--- Chapter 7 ---
Engineers, Conductors, Brakemen, Workers, and Accident Victims
Ghosts tend to be confined to a building, or a structure. And that tends to be true in railroad ghost stories. You’ve already read about ghosts who haunt railroad station houses and former station houses, railroad museums, and even bridges and trestles
—but railroad ghost stories also have their share of wandering spirits.
Because railroad tracks crisscrossed the country, covering vast and open spaces between cities and towns, some of the railroad ghosts aren’t trapped in a building, or on a bridge. They drift along the tracks, often near places where they died in a railroad-related accident, or, more ominously, were murdered.
The wandering railroad spirit has given rise to a unique piece of railroad ghostlore: the ghost light. The pages ahead detail chilling stories—mainly collected from all over the United States—of headless conductors scouring the tracks for their lost heads, gallant engineers who died in horrific accidents, and disoriented murder victims still wandering the scene of their final breaths. Typically, these spirits appear not as apparitions but as anomalous lights that hover in certain sections of the railroad that mysteriously appear—and, just as inexplicably, vanish.
Skeptics dismiss these sightings as misinterpretation of completely natural phenomena. For instance, headlights reflecting off railroad tracks, depending on the point of view of the observer, may appear to be floating in mid-air.
When possible, arguments from both sides of the paranormal debate will be presented here.
The first story features a pretty impressive figure who had his own encounter with the ghostly lights of a railroad spirit. That person was none other than a president of the United States.
Railroad Ghost Story
Gets Presidential Seal of Approval
Maco Station, North Carolina
In 1889, President Grover Cleveland took a swing through North Carolina when he noticed something strange from the window of the presidential train, according to railroad historian James C. Burke. Some of the railroad workers were signaling with two lights, not one, as was typical in those times. He asked an employee of the Atlantic Coast Line why the two-light signal was being used and the answer shocked the leader of the free world.
They told the president that railroad signalmen in the area now carried two lanterns so that the engineers on the train wouldn’t mistake them for the infamous Maco Light. There’s a good chance that the workers then filled in the president on a variation of a tale that’s been told for more than a century about the haunted area of railroad tracks that stretched north to Richmond, Virginia, and south to Florida, east to Birmingham, Alabama, and west to points in North Carolina.
According to one version of the story, right after the Civil War, one of the best brakemen in the business, named Joe Baldwin, stood watch at the last car of a train cruising down the Atlantic Coast Line late at night. Without warning, his car uncoupled from the rest of the train. As the car slowed down, Baldwin knew a train following close behind would crash into the orphan car. He jumped into action, grabbing a lantern, which he then swung with a frantic ferocity. He hoped the engineer of the approaching train would see him and slow his train.
His efforts were in vain.
The train collided with Baldwin’s car and, gruesomely, the brakeman—in some versions, he’s a conductor—was decapitated.
After that crash, the lonely stretch of rail near Maco Station became known for paranormal activity. Specifically, witnesses claim to see a single light swinging about in the same area where the crash reportedly occurred. People have seen the lights so often and reported them so many times that the site is considered one of the most haunted spots in North Carolina.
Folklore suggests that the lights these people see is Baldwin’s lantern, and he is either reenacting his final moments on earth or he is using the light of his lantern to find his head.
John Harden, of Tar Heel Ghosts, told the Wilmington Star-News that the light has about the same brightness as a 25-watt bulb, which is about the same level of intensity as a railroad lantern. A few witnesses offer even more detailed descriptions of the Maco Light. They say it’s so bright, you could read off of it. Those who have a closer, unobstructed view of the phenomenon also say the light reflects off the rails, causing them to glow.
Over the decades, more than a few paranormal investigation teams—and a bunch of people who are simply intrigued by the possibility of seeing the headless brakeman—have traveled to the area to record their impressions. Those impressions range from deeply skeptical to true believer. Some people say they didn’t see the lights at all. Others claim to see the light, swaying back and forth. Still other witnesses say they saw the light, but it didn’t sway; the Maco Light remained steady throughout the encounter.
Harden gave the paper the most detailed report of the Maco Light. He said the light appears three feet off the ground, right about where an average-sized brakeman would be holding a lantern. The light always moves east, he added. Most accounts adhere to these specifications, although there are several witnesses who report seeing the light hovering much higher, saying it seemed to sail ten feet off the ground.
“Summer is the popular time for paying the Maco Station Light a visit,” Mr. Harden told the newspaper. “Dark and moonless nights are better because they provide a clearer, sharper view.”
The light, he added, would appear and disappear like it was on a railroad timetable, usually at fifteen-minute intervals.
Years ago, a Maco Light investigation became the thing to do for the residents of the area, especially the young people of the community.
Brooks Preik was one of the Maco Light enthusiasts. Preik wrote the book Haunted Wilmington and the Cape Fear Coast. Preik told the reporter that she grew up near the scene of the Maco Light and heard about it all her life. She added that in the 1960s, she, her husband, and some other couples went to the area.
They waited for about fifteen minutes and didn’t see anything. Just as they discussed abandoning the investigation, someone suddenly yelled, “There it is!”
“It was like a full moon on a misty night,” she told the Star-News. “It appeared in the distance and started coming toward us. It was the eeriest thing I ever saw in my life.”
The light seemed to pause about 100 feet away. “We started to run for the car,” she continued. “One fellow said, ‘I’m not scared of anything,’ and started to walk toward the light. The closer he got, the more it would recede.”
Preik offers some other tales and possible explanations in her book.
Nearby Fort Bragg soldiers had a more literal approach to ghost hunting. Preik wrote that a machine gun crew went out to bag the light once and for all. According to one version, the crew was out on maneuvers in the area overnight when they spied the light. American soldiers don’t like to retreat, so they did what soldiers do best—they attacked. They shot their weapons at the weird light but came no closer than any other witness in figuring out the light’s source. After they shot a few rounds with marksman-
like accuracy, the light continued to bounce around, seemingly impervious to the bullets.
Natural Explanations?
So, how much of the Joe Baldwin legend is true? Or is it just ghostlore?
We’ll start with the tale of Joe Baldwin. According to local historians, most of the story seems to be made-up. Although a Charles Baldwin was listed as a victim of a railroad accident that happened years before the mishap that reportedly claimed Joe Baldwin’s life, there are no railroad records or newspaper articles that suggest a railroad worker—or anyone—named Joe Baldwin died in an accident at that time, or at the site where the light has been seen. There doesn’t seem to be any record of a decapitation on the lines, either. A decapitation is a gruesome accident and would have likely made the paper. A few railroad-related accidents did occur, of course, including one where the railroad worker died a few days later. But he didn’t die on the tracks as the Maco Light story suggests.
Debunking the Maco Light became so popular that a lot of scientists and paranormal researchers investigated the sighting and produced their own theories. Their explanations range across the scientific spectrum.
The Smithsonian Institute and world-famous parapsychologist J. B. Rhine investigated the phenomena, for example. Rhine thought headlights from automobiles might be behind the lights. But others point out that witnesses have been reporting the lights since long before the advent of automobiles.
And, of course, several officials offered the skeptical explanation-du-jour on the Maco Light, as they do with most UFO or ghost stories that challenge rational and natural explanations: swamp gas.
Still, the reports, and even some evidence, began to flow in and captured national attention. Life published a spread on the lights but didn’t capture a photograph of the phenomena. Photographers for the Star-News, who paid regular visits to the area, had a little more luck. They often captured pictures of the eerie lights—or, at least some type of eerie lighting effects—in the area. However, most skeptics consider the best of these photographic representations of the Maco Light to be unconvincing. It also doesn’t help that the photographs, taken before the digital photography era, are now available on grainy microfilm.
Disappearing Lights
By the 1970s, the Maco Light, which appeared and disappeared so regularly, had finally faded out forever, according to most of the residents in the area and experts on the case. There are a few explanations for the lack of recent sightings. Use of that rail line dropped, and eventually crews tore up the tracks. Booming growth brought in more people who built homes and businesses nearby.
There’s a more hopeful explanation. Some hope that ole Joe Baldwin finally found his head and lived happily—and re-capitated —ever after: finally, a well-deserved eternal retirement.
The Paulding Light
Paulding, Michigan
Located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Paulding is a small community in Ontonagon County. But what it lacks in size and population, it more than makes up for in mysterious phenomena and intense debates on the explanation of that mysterious phenomena.
The Paulding Light accounts are told throughout the region and have received nationwide attention recently. The history of the Paulding Light stretches back decades at the very least and may or may not be related to the region’s considerable railroad legacy. Since the 1960s, witnesses have seen light orbs dancing in a valley just outside of Paulding. There are a lot of natural explanations, including swamp gas and headlights from cars traveling down a nearby road, but citizens tend to favor a tale that involves, like a few other stories, a heroic railroad brakeman.
According to this legend, a railroad line was once built at the very site where the lights appear. One night, a train had stalled on the tracks. Before the use of radio communications, if a train stalled on the tracks, workers had to hop a ride on the shoe-leather express to find a telephone or a railroad station to let the main office know about the situation. Of course, this could be risky, as well. A train stalled around a blind curve, or at the bottom of a steep decline, could find itself a sitting duck for a violent collision.
According to a tale that’s part of the Paulding Light legend (also referred to as the Dog Meadow Light), that’s exactly what happened to a locomotive that stalled one night at a vulnerable spot near Paulding. In this story, a brakeman saw an oncoming train and hurried from the stranded train, swinging his lantern. The approaching engine drew closer and closer but made no attempt to stop. The brakeman figured that the engineer wasn’t looking at the side of the tracks and failed to see his lantern. He made the bold decision to jump in front of the train to get the engineer’s attention. It worked, but with horrifying results. The engineer did slow the train down and was able to signal for a hard brake to avoid complete catastrophe, the legend goes, but the brakeman could not jump out of the way in time and died in his valiant attempt to stop the train. The mysterious light that floats about three feet off the ground is the ghost of the heroic brakeman, still swinging his lamp and trying to attract the attention of the engineer, according to numerous tales about the Paulding Light.
Residents have other railroad-related reasons for the anomalous lighting. They say that an engineer was murdered near where the lights engage in their eerie dance.
Skeptics Respond
As noted in other tales of railroad paranormal in this book, accounts of the dancing lights of a dead railroad worker attract three types of people: believers in the supernatural who are looking to confirm their beliefs, the curious who want to find evidence for the unexplained, and skeptics who are out to find natural explanations for the phenomena. That latter group has long since seized on a mission to take the super out of the supernormal activity of the Paulding Light.
Since the 1960s, several scientific groups and skeptical organizations have made the trek to Paulding to examine the evidence. One of those groups to investigate the Paulding Light included a team of science students from nearby Michigan Tech. They released their conclusion with the Michigan Tech News, the university news source. The students say it’s nothing more than headlights from a nearby road. One team member went to a spot where he could log each time a car drove along the road. The rest of the team logged each time the lights appeared. Sure enough, the arrival of the cars correlated with sightings of the lights.
The other clue is that reports of the lights started to circulate in the 1960s, about the time when cars began to routinely travel through the area.
But, hold on, Paulding Light believers counter: there were reports of lights prior to the 1960s, including a few at the turn of the century. And some reports suggest the lights are seen far from the highway. Finally, believers say that a team of investigators from Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, a show that tries to prove or debunk evidence of paranormal phenomena, could not find natural explanations for the Paulding Light case. It could be that while car headlights explain some of the sightings, maybe there are others that defy the explanation.
Now, whether or not these other explanations for the lights include the lantern clutched in the hand of the spirit of a departed heroic brakeman is a completely different story.
A Spectral Brakeman Who Never Takes a Break
Brockway, Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania town is now called Brockway, but its original name was Brockwayville, before being shortened in the 1920s. The town once prospered as an important railroad town nestled along the Little Toby Creek.
Curving their way into the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal and timber region, trains pushed through the mountainous region day and night, carrying supplies into the coal mines and factories and hauling away tons and tons of the precious black rocks and timber. Shepherding the beastly long and heavily loaded trains up and down the mountains and around the twists and turns of the line took a special locomotive crew. Just like the well-oiled engines the railroad crew piloted, the workers had to be in sync, knowing exactly what the other members of the crew were doing, even though they may have been separated by several cars.
Howard Neusbaum, a young brakeman, was on one of those special crews. He had established a reputation as being one of the best brakemen in the business after just a few short years. Neusbaum was assigned to serve as a brakeman on a return trip of empty cars from Clermont, a town north of Brockway. The engineer carefully piloted the unwieldy snake of cars through a particularly treacherous part of the journey.
Operating trains in rolling terrains—where one steep drop is immediately met with a slow uphill climb—can be tricky. The opposing forces of gravity weighing the train down, and the engine’s power trying to move it forward, can build pressure that uncouples the cars. It’s almost like a twig snapping.
A newspaper article describes it like this: “A sharp grade pitches into a ‘hole’ out of which another steep grade breaks abruptly.” The stretch of track where Neusbaum was operating had a few sections where a train could “break.” The newspaper account continues to say that most of the time, a break could be fixed; other times, the uncoupled cars could take off on their own, turning the well-controlled rolling stock into a deadly runaway train.
That’s what happened to Neusbaum’s crew. The train uncoupled and the crew never had a chance to check it. One section of train collided with the other and eighteen cars, including several occupied by the crew members, were thrown from the tracks.
Once the shock of the accident wore off, the crew members who were tossed from the train collected themselves and began to look for survivors. They called names and waited for replies. They called Howard’s name. There was no reply. They just heard the icy silence of night and felt their hearts drop into the pits of their stomachs.
Like many railroad tales, there are a few versions of this story. Ed Kelemen, in his book Pennsylvania’s Haunted Railroads, reports that Neusbaum died in an accident at a switching yard in Kane, Pennsylvania. And switching yards were particularly dangerous places for brakemen at that time.
What all versions seem to agree on is that everyone liked the brakeman—and Neusbaum’s death would remain in the minds of his coworkers when he began to show up—seemingly—in the flesh. Crews, particularly brakemen, began to see the ghost of Neusbaum. In many cases, he would appear just as a train began to navigate its way through a tricky section of tracks near Brockwayville.
Railroad ghosts aren’t always identified, but because many of the railroaders knew Neusbaum before he died, they recognized him immediately when he appeared. Reports suggest that he continues to show up to railroaders working in the area.
While most ghosts inspire fear in witnesses, that’s not the case with Neusbaum’s ghost. Many workers who have experienced the haunting said that after the initial surprise of seeing the apparition wore off, they reportedly felt relieved that this unexpected—but not unwelcome—passenger had hopped a ride on their train. In fact, they considered him a helpful ghost, who assisted the crew as they made their way along their often-perilous journey.
In a way, the brakeman has become a sort of patron saint of engineers and their crew.
1888 Ghost Rider of the Rails
Cheyenne, Wyoming
The freight train pulled out from Cheyenne, Wyoming, right on time, according to W.H. Smith, a well-respected conductor of the Denver Pacific Railroad. About fifteen miles outside of Cheyenne, though, there’s a notorious hill on the line, called Big Springs. This stretch of railway called for the crew to precisely handle the long beast of a train—and, especially, the crew’s brakemen would need to be at the top of their game. They knew if the train picked up too much speed, it could lose control, fly off the tracks around one of the turns, and cascade down the mountainside.
The men on the freight train also knew a few factors were outside of the crew’s control, according to Jerome Clark, author of Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America. In 1884, four years before Smith’s own crew was attempting to navigate the precarious section of track, a freight train hit a broken track and derailed, Clark reported. One person —a brakeman—died in the accident.
Smith thought his train was picking up too much speed and gave the engineer the signal to blow the whistle and start to apply the brakes. As the whistle wailed, Smith watched his brakemen jump into action and twist the brake wheels to slow the big freight down. Well, not all of them. Both the rear brakeman and the one further up the train were on the job, but another brakeman, the one responsible for the middle section of the train, just sat on the brake wheel. Smith nudged his rear brakeman to call attention to the slacker and they both watched as the man refused to budge. They decided to confront him. As they came close to the man, though, he stood up and nonchalantly stepped right off the train. Smith and his colleague, both horrified, rushed to the scene and peered out onto the ground below, expecting to see the battered remains of the suicidal brakemen. But, to their shock, they saw no one. He had just disappeared.
The crew later found out that the phantom brakeman had appeared to other railroad crews working the area. Just a week before Smith reported his encounter, a brakeman on another train said that he was setting the brakes on the train when he turned to find a brakeman sitting on the brake wheel about three cars back, exactly like the figure in Smith’s encounter. The brakeman went about his business, moving up another three cars before looking back at the strange figure. Then, the worker became concerned. This stranger had followed him and was now sitting on the wheel of the brake that the brakeman had set only a few moments before.
The brakeman shouted to his foreman and they both stood and watched as the man stood up and, just as Smith had reported in his account, stepped off the train.
Stories of phantom brakemen and helper spirits pop up throughout railroad ghostlore, but the story of the Cheyenne specter is different in both the number of sightings as well as the quality of witnesses who claimed to see the strange, ghostly sighting. The workers had impeccable reputations among their colleagues.
In an 1888 Indiana Democrat account of the incidents cited by Clark, the newspaper reporter wrote, “Neither of the railroad men who tell this peculiar story is a bit suspicious and both were in their soberest senses when this peculiar apparition appeared to them.”
A Not-So-Thankful Thanksgiving Day Haunting
Geneva, New York
On Thanksgiving Day in 1902, a train chugged along the tracks right outside of Geneva, New York. As it started to cross the Marsh Bridge, the engineer and fireman heard a terrifying shriek. When they looked up, a white figure stood on the tracks, wildly flailing his arms to get their attention. That definitely worked.
The train crew slammed on the brakes—as much as a train’s brakes can be slammed—and managed to bring the beast to a standstill.
Another scream pierced the forest surrounding the train.
They watched as the freaky figure disappeared.
Not sure about what they had on their hands—nothing in the train operator’s manual covered what to do when encountering shrieking forest weirdos on the tracks—the workers clambered off the engine and began to inspect the track while looking into the forest for any sign of whomever had hailed, or screamed at the train to stop. Nothing was amiss with the track. And there was no sign of the shrieking apparition.
They started to cross the bridge and one final shriek rattled across the bridge.
The train chugged down the line and into the station where the men knew they had one whopper of a haunted railroad story to tell their colleagues. After they finished their story of encountering the shrieking freak, the railroad workers received a knowing nod from their captivated audience. From the description of where the encounter took place, the listeners said they likely encountered a ghost from a serious train accident. The townsfolk said that only a few Thanksgivings before this run-in with the shrieking ghost, a train had derailed on the Marsh Bridge, killing the engineer and fireman.
Rescuers who went to the scene could only recover the body of the engineer. The body of the fireman either drifted downstream or got bogged down in the quicksand-like soil under the bridge.
Since then, the shrieking ghost returns every Thanksgiving. The speculation is that it’s the ghost of the fireman—who never had a proper burial—returning to the scene of the fateful accident.
Truth or Folklore?
A train wreck. A haunted fireman. A haunted anniversary. They are all necessary ingredients of railroad ghostlore tales. But is there any truth to the bizarre legend?
Luckily, Jennifer Jones, of The Dead History, who was mentioned in the chapter about Ogden Railroad hauntings, has done some outstanding paranormal detective work on this one too. Her conclusion? Maybe.
Based on her findings, an actual incident fits most of the shrieking ghost narrative. On March 29, 1875, a train pulled out of Syracuse and headed toward Rochester. Right outside of Geneva—exactly where the ghost accosted the Thanksgiving train—flood waters had rushed over the Marsh Creek Bridge. The water was just high enough to cause the engine, the tender, and baggage car to leave the track and topple into the raging river. Just as the details of the ghost story point out, the engineer, Ignatius Buelte, and fireman, Augustus Sipple, were swept off the engine and into the flood waters. Both bodies were later discovered downstream.
Two key points differ: searchers did recover the body of the fireman, and the incident did not happen on Thanksgiving.
Jones believes this may be another example of how history, ghost stories, and folklore mix together.
“Maybe this is one of those urban legends meant to remind people how fleeting life can be,” she wrote in her blog. “Or maybe engineer Buelte and fireman Sipple were simply trying to warn other railroad men of the dangers of the bridge.”
He May Have Died at His Station
but He Left a Restless Spirit
Atchison, Kansas
The early days of railroading are full of stories of unbelievable heroism—and tales of unforgivable cowardice. Railroad history would place engineer Brit (sometimes referred to as Bert) Craft in the former category.
In the summer of 1882, Craft sat in the cab of his engine, carefully shepherding his mail train out of Cawker City, Kansas. People considered Craft to be the best engineer in the business. When the railroad’s big bosses wanted to travel by rail, they asked Craft to serve as an engineer.
Nobody knows when Craft got the first inkling of danger ahead. Some speculate that maybe a puff of smoke wafting from just around a sharp bend signaled him. But it’s likely Craft only had seconds to respond when he guided the engine around the bend and saw that the small bridge, which crosses the dry creek bed near Great Spirit Spring, was completely engulfed in flames. The fire damaged the integrity of the structure and, as soon as the heavy train tested the beams, they cracked. The engine—along with the mail and express cars—fell into the creek bed. The passenger cars, though, remained on the burning bridge. Somehow, members of the crew survived the crash and, once they extricated themselves from the wreckage, ran to rescue the passengers in the blaze.
Thanks to the heroic work of Craft and his crew, many passengers escaped the conflagration. Craft wasn’t so fortunate, though. During the rescue effort, steam escaping from the damaged engine badly scalded Craft, the fireman, and the conductor, according to an account. The fireman died immediately, but Craft died later as a result of the injuries.
Craft’s family buried the hero in a nearby cemetery. His gravestone is etched with a simple saying: “He died at his station.”
His heroic spirit, though, lives on, based on several encounters reported by witnesses.
For more than a century, strange accounts have filled the railroad lines near the Atchison area, accounts that many paranormal theorists say are related to Craft’s heroic actions during that hot summer day in 1882.
Just a few weeks after the accident, a newspaper reporter from the Kansas Globe took a break on the porch of a store in West Atchison. He struck up a conversation with a group of Central Branch railroad workers, including a freight engineer and his fireman. The engineer began to tell the reporter a bizarre story. He said he had engineered a train a few nights before that was approaching the bridge where Craft and members of his crew perished. As he drew closer, an engine whistle ripped through the night. There should definitely not be traffic on the line at this time, thought the shocked engineer, He leaned his head out of the cab window to see what was going on and saw a crazy sight. Within a hundred yards of the bridge, an eerie outline of an engine came around the curve, directly at the engineer.
Too shocked to take evasive action, the engineer froze, expecting the worst. But even more mysteriously, the phantom train abruptly vanished.
The reporter noted the earnestness of the engineer when he told his story—and particularly when he revealed one detail. The engineer told the reporter that the ghost train looked like someone had outlined the train with hand-drawn white lines, and that he had noticed that leaning out of the window of that phantom engine was, without a doubt, Brit Craft. He was stoically staring down the line.
The engineer apologized for how ridiculous the story sounded, but the fireman on that train offered some verification. He said that he happened to look up while working and saw that the engineer was “white as death.” As they passed the bridge, the engineer told him, “I have seen the ghost of Brit Craft’s engine.”
Reports of the haunted engine began to barrage railroad company authorities and newspaper reporters. Train crews reported seeing the white-outlined engine right before the break of day in three different places between the towns of Downs and Beloit.
Craft, apparently, isn’t tethered to his phantom train. Other people have seen a light glowing alongside the tracks near where the train crashed. They think it’s the ghost of the area’s most famous engineer who now wanders the lonely railroad tracks at night, joining dozens of other specters who supposedly inhabit Atchison, Kansas, one of the America’s most haunted towns.
There’s another legend attached to Craft and his haunted engine. According to this tale, the engine might also be cursed. After the deadly accident, crews repaired the engine that Craft had operated during the accident. Just a little over a year after the first accident, Craft’s engine—Central Branch engine number 162—smashed into an obstruction just about a mile away from the first accident. The engine was badly damaged, possibly beyond repair, according to the newspaper account.
Maybe Craft decided if he couldn’t pilot ol’ 162, nobody should.
The Natural State Boasts
Some Supernatural Railroad Tales
Gurdon and Cossette, Arkansas
When it comes to anomalous activity, Arkansas, also known as the Natural State, is anything but natural. You might say it’s the Supernatural State.
Arkansas is full of legends about ghosts and tales of the paranormal, according to occult theorists. The supernaturally charged environment of Arkansas also powers a flurry of haunted railroad stories. While ghost chasers across the country report that mysterious lights appear along railroad tracks and crossings in their home states, Arkansas has two major railroad spook light manifestations. The first that we’ll discuss—the Gurdon Light—occurs in Clark County, Arkansas, and the second appears near Crossett, Arkansas.
Money, Murder, and Mysterious Lights
Times were tough during the Great Depression—and time is money. And that’s what started the disastrous chain of events that apparently still haunts the tracks near the town of Gurdon, about eighty-five miles south of Little Rock, Arkansas.
According to the legend, in 1931, a railroad worker named Louis McBride felt the company he worked for—the Missouri-Pacific Railroad—had cheated him out of how many days he would be allowed to work. In the Depression, cutting hours meant cutting pay and, to some workers, that seemed like the company was stealing food from the worker’s table and right out of their family’s mouths. McBride decided to address the situation with his supervisor, William McClain.
Let’s just say the conversation didn’t go so well.
As the argument grew increasingly more volatile, McBride picked up a shovel and beat McClain over the head with it. Then he took a hammer that was used to drive railroad spikes into the ground and began to bludgeon McClain with the instrument. McClain’s murder caused a sensation in the relatively peaceful area. But as the buzz about the murder swept through Gurdon, another spectacle began to seize the attention of the residents. People started to see a strange light dancing along the railroad tracks near the site of the infamous crime.
The light, which floated in midair, had the same shape and intensity of a railroad lantern. It didn’t take long for the witnesses to suggest that the source of this light was none other than William McClain’s lantern—or, at least, the lantern of William McClain’s ghost.
As with other cases of will-o’-wisps that appear near railroad tracks and facilities, believers and debunkers clashed over the Gurdon lights. Believers even debated among themselves. Some say that the lights are caused by McClain’s lanterns, while others believe that a decapitated railroad worker is using a phantom lantern to look for his head, which is a common theme that appears in railroad ghostlore.
Skeptics don’t buy that the lights are either the ghost of a murder or an accident victim. They say the phenomena are caused by car headlights from a nearby highway. However, the strange lights seem to pre-date the existence of the road in question. They also suggest the lights are just a random manifestation of an electrical effect, called the piezoelectric effect.
So, the debate, just like an old phantom railroad lantern—whether it’s clutched by either old man McClain, or the ghost of some poor headless conductor—seems doomed to continue for an eternity in this sleepy section of Arkansas.
The Beheaded Brakeman of Crossett
Located in the southeast corner of Arkansas, the town of Crossett grew up around the papermaking industry. To fuel the processes used to make paper, factory owners needed a railroad. Eventually, the fate of the town, the paper mills, and the people became entwined with the trains that brought in the raw material and transported the finished product to market.
The fates of some railroad workers, however, were tied much tighter to those rails—and sometimes those fates turned to misfortune.
That would certainly be the case for a brakeman who worked on a train traveling just outside of Crossett. According to the legend, the worker fell on the track and was decapitated. Since then, people have reported seeing a weird light dancing along the tracks. One thing that’s really strange about these orbs is that when witnesses start to move toward the lights to investigate further, they immediately disappear.
Obviously, most people connect the phenomena with that brakeman. Others say the light has an even more heartbreaking origin. These folks believe that it’s not a headless railroad worker haunting Crossett’s railroad tracks but his wife, who is carrying a lantern in a vain attempt to find the remains of her husband.
From all accounts, she’s still looking.
Northern Spook Light:
Canada’s Famous Railway Ghost Light
St. Louis, Saskatchewan
St. Louis, Saskatchewan, is a small, agricultural village that rests on the South Saskatchewan River in Canada. Most people know it as a picturesque and peaceful community. But it has a much bigger reputation among fans of railroad history and believers in paranormal phenomena. St. Louis is the epicenter for the eponymous St. Louis lights, a ghastly light show that appears without warning and seems to be connected to the village’s railroad past.
For more than a century, people have claimed to see lights—a bright white light that looks like the light on a train engine and a red light that resembles a railroad lantern—appear along the train tracks, located just outside of the village. Some say they have heard animal noises—coyotes and wolves howling and geese honking—right before the appearance of the lights. The phenomenon happens so often and so regularly that just about everyone in town has a story to tell—and people actually travel to the village in hopes of seeing the lights.
One witness, Edward Lussier, of St. Louis, told a reporter from the Western Producer that he saw the lights.
“When I was growing up in my teens… we used to go there quite a bit on weekends and if you sat on the track and looked south down the train track, the light would appear periodically,” said Lussier.
One night, Lussier and several relatives went to see the lights. Lussier and his cousin followed his father and uncle as they walked along the tracks. His mother and aunt stayed in the car. As they walked, a bright light suddenly flashed behind them and cast their silhouettes on the tracks so plainly that Lussier’s father and uncle turned around and saw the lights.
“Dad came running ’cause he thought we’d be scared and we hadn’t even noticed, we didn’t see the light ourselves, so that was kind of an eerie thing,” Lussier told the reporter.
St. Louis’s own mayor, Les Rancout, is one of the witnesses, according to the Western Reporter.
“It basically looks like a street light from a distance that’s a little brighter and gets a little dimmer and there’s a little red light that’s sometimes seen on either side of it,” said Rancourt.
The mayor’s attention to detail reveals the heart of the controversy about the ghost train lights. Some say the bright white lights and the trailing red lights point to a natural explanation for the phenomena. In fact, two teens won a science prize by theorizing that the lights are headlights and taillights from cars, according to the Western Reporter. The teens asked one of their fathers to drive to a spot south of the tracks. When he flashed his headlights, the girls saw the ghost train lights. When he flashed his taillights, the girls could see the little red light that is often described in St. Louis Light encounters.
Phenomenon Debunked?
Not everyone thinks the young scientists’ explanation matches their own experience. Some have tried to replicate the experiment at places where they saw the lights and failed to see the headlights and taillights when their confederates flashed them. Maybe the headlights can explain some of the sightings, but not all, these debunker-debunkers counter. A NASA scientist couldn’t explain the phenomenon and a television crew shut down the highway and still saw the lights. Others say that the lights predate the construction of the highway and perhaps even the invention of the car. That would rule out headlights for that era. Reports do coincide with the arrival of rail service to the area, however.
While believers try to debunk the skeptics’ debunking, they put forth their own explanation, and it relates to Canada’s railroad past. In fact, there are a bunch of explanations. According to one legend, a train was rolling north on the tracks that lead to St. Louis when the conductor jumped off the caboose to inspect the track. The worker, however, slipped and fell under the train. The wheels decapitated him. Some people believe that the light is the headlamp of the ghost train’s engine and the little red lights are a grim reenactment of the conductor scanning the track with a lantern to find his severed head.
There’s another gruesome tale to explain the visitation of the St. Louis ghost train. According to this version, which occurs possibly in the 1930s, a heavy snow blocked the tracks, causing a train carrying mail to halt just outside of St. Louis. The stranded train presented too tempting of a target to a pair of thieves. They rushed down on the train, but a brave conductor confronted the thieves and a fight broke out. Outnumbered, the conductor gave a good account of himself, but the thieves eventually got the upper hand and killed the railroad worker. Flush with booty from the train, it didn’t take long for the honor among thieves to crumble. One of the thieves killed the other to seize all the loot. The lights that people now see is a paranormal replay of that fateful attack on the mail train and the conductor’s valiant defense of railroad people and property.
The debates continue about the St. Louis Ghost Train: Is it a real paranormal phenomenon, or just a mistaken natural phenomenon? One thing is for certain, there’s no other haunted railroad phenomenon that is so famous and so consistent that a national government officially recognized it. In 2014, the Canada post administration issued a stamp commemorating the St. Louis Ghost Train lights, joining other creepy Canadian tales, including the Maritimes’ Northumberland Strait ghost ship, Quebec’s ghost of the Count of Frontenac, Ontario’s Fort George Spirits of 1812, and Alberta’s Ghost Bride.
Oh, and the day that the St. Louis Ghost Train stamp was issued? June 13, which, of course, was a Friday.
The Suitor House: Canada’s Spirit Weigh Station
Calgary, Alberta
On paper, the Suitor House, an historic property in Calgary, Alberta, has all the right qualifications for the ultra-haunted house. At one time, the home served as a hospital where officials isolated patients from Calgary’s healthy population. But it wasn’t a hospital in the sense that doctors hoped the patients would get better. It was basically a place where they could die.
You might think that would be the reason behind the ghostly goings-on in the house, but according to experts on Calgary’s haunted history, the spirit that continues to inhabit the Suitor House isn’t the ghost of a patient, or even a doctor. The home is haunted by the ghost of a widow whose husband died in a bizarre railroad mishap. According to the tale, a young couple lived in a third-floor apartment in the building. The husband used the freight trains that would snake through Calgary as a way to get around the city. He would jump on one train near the home, take it as far as he could to get close to his eventual destination, and then jump off.
He did it so often that it became routine. But, then, just when his confidence was up and his guard was down, he tried to jump onto the train but missed. His legs were crushed under the wheels of the train. Horrifically, some accounts say that he tried to crawl to a nearby hospital, but he never made it.
Here’s where a twist occurs in the story. You might think it’s the husband who haunts the Suitor House. However, paranormal theorists now blame the haunted activity not on the husband, but on the man’s wife. She still stays in the home, waiting for her husband to return.
On a few occasions, people who have stayed at a nearby bed and breakfast raised complaints with the owner of the Suitor House. They told the owner that a female Suitor House resident is really unfriendly. They tried to wave at her when she stood on the balcony and they even tried to talk to her, but she completely dismissed them, like they weren’t even there. The owner asked for a description of the mean lady. The witnesses described her as young with dark, curly hair.
No one at the Suitor House, however, matched that description.
Still other people say they see a woman looking out of the window and down onto the bike path that used to be the railroad tracks where the accident occurred. Some have even snapped pictures of the forlorn lady.
Inside the home, workers claim to hear the sounds of things moving around—or someone moving stuff around—on the third floor. When they go to investigate, the floor is vacant.
While there are a lot of homes rumored to be haunted and properties that have inspired railroad ghostlore, believers say the Suitor House is different because visitors have collected photographic evidence. On more than one occasion, a person will snap a picture of the beautiful old home, hoping to memorialize the visit, but when they inspect their photos, they notice something different, something strange that wasn’t in the home when they took the picture. In one of the third-floor windows of the Suitor House, these accidental spirit photographers and would-be paranormal investigators notice a woman looking at them from the window. She doesn’t look anything like any of the other visitors, or any of the current occupants.
But she does fit the description of the woman who lost her young husband in a tragic railroad accident many years ago.
Dead Worker’s Ghost
Gives Whole New Meaning to Being “Fired”
Eddystone, Pennsylvania
During its long history as a leading steam locomotive manufacturer, the Baldwin Locomotive Works produced more than 70,000 train engines, most of them steam-powered. The company, initially located in Philadelphia, and later Eddystone, Pennsylvania, built sprawling manufacturing sites that arguably produced more engines than any other American company; they made thousands of engines that powered the Allied victories in World War I and World War II.
Of course, large manufacturing sites are susceptible to accidents, some of them horrific in cost and scope. Baldwin was no exception. Its history is marked by a few major accidents. Some of the deadliest of these mishaps, it seems, refuse to be a mere tally in the loss column of the company ledger, or a distant memory stored in the archives of the town newspaper. In one case, the ghost of a worker continued to punch in days long after an accident took his life.
A punching machine in the boiler shop of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
On August 26, 1902, the Wilkes-Barre News reported that James McGlone, a laborer in the Baldwin Locomotive Works, claimed to see the ghost of a worker who had died in the plant just a few days before.
He told the paper that his foreman barked out a command to find a large monkey wrench. He remembered seeing it behind a bunch of boilers. The huge boilers sat in front of the furnaces that belched out flames, which licked out of the iron bars like vipers’ tongues toward McGlone. Even though the roar of the furnaces drowned out nearly every noise on the floor, the foreman and his men could hear the cry of McGlone.
Thinking McGlone had fallen or he had been caught up in some other type of accident, the men rushed to his aid. A recent accident that had claimed the lives of a few workers, no doubt, weighed heavily on their minds and caused them to drop everything and bolt toward McGlone’s aid.
He was not hurt, thankfully, but he seemed distraught. When he finally managed to form words in his mouth, McGlone shouted, “Oh Tom! Tom!”
McGlone, considered one of the crew’s strongest and most reliable workers, had fainted. His coworkers immediately called for help and had him transported to a nearby hospital. McGlone remained unconscious for about a half hour before he awoke. But he was still distraught.
When he came to and calmed a little, he told the medical team a fantastic story. He said he was scouring the area for the tool when he felt a strange sensation. He had never felt something like this in his life and found it difficult to put the sensation into words. When pressed, though, he said it felt like someone was there—even though he knew he was alone—and that someone was watching him.
When he turned to the furnace, there, in the glare of the flames that lapped out of the furnace door, McGlone saw Tom, the man who had died in a recent accident.
“He just stood there and looked at me with an awful, sad, faraway look in his eyes,” the stricken man told his doctors. The vision—or ghost, or whatever it was—terrified McGlone so much that he fell to the floor and buried his face in his hands.
“I feel ten years older today than I did yesterday,” he added.
The paper was quick to clear McGlone of any character issues that might have caused the vision. The doctors said he wasn’t drinking at the time of the incident, nor did he seem susceptible to hallucinations.
The doctors admitted they were reluctant to believe McGlone’s story, but the medical effects of the vision were real. They kept him in the hospital, treating him for shock, until they finally released him and let him go back home.
No one else reported any other ghostly incidents in the manufacturing facility.