FATE Magazine
Jun 17, 20227 min
by Scott Corrales
Common knowledge, coupled, with the sage advice of our elders, has led us to rest secure in the
knowledge that "there is no such thing as a ghost," and that it is childish for an adult to
believe
in-much less write about-them.
But millions of people around the world have seen the shades of the departed, both human and
animal, and no society on the planet has a dearth of lore on the subject of dealing with ghosts
when they appear to us: how do we appease them, how do we banish them (if necessary) or
simply, how do we honor the dead and assure their peace?
In the industrial world, it is not uncommon to learn of cases in which the living have
encountered ghostly images. These include nonliving things, such as ethereal houses,
automobiles, and in some rare instances, entire ghost villages which, like Brigadoon, are not
there the following morning. Therefore, the case involving a phantom locomotive should not
cause us to raise our eyebrows. Or should it?
After the completion of the coast to coast railway system at the end of the 19th century, the
United States boasted one of the busiest rail systems in the world. Enormous trains
like the Mikado hauled vast numbers of coal cars to feed the industrial appetite of the budding
world superpower Pittsburgh, in particular, needed coal to fuel the blast furnaces of its
titanic
steel, glass, and iron works, and was serviced by a number of crisscrossing railways.
Phantom locomotive
The building of the interstate highway network, the decline of commerce by rail, and the advent
of the postmodern era led to the obsolescence and eventual abandonment of the railways and of
the tunnels that were blasted through the heart of the Appalachians.
One such train track ran through tunnels south of Pittsburgh, near the city of Canonsburg. It
retains a ghostly memory of its heyday, as two young Pennsylvanians were able to discover for
themselves.
While driving along the back roads running off Donaldson Rd., they came upon long abandoned
rails, rusted and interspersed with weeds. A pair of tunnels farther down the line caught their
attention-particularly the fact that one of the tubes was barricaded by a gate that swung aside
as
they approached, as if beckoning to them.
Discretion prevailing over valor, they chose to forgo the dubious distinction of venturing into
the darkened tunnel's nether reality. They decided to return during the day, only to discover,
in
the best horror-film fashion, that the gates were no longer there-in their place now stood a
wall of old bricks, the work of earlier decades, judging from their poor condition. This
disconcerted the youths even further.
Unable to ignore the site's enigmatic attraction, they returned to the tunnels one night during a
full moon in May 1993. Any plans they may have entertained about exploring the abandoned tunnels were thwarted by the sudden
appearance of a phantom locomotive, pearly white in color and almost solid, which caused them
to lose their resolve and run away.
Massive train wreck
They bestowed the name "Hell" upon the peculiar patch of backwoods they had discovered, and
began to learn as much about it as they could. A quick check at their local library revealed
nothing, at first. But they gradually pieced together the story of a massive train wreck, with
considerable loss of life, that had taken place along that section of track in the 1930s.
Even more ominous, their research uncovered the story of a subsequent derailment during the
late 1960s along the same section of track. This caused a collision with a train carrying the
bodies of Vietnam War veterans.
"Hell" had a personality of its own, as they discovered. It allowed some to enter its unhallowed
confines while chasing others away, availing itself of a bright yellow Chevy Camaro, or an
equally garish pickup truck that would pursue unwelcome arrivals back to the main road, then
turn aside down a dirt track just as soon as the trespassers ad been warned off.
Before discarding the teenagers' narrative as a lively amalgam of Freddy Kruger films and
Stephen King novels, we should reflect upon the fact that acts of violence tend to leave an
indelible imprint upon the areas in which they occur.
The late British psychic, John Pendragon, reported an event that took place in London during
World War II. While seeking shelter in a bombed-out mansion during an air raid, a man came
upon a "monster," which he described as being horned, goat-like, and filled with evil, sitting
on
the stairs leading to the upper floor. The nightmarish beast ran up the stairs, the man claimed,
and vanished into one of the bedrooms, where it proceeded to make loud noises.
Pendragon speculated that the hapless man had witnessed an elemental, a creature "prone to
frequent places where a tragedy has occurred." Subsequent investigation revealed that a
manservant had committed suicide on the premises by hanging himself from a banister, and
many people had since reported the horned, bestial apparition on the steps. Enigmatic three-
toed footprints were found in the vicinity of Mars, Penn., in February 1975, at the site of a
railroad tunnel that had collapsed, a fact that lends some weight to the tragic event
suggestion.
The Canonsburg, Penn., region falls loosely under the general zone known as the Laurel
Highlands. This area is well known for its UFO and
Bigfoot sightings. Other railroad mysteries exist in the region that oddly complement the teens'
story. During the completion of the track leading down from Pennview Mountain, two gangs of
railroad workers, sparked either by the hot summer weather or a real or imaginary slight,
stopped driving spikes into the ground and instead, chose to drive them into one another. By the
time the situation was resolved, two men lay dead, and were promptly buried on the site.
According to locals, on certain evenings voices arguing in rage can be heard.
A parallel situation to the Canonsburg sighting was recorded in the book Illustrated Guide to
Ghosts by Nancy Roberts. Pat Hayes and her husband Larry were driving through North Carolina
in the early morning hours when their car broke down. While Larry was getting help, Pat heard
a screech of metal in the darkness. She got out of the vehicle to see what was happening.
She soon witnessed the derailment of a passenger train from a tall bridge into the waters of a
creek below. Explosions, fire, and screams rent the darkness. To add to her bewilderment, she
found herself standing beside a thin, uniformed man who asked her for the time, yet seemed
unconcerned by the calamitous situation playing out before them.
Her husband returned to find her distraught, convinced that there had been a terrible accident
in the woods.
The following day, they visited the local train station, where they learned that there had been no
derailment that evening-but there had been one on that very same evening exactly 50 years
before. On August 27,1891, a train had left Sallsbury for Ashboro, N.C., and reached Bostian's
Bridge at 3 A.M., plunging 90 feet into the dark water below.
The stationmaster was even able to how the confused and frightened Mrs. Hayes a clip from the
Charlotte Chronicle, that memorialized the terrible event: "Hurled to death, 30 Killed, any
Injured. At Three o'Clock in the Morning, Bridge near Statesville the Scene of the Wreck."
Bagage master H.K. Linster was killed in the disaster. His description matched that of the man
she'd spoken to at the crash site.
Even more dramatic are accounts of the "headless track walker" who carries out his duty at
night this very day.
As one variant of the story has it, track walker was on his way back to Derry, Penn., after
checking certain sections of track in the vicinity of Burd's Crossing, when he was slain by a
westbound train. The fact of the matter is that the unnamed man's headless corpse was found on
the tracks the next day. Ever since, those taking shortcuts across the track have stumbled
across the path of a headless man carrying a lantern before him.
While we should not allow the charm of folklore, no matter how colorful, to distract us from the
underlying truth of the matter at hand,
places like "Hell" exist not only in the U.S., but around the world, many of them involve
railroads.
These so-called "Dead Zones" have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers bent on
unlocking their secrets. Their existence has been explained in terms of "psychic saturation, a concept that presumes matter is quite capable of recording impressions of diverse natures,much like a blank strip of magnetic tape.
When an event produces an intense outburst of mental or spiritual power from an individual or
a group of persons, surrounding matter (the tunnels, train tracks, etc. in this case) picks up
the outburst, storing it for "playback" (for want of a better term) by a person or persons
capable of doing so.
While neither of the two percipients of the strange phenomena taking place at "Hell" tried to
test the solidity of the gate at the tunnel entrance, or that of the phantom locomotive, the
phenomenon has entered playback mode whenever they have returned.
An alternative theory, that of psychic contagion, could be invoked to explain the goings-on in
this community near a major interstate highway (Route 79), less than 40 minutes from
Pittsburgh.
The events playing out at "Hell" are nothing more than a hallucination suffered by someone at a
Particular time-perhaps during the collision in the 1930s, or during the derailment of the
1960s that has repeated itself and expanded until it developed into a sort of localized mental
disturbance, infecting those entering the area and spread by them to others, fueling the
phenomenon's existence.
While such situations have been discussed by eminent American and European
parapsychologists, their complexity leads one to choose the possibility of a bonafide haunting.
In all fairness, one must point out that other train accidents have occurred in Pennsylvania and
have left no haunting tales for posterity.
In 1856 a train filled with Sunday school children on an excursion crashed to a regular train,
leaving 66 dead. he engineer was reportedly so disraught that he committed suicide on returning
home.
In 1943, a wheel bearing froze on the seventh car of the Congressional Limited as it sped
through Philadelphia. The train ground to a halt and the seventh car jumped the track, slamming
into the embankment. Other cars left the rails and piled up, causing 79 deaths.
There may be no quick and easy answer to explain the situation. Pennsylvania is filled with
ghost stories and mysterious areas, which add to the Keystone State's store of the rare and
unusual. The phantom trains are just one example.
Bigfoot and train wreck haunt the same area
Interestingly enough, there is researched Bigfoot activity in the area connected with the
Canonsburg ghost train. Devon Ross and John Stasko, investigators for the Pennsylvania
Association for the Study of the Unexplained, visited the area in September 1991 with the
intention of conducting a "Bigfoot Stake-out." Their area of study, coincidentally, was the
backyard of a house located on the same section of railroad track that the local teenagers would
come to identify as "Hell" two years later.
Armed with flashlights and communicating with each other through radio headsets, the
investigators' efforts were rewarded by the sight of two pairs of green eyes staring back at
them
in the darkness. At nearly 11 o'clock at night, there was a sound of heavy footfalls crashing
through the woods, followed by the sound of metallic ringing against the rails.
It was then that two figures, described as "flat black and with arms swinging wildly," ran
across their line of sight, never looking back at the investigators. The creatures were
described
as being between five and six feet tall, and weighing some 150 pounds. The erratic mariner in
which they moved has also been reported in other cases involving Bigfoot-like creatures.
(Information courtesy of Keith Bastianini, PASU).