Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our Halloween season series on locomotive horror and
Trains of Terror. Now. In the last episode, we talked about how trains are often used in weird fiction and the kinds of themes that they emphasize, including things like fate and helplessness, isolation, alienation, and especially in nineteenth century stories, the irresistible changes brought by technology brought on by the steam era, how it was transforming the landscape, transforming our culture, and highlighting maybe the fragility of our minds and bodies.
We also talked about the various inputs leading to the invention the steam locomotive, and finally we got to the Victorian panic about railway madness, a belief you'll find at tested in a bunch of British newspapers from the eighteen sixties through about eighteen eighty, according to which it is common for men to be driven instantly, violently insane by the vibrations of a railway carriage in transit. So that
was part one. If you haven't heard that yet, it's definitely worth a listen, go back and check that out first. But we're here today to talk about more that's right.
This week, we're going to be getting into the more familiar territory of the ghost train. Though even as I say that and I start thinking about potential mainstream examples, it's really hard for me to think of a straight up haunted train in popular media like Polar Express maybe comes to minds like the most mainstream example. Yeah, is it just me or do we just not actually have a lot of stories about ghost train?
Well, it's interesting that you frame it that way, because I was thinking about the ghost trained as a concept and thinking about how, Yeah, we have the concept of ghosts, which are spectral, insubstantial entities that take the form of a human I guess sometimes an animal, usually human understood to be like the soul or the animate image of a person who has died. So these are individual human entities. They usually move around and I don't know, they interact
in some kind of sensory capacity. You can see them, they make noise and so forth. But then we also have the concept of haunted houses or haunted locations, for example, a church or a cemetery or a battlefield. These are places where hauntings by individual ghosts happen, most often understood to be the location of a tragedy or a death, or maybe like a place that the ghost frequented in life.
The house, the haunted house is usually an actual house. I guess. Maybe there are some versions where ooh, there was never a house there at all, it was just a vacant lot. But for the most part it's like, oh, it's the old the old McCormick place there.
Yeah, yeah, exactly so. But trains are like in this in between realm where I guess they could sort of be both because on one hand, they are moving entities like people, and so they can sort of be a moving form that could pass in and out of your awareness. And at the same time, trains are locations like houses. People go inside them, inhabit them. They have rooms and corridors and doorways. So a train oddly has the ability to be like a wandering ghost itself or like a
haunted house. And I was trying to think, is there any equivalent, I guess like a ship, like a you
could have a ghost ship or a haunted ship. Though, like you were saying, or I think you were alluding to this, most of the ghost train lord that I'm aware of and that I could turn up and research for this episode seems to be about beliefs about a spectral train that you believe you see passing as an outside observer, not a physical train that you get on board and then believed to be haunted like a haunted house. The latter is possible in concept, it just seems like there's less of that.
Yeah, I think it is probably an idea that is infected by these other concepts, like you said, the haunted house, the haunted domicile, and a train is kind of a place that you live. It is an environment, but it's also a vehicle. And we have a long legacy of
ghost ship stories. But it's interesting because that doesn't really line up one hundred percent because with the idea of a ghost train, because with ghost ships you have, of course tales of a flying Dutchman and everything from a haunted unoccupied vessel maybe it has Dracula on it and
so forth, or a straight up spectral vessel. But then a lot of this is based on the historic reality and even contemporary reality of ships that have either been damaged or abandoned, or something terrible has happened and they are left to be moved around on the water by wave and wind, something that isn't really in the cards for a train, you know, especially in the modern air, but even historically, like if you had an unknown train moving around and it was a physical reality, bad things
would happen pretty quickly. And yes, the idea does tie into fears of those things happening, and I think a lot of the examples you can look at of ghost trains are tied to either memories or anxieties concerning train accidents. But yeah, it doesn't really it seems to be influenced by all these other concepts, but also it doesn't line up one percent with any of them either.
Yeah, I think that's right. This is kind of a but this also because the train has this potential duality that it could be like a haunted house or like a like a ghost itself. It was making me think about the different moral understandings we have of individual ghostly
entities versus haunted locations in horror fiction. Because I don't know, maybe you have some counter examples to this but I was thinking that in most horror stories, individual ghosts, though they invoke fright, are usually looked on with pity once you know their story. They are usually said to be victims in some way, people who suffered, whereas haunted locations are often characterized as evil or malicious in themselves. There's this idea that like a haunted house is a bad place.
It's like the Overlook hotel. The hotel is evil.
