___ Conclusion ___

TRAVELOGUE
FOR A TRIP ON THE HAUNTED RAILS

So, we’ve come to the final stop on our long ride into the heart of haunted railroads. And what a ride it’s been. There have been stories that suggest that people have seen ghosts of railroad people, places, and things. Railroad museums count more than a few ghosts in their exhibits. Spirits of engineers, conductors, workers, and firemen still lurk near the tracks where they died, say some paranormal theorists. Railroad facilities—factories, station houses, and even bridges and tunnels—teem with specters and spooks.

Haunted rails are not unique to the United States—in fact, it’s a global phenomenon. Railroad ghost stories are told in Canada, England, Sweden, and other spots around the world.

These paranormal tales on rails just don’t seem to be a relic of the long past, a time, cynics sneer, when people were much more superstitious. These ghost stories pop up during all time periods, from the long past to the modern era. And new stories of the railroad supernatural are coming to the surface all the time.

So, what are we to make of these strange tales of headless conductors, haunted cabooses, and hellish curses that seem etched deeply into the fabric of railroad history and folklore? And why are there so many of these types of stories?

I’ve wondered about these questions, too, as I’ve researched and written this book. In fact, one of the reasons that I started compiling these stories is because of a folktale that I heard when I was a kid. This story began with a railroad worker—conductor or brakeman or just an employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad, depending on who tells the story—who was on his way home. In some stories, he is too tired to make it home; in others, he’s just, well, too drunk. He falls asleep on the path next to the train tracks, but somehow he either sleepwalks or passes out, right on the tracks. A train rolls by and our sleepy—or inebriated—railroad worker is decapitated.

Now, the legend warns, if you’re out late at night, wandering along the tracks, you just might meet up with the headless railroad worker who is still searching for his head. Who needs the railroad police keeping watch over company property when you have a headless phantom around the yard?

I’ve never talked to anyone who had a verified run-in with the ghost of this unfortunate railroad worker and, as I’ve found while researching this book, stories of mangled railroad workers are classic bits of railroad ghostlore. In this volume, of course, we’ve encountered similar themes in railroad stories around the country and throughout the world.

These railroad ghost stories remind me more of the university ghost stories that I wrote about in America’s Haunted Universities and Haunted World War II and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in my books about haunted rock and roll and country music. In the latter volumes, I felt there was a connection between the consciousness- raising potential of music and the supernatural, or, at least, tales of the supernatural.

Railroad ghost stories drive right to history’s core. They don’t just tell us about spooks and spirits; they tell us about the power of the railroad, a technology that rewrote history. And these stories tell us about brave men and women confronted with a technology that could be just as dangerous and destructive as it was vital and productive.

Historians may chafe at my suggestion that ghost stories make good history—and I would agree with that criticism. However, I’ll use a railroad analogy to explain why this criticism might be slightly off the rails. If history serves as the main line of railroad ghost stories, tales of the strange and supernatural railroad incidents, like other ghostly tales, can serve as feeder lines to real historical accounts. People read a story about a wandering railroad engineer spirit, for example, which then sparks their interest to confirm the tale, or it just whets the intellectual curiosity enough to cause the reader or listener to learn more about local railroad history.

As proof, remember the story about the Malvern Murder. A ghost story that two men heard when they were kids prompted them to become amateur anthropologists, uncovering evidence of a terrible epidemic—or a terrible murder.

There’s another related reason for the popularity of railroad ghost stories: they can serve as cautionary tales. I joked about the ghost of the headless railroad worker serving as an eternally vigilant security guard along the rails of his former employer. But, might there be some truth to this? I speculate that some of these ghost stories may have had a similar origin. Would it be so outlandish to suspect that smart railroad company executives seeking to protect millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and freight might decide to post a spooky headless ghost on their property— or, at least to not discourage the passing of a haunted rumor?

Ghost stories of accident victims or maimed workers at certain sites may also be passed from worker to worker to raise awareness of dangerous spots along the line that require special care and attention from the crew.

Finally, shared points on the philosophical and technological timeline may reveal another theory about why railroad history is so haunted. As the railroad industry spread exponentially across the country, spiritualism—a belief system that focuses on the communion of spirits and ghosts—exploded across the country at about the same time. Ghost stories and tales of railroad heroics and tragedy may have mixed to create this unique type of ghostlore.

Now, let’s make sure to address the 800-pound ghost gorilla in the room.

Not all of the stories in this book are ghostlore, technically speaking. For a story to be classified as ghostlore, we can’t have a witness, or a bunch of witnesses. Once a witness enters the scene, ghostlore shifts to something else—call it an anomalous event, or a ghost encounter, or a tale of the unexplained. In this book, several stories do feature a real witness, or a bunch of real witnesses, who say they experienced something—often at sites that are the focus of railroad ghostlore, but not always—for which they could not find a natural explanation. Could they be mistaken, or discounting some natural occurrence that might explain the activity? Could they just be pulling a prank? Could they be trying to create their own haunted railroad legends?

Absolutely.

But, there’s always this remarkable little phrase, “what if,” when you’re dealing with these sorts of stories: the brushes with the liminal regions of our consciousness between the real and the fake, the natural and the supernatural, death and life.

What if there are more to these stories of railroad ghosts and spirits? What if some—maybe even a small percentage—are more than simply grassroots fables and practical jokes? What if emotionally charged events, like the technological shock of seeing steam- and diesel-driven machines and witnessing the tragedy of horrific railroad accidents, can embed themselves into the space and time of the epicenter of these occurrences? What if the industry that helped change our consciousness from a world of farms and pastures into a world of factories and industry, and led to what some researchers phrased the annihilation of space and time, also altered our consciousness in such a way that it allows us to probe into deeper dimensions of reality?

Those are difficult questions—questions, maybe, that we can never answer. And that might be a good thing.

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