy vibe of a Halloween evening, the resulting noise could probably sound like a piercing scream of anguish.
Nina Criscuolo, a reporter for WISH TV, a local television station, also did some investigative work. Susan Truax, a local historian, could not find any details of an actual accident at the site that resembled the one referred to in ghost stories told about Avon Bridge. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, though, and even the historian notes that not everything that happened in the early twentieth century made it into the newspapers in that rural community.
One local resident who has family ties that stretch back into the community’s history said the only way to test the theory is to go to the Avon Bridge site and listen. “If you go by on Halloween night you’ll hear her scream. Yes, you will. The train goes by, you will hear that,” Harriett Muston told the reporter.