Yeah. Yeah.
And yet while a train could be a location like this haunted house that you often think of as a bad place. When I read through all this ghost train lord, I don't get that feeling like, oh the ghost train, Ooh, that's wicked, it's bad, it's malicious. Instead, it has more the character of the individual wandering ghost. It's something that may be frightening, but is mainly to be kind of pitied to tell a sad story about.
Yeah, that's the impression I get as well. So we'll keep that in mind as we roll through some of the specific examples here and perhaps out there there's a wish we'll touch on this again. But there are a lot of ghost train stories out there. There's a lot of train related urban legend, so we have things that have been circulating for a while, and you know, stories
that are just kicking out. Perhaps, so if you were familiar listener with a story of a malicious ghost train, or just any ghost train story that we don't mention here, or if you have additional thoughts on things we mentioned here, obviously write in because we would love to hear from you.
Absolutely, contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Please share with us your local ghost train story, especially if there's something unusual about it.
Now, before we get into specific ghost trains and ghost train stories, I do want to just kind of an overview of what seemed to me to be sort of like three definite types of ghost trains to consider. Okay, okay, So the first type we'll come back to this one in some specifics here shortly, is the idea of just lights and or sounds of trains on or near the
tracks that never materialize. The idea that I hear the sound or I see the lights of a train that should not be here, and then that train never arrives. But it causes you a lot of anxiety because, oh, if there's not supposed to be a train here right now, that's a bad thing.
You know, this ties into you and I were looking at an example of a play about a ghost train off Mike. We ended up not getting into it in our outline really here, but there's a play called The Ghost Train by an author named Arnold Ridley, which turns out to have a quite bizarre twist where there's like a story of a ghost train and then it turns
out to be like a communist counter espionage thriller. But anyway, I think that that story was said to be inspired by the author's experience of being stuck at a train station at night and hearing what sounded like a train approaching and thinking it was coming arriving to pick him up, but then it just like seeming to pass without him ever seeing it. And the explanation is the train was there was a train coming by him, but it was
being diverted along a different track that was. So he's like in the night hearing a train approach and then leave but never sees anything.
You know, the approach of a train is kind of haunting, almost supernatural occurrence in some ways, you know, because you're standing there and perhaps you hear just like that initial hum of the rails, maybe the air is suddenly a little bit different. You get to get some of that sort of underground air coming out if you're in a subway system, all ahead of the actual roar of the train, the lights of the train, and so forth, there are a lot of subtle hints leading up to the arrival.
All right. So that's the first, you know, rough categorization for ghost trains. The second one I want to highlight are just straight up overtly creepy or ghostly trains, straight up spectral trains, trains with ghosts on them that are sometimes connected to railway disasters but sometimes to other mishaps and tragedies and so forth. And then there's this third area, and this is empty trains witnessed moving down the tracks. And this is the category that is going to include both.
Just straight up, here's a train. It doesn't look like it has people on it, but it is a physical train. And also here's a train that is you know, there's nothing suspect about it's about who's piloting it. We know it's either we can see the human or we know that this is an automated rails system, whatever the case. But why is there a train with no people on it. Why is it stopping and letting no one out and then continuing on its way.
You know, it's funny how this connects to the idea of the ghost ship which you were talking about, could be inspired by sightings of real ships that were saying people have abandoned them. And you see a ship drifting in the waves with nobody on it. That's a very chilling site. But that would be a real thing people would observe in various situations. Obviously, a train is a little bit different, because a train isn't going to be
completely abandoned and drifting on the waves. It needs to be moving for some reason, like somebody's got to push a button to make it go. But it may in fact be empty of passengers, and just like seeing through the windows and seeing it empty can be a creepy site.
Yeah, absolutely, you know, thinking about the trains that go by directly by my house. There's the Marta Train, the public transportation train system here in Atlanta, and sometimes there are empty train cars that are going by because you know that one's done for the night. And then there's the CSX line, and this is freight, not passengers, though at least on one occurrence. I did see some empty
passenger trains on the tracks. I think they were being I assume they were being moved somewhere, you know, either I don't even remember how nice they looked. Maybe they were brand new being moved somewhere to go into service, or they were being retired or scrapped or something. But you know, there is something potentially creepy about seeing this space that is made for people, devoid of people, but still in motion, as if it's going somewhere but without people.
A lot of horror movies used to great effect the empty subway train, you know, the subway arrives in the station, the doors open, there's nobody inside, nobody on the train. It is a creepy feeling.
Now. I was reading a bit more about this idea of ghost trains, and there is this unofficial classification for a ghost train, at least in Britain, that has nothing to do with hauntings. And these are trains, according to Amanda Ruggeri and Why Britain Has Secret Ghost Trains twenty fifteen BBC. These are low frequency routes that often entail mostly empty, if not entirely empty cars, and this is a reality that the author describes as being due to a quote bureaucratic hangover.
Okay, so these are trains that are operating normally. They're just like they haven't adjusted to the fact that there is little or no demand for travel along the route where they're going.
That's correct. She goes on to write, there is no single definition of what constitutes a ghost train, although the general consensus is that it's when a service is so infrequent the train becomes effectively useless, slippery or not. Though the term ghost train seems apt, it implies a service that is not exactly whole, something that whispers through towns and countryside, leaving barely a dent in its wake. And it's really interesting to read about these because a lot
of people don't, you know, aren't even aware that these exist. Perhaps, But there are hobbyists, ghost train hunters, they call themselves, who seek these out. They try and find these lines or these particular trains, and sometimes they run at strange hours, and you know, they're stopping. It stops their way out out in the middle of nowhere and so forth. But they kind of like pride themselves on hunting them down and getting their pictures made on them. Or with them.
But as the article explains, these trains are often legal placeholders to keep a line from being closed. Absolutely the sort of lines that are mostly useless currently, but it would be controversial to close them. It would be perhaps bureaucratically expensive or require a lot of effort to close them. And another big fact is, of course, you know, populations
don't stay the same. You know, what may be a ghost station and a ghost train line today could be vitally important, say five years from now, ten years from now, as population shift and new communities develop and so forth. The more official name for these are parliamentary trains, since in the past and at any rate, it took an act of Parliament to shut down a line, so against speaking to the amount of effort that it would go you'd have to go to to actually close one of these.
There of course corresponding parliamentary ghost train stations. Again, these are also sought out by hobbyists, and these trains and these groups are still very much around, so I would love to hear from any ghost train hunters out there. I also have to note that, especially with subway systems, there are various examples of ghost stations that are no longer in use, often for logistical reasons or expansion reasons, such as the famous City Hall station in New York City,
noted for its Romanesque Revival architecture. Sometimes stations such as this are used on tours, or they're repurposed. And yeah, there's something captivating about the idea of such places, stops that are on the line but no longer stops, human spaces that have literally been carved out of the interior of the earth, but are just no longer used by
human beings. And you know, after I was putting together my notes on this section, I was walking back to my house from a place that I was working remotely, and as luck would have it, I was walking right past a ghost tunnel of the Marta rail system here in Atalanta. There's about two hundred feet of tunnel, originally built for a Tucker North to cabline expansion that was never completed, now just a yawning urban cave amidst other track structures. And I really don't think i'd noticed this
until yesterday. I looked up and there's a YouTube page called V twelve Productions that does a lot of stuff on trains and also some stuff on like urban and Atlanta architecture and so forth. They did a nice video on it about six years ago. So now I know all about this kind of haunting cave, this unnatural human made cave in the earth, just you know, a stone's throw from where I live.
Did you take this photo in our outline here?
I did not. I felt a lot of people have sought this out. I think some people were doing a little sneaking around to get in there and get closer, because there's it's not just the tunnel, there's also a length it's like, what do you call it? A trench that was constructed too. Like Basically, the situation was they were building out the Marta bridgework overhead, and if they were going to do this line, they would need to
make the tunnel now rather than later. It would be just so much cheaper to go ahead and build the tunnel early than to do it later once everything else was built up around it.
The steep cutting in the earth reminding me of that haunting descriptive passage from the signalman. Right, you know, there's just the strip of sky and seeing the stone on either side the damp walls. But it's one of these visions that's both gloomy and beautiful at the same time.
Yeah, now getting into some more examples of like straight up ghost trains, actual spectral trains, haunted trains, trains associated with ghosts or supernatural creatures. We're gonna turn briefly here once more to Japan. I want to add the caveat
that again. There's so many ghost train traditions around the world, and some of them are rather popular, but we ultimately had to focus on ones that maybe had just a little more in some cases, a little more scholarship around them, or just a few more just interesting things to point out, because some of them are just like, hey, there's a
ghost train, Yeah, rides around. We're not sure it's going where it's coming from maybe Hell, we don't know, And you know, those are fun and that maybe there's less meat to chew on.
There for us.
But anyway, there are a few different traditions in Japan, one of which concerns the legendary Tanukis of Japan. We've discussed these before. You have. These are the okai versions of the actual Japanese raccoon dog, which, to be clear, are far more closely related to dogs. They are part of the kind of day family, so they are there essentially dog can. They are not raccoon can, except in a very distant since.
They look like raccoons though they've got that kind of head shape and coloration.
Now, if you've ever watched the excellent nineteen ninety four Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko, then you know all about these guys, and if you haven't, you should go watch it. It's I believe it's on Max in the States, and it's excellent, taking viewers into the world of shape shifting by way of their testicles. Bake danuki. These are yokai tanuki, supernatural tanuki and their struggles alongside a changing, modernizing world. And this last bit is a common theme in tanuki lore,
especially during the Meiji era. The tanuki are a symbol of the folkloric wilds of rural life. The traditional tanuki statue also entails multiple symbols for good luck, and you'll find them in both rural and urban Japanese neighborhoods today, in front of homes and so forth, in pandemonium and parade. Japanese monsters and the culture of yokai. Michael Dilan Foster describes ways in which the tanuki and the locomotive stand
in stark opposition to each other. So you know, a reminder here the first Japanese rail line opened in eighteen seventy two and remains an impressive and highly connected form of public transportation there.
Yeah, but I call reading. And by the way, Michael Dylan Foster is a folklorist I've cited on the show before. His book of Yokai is great, but I think I've seen him write that there was some on record, some ambivalence about the edition of the railroad to Japanese life.
Yeah, yeah, and that seems to be reflected in these tales of the tanuki. They're sort of two main legends slash accounts to take into account here concerning the tanuki and the train, and they both occur where these two worlds meet, you know, the world of the folklore, magical
wild and this rapidly modernizing world. So you imagine a lonely train track running through the wilderness in Japan, and if you're aboard one of these trains, or maybe you're working on the rail, or maybe you're at some sort of like very rural train station, and suddenly you hear the sounds or you see the lights of an oncoming train, Well that's a cause for alarm for all the reasons we've cited so far. So if you're if you're if you're on a boarded train, perhaps you slow or stop.
If you're working, well, then you know, you freak out. You try and get in touch with with with the folks and let them know that there's some sort of unexpected train on the track. But then, as is the case with ghost trains, sometimes it never shows up. It becomes clear that this was a false alarm. There was no train, and in this case, via the supernatural Yokai explanation, this was clearly the work of the Tanuki's mimicking the sights and sounds of a train to mess with these humans.
A little trickster is okay. So this, I think is a is a slightly more humorous take on the ghost train, Like there's a bit of a spirit of pranksteriness about it.
Yeah, yeah, where it's like, oh Tanuki's they they got us again. But then there's a flip side to it and uh, and this is where one sees the side of a dead Tanuki, perhaps cut in half by train by a roaring train by the side of the tracks, and Foster describes it as follows. The confrontation between tanuki and steam train, a common trope during this period, gestures
dramatically to the changing meanings of yokai. The old forms of magic, the shape shifting talents of the tanuki still had the power to dazzle and deceive, causing the train engineers to proceed with caution through the lonely countryside. But the instant they stop believing and plowed full speed ahead, the iron mechanism of technology could make the magic powerless, transforming a supernatural creature into nothing more than an animal body lying dead beside the tracks of progress.
Oh, that's quite poignant.
And if you are a fan of Pompoco, which again is an excellent film, there's a sequence towards the end of this movie which has quite a serious ecological message and gets into this, you know, some of these topics we're discussing here, in which some of the tanuki are run over by automobiles and trucks, and the impact of this scene, at least in my understanding, it seems to mirror the traditions here, the idea that you know, they lose their power when they are when they go head
on head with like the violent nature of progress.
Yeah, that the magic is gone once it once their presence fails to convince anyone to slow the giant machine down.
Now there are other supernatural beings associated with trains. I mean, I guess there are other yokai and yuri that may be. It may turn up on a train in some tellings, but there I read did run across one. There's a particular urban legend of a yuri of ghost by the name of I think Tiki Tiki. I'm not sure if
I'm saying this correctly. I think it is. The idea here is this is supposed to sound like the sound that a half of a woman makes when she crawls across the ground, because the ghost is that of someone who was cut in half by a train whoa One version of this tale recounted on the MPR podcast Code Switch, or more specifically, I Think an article referring to one
of their episodes that I came across. I do listen to Code Switch, but I don't think I've heard this particular episode The Creepiest ghost and monster stories from around the World. They mentioned that This particular ghost is sometimes named Kashima Raiko, and sometimes she inhabits a bathroom stall and asks children who venture into the bathroom to fetch her legs from a neighboring stall. And there are other versions of this too, where she just like basically, you know,
she's going to cut you in half. That's what she's going to do if you run a foul of her. But interesting too that it ends up connecting to bathrooms because there are a lot of you okai and you that seem to be associated with the fear of young people venturing into perhaps dank or quiet bathroom areas.
Oh man, have we ever done a Halloween episode on scary bathrooms? I feel like that should be a series.
Oh yeah, that would be a good one. There are a number of yokai that line up with that.
Wait, do we have everything planned for this month? Maybe we should sub that in. That's a pinch hit.
Oh, we'll see. We'll have to look at the calendar.
Okay.
Now.
There's also a railway tunnel said to be haunted Joman Tunnel, and Hokkaido said to be haunted by laborers who died in its early twentieth century construction laborers who were then either buried on site or walled up in the tunnel or side shafts. And for this reason it's also it also has another name, and that is hito bashira tunnel, a term referring to an ancient Japanese form of foundation burial, premature burial, and human sacrifice that traces back to ancient
Chinese practices. The concept here is that such a sacrifice is necessary to appease the gods on large scale construction projects, to prevent them from failing or you know, falling to
the elements, natural disease, and so forth later on. According to Andrea d Antoni down in a Whole twenty nineteen Japan Review, archaeological evidence suggests that the practice was used maybe as late as the sixteenth century in Japan now standard Caveat anytime we bring up particular historical cultural examples of human sacrifice, we have to drive home that you can find examples of human sacrifice in all ancient cultures, and there are many examples of foundation burial, human or
otherwise you can find in different cultures around the world. But in Japanese usage, the term hitdobashira, meaning human pillar itself can also refer to laborers who end up buried or dying in one of these construction projects just due to bad working conditions, and this seems to be the case with Joe Muntunnel. And this leads to various ghost stories that invoke actual ritual premature burial. So to read more on this, so turned to one of the books
that Euroko, Yoda and Matt Alt wrote. I reference to these a lot. They wrote one on Ninja's, they wrote one on Yokai, and they wrote one on Yuri. Well. In the Yuri book Uri Attack, they point out that officials initially dismissed these accounts. For years, the Joman Tunnel was haunted or had humans buried in the walls until
around nineteen seventy. That's when there were repairs underway following a nineteen sixty eight earthquake that it damaged the tunnel, and skeletons were discovered in the walls of the tunnel, apparently in a standing position, and dozens more were buried
outside of the tunnel. Some accounts say hundreds of Some seemed to point towards a far lesser but still disturbing amount of skeletons Now, I don't think any serious historians suggest that early twentieth century construction of this tunnel made use of ritual human sacrifice, but rather that the skeletal remains, as well as some physical evidence and accounts involving the construction of the tunnel point out that it was a difficult tunnel project with many accidents and that the working
conditions were dangerous. And Andrea D'Antoni, in the paper I cited previously, also discusses the probability that these were forced laborers as well, So not a ghost train, but a ghost train tunnel.
Is there any known like modern folklore about this, Like, do people believe there are hauntings related to this tunnel?
Yeah? I think the idea is in these have persisted for a while that if you trip, you're traveling through that tunnel, you might hear strange sounds, maybe see strange sites, but it certainly sounds, So there is a tradition of it being haunted, and as that paper that I cited points out, it's also become sort of a focal point for what the author calls dark tourism, where people actually
seek it out. And we have plenty of examples of this obviously in other places around the world, haunted castles, haunted cabins, haunted location that have some sort of dark history, and they become a target for dark tourism.
I'm a sucker for a ghost tour, even a cheesy one.
Yeah. I am glad you mentioned that, because that is one of the problems about research and ghost trains is that you have actual traditions of ghost trains, and then you have plenty of trains, either actual or maybe almost trains that do like ghost Halloween related events in rock. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it kind of messes with your search results sometimes.
Oh I bet a train could make a really good haunted house, though, you know, because it's already like lineary moving through it. I don't know. Then again, is the is the terrain of the inside of a train varied enough?
Yeah? I think serious professional haunt designers would probably argue that you just don't have enough room to move people around and have the various distractions and frights. But you know, it's like a simple haunted house and as a one off gimmick, I'd be down for it. Haunted subway train, that's great, let's do it.
Okay, so we've talked about shape shifting tanuki's pretending to be trains. We've talked about haunted train tunnels, but what about just like a full on spectral train, a train that is like a wandering ghost in itself in that people seem to see or hear it passing by them along the tracks, and it turns out there's no physical train there.
Well, all aboard for Lincoln's funeral train, the spectral version, because there was an actual Lincoln funeral train, because in eighteen sixty five, after the assassination of the US President, funeral services were held, his body laid in state, and then a funeral train transported his body at low speeds through seven states to be buried in Springfield, Illinois. A pilot train went ahead of the nine car funeral train
to make sure the tracks were clear. And you know, the people you know heard this go by or gathered to WI should go by. Included a map for you here, Joe, showing all the different cities it hit on the way.
Right, so it was not a direct route. It went up from Washington, d C. Through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and then background upstate New York to through like Albany and Buffalo and then down through Ohio, Indiana and finally Illinois.
Yeah, they could. You could really do like a band tour t shirt for this. I would be tempted to create one if we were more of like a US history podcast and not Science and Culture. Now, the ghost train story here allegedly dates back to the thirties and forties, and it involves a spectral version of this train continuing to make this journey once a year in April, and stopping clocks and watches on the way. And I think a lot of these are also these sightings where are
located in New York. And in fact, one of the main sources on this that everyone points to this a nineteen forty five article in New York History by folklorist Louis C. Jonas Session titled some Historic Ghosts of New York.
Okay, let's hear it.
The author writes, the first train is followed by a second, this time with a single flat car draped as is the one before it, but on this car is a lonely coffin, nothing more neither ghost nor skeleton. As the train approaches, a black carpet seems to unroll along the track before it, and all sound, even the passing of Frates is blanketed. Men know which day in spring the ghost train has passed through. For all clocks stop and wait five to eight minutes before they begin again.
Now, this seems to me to be, at least as far as I know, a really unusual kind of ghost story, because ghost stories are typically very local. You know, it's like, here's the local phenomenon. The locals claim to have seen it, or maybe people who come to visit, but it's tied to a specific location. This is going cross country, it's going all over the place, going through New York and saying stopping clocks as it goes along.
Well, I mean, that's the story. But then I guess we have to keep in mind that the story itself could be very local. That's true, and you know, it could be isolated to just parts of New York State, but then gets passed on as if this is happening everywhere.
Yeah, because the actual trains route was so long, it gives the impression that it's all along the tracks, but it could be. Yeah, like you're saying, just a local story.
Now, this particular ghost story, it's interesting in a number of ways. On one hand, it does seem to kind of line up with ancient folkloric traditions of the procession of the dead, in which souls proceed along a road or path bound for the underworld. And of course this matches up nicely with some of the ideas we discussed about,
like why the train is captivating. You know, the idea of it is fate at his point A to point B, there's no getting off, and in this case the train is bound for the underworld or the afterlife, or the great beyond in one form or the other.
Also tying into the uniqueness of tunnels passing into that literally under the earth.
Yeah, yeah, you can. You can also line this up with traditions of the wild hunt, and you know, in another other traditions of the procession of the dead, which sometimes are more malicious, you know, it's the dam going into hell, and other times it's more solemn. You know. It's hard to say exactly how we're supposed to feel
about Lincoln's ghost train. The author here in the nineteen forty five paper is is light on interpretation, but I get the impression that it's meant to be somber, kind of a folkloric expression of communal shock and grief, aligned perhaps to sightings of unidentified trains or strange sites and sounds by the tracks and so forth.
That's interesting. I'm a little curious. I don't know if you know what to make of this, but I'm curious why the description from Jonah Session mentions that the train is moving along and it only has the coffin, and it says no skeleton. Would people be expecting to see the skeleton?
I guess they wanted. I guess the author's trying to drive home the idea that it's that it's tasteful.
I don't know, you know, it almost seems like it's like a very respectful ghost story, you know, in keeping with presidential decorum. It's like, no gory details, no signs of decay. You're just seeing the coffin. It's just a box.
Yeah, there's no like ghost Lincoln's gonna get you. Yeah. It does seem to be more of this, this expression of communal shock and grief. Yeah. Now, As an aside, though, it is worth noting that Lincoln's personal ghost, not just his train, has long been said to haunt the White House, as well as various former residences of Araham Lincoln, and offices that the sixteenth US president held or occupied for
some amount of time. This of course, raises all sorts of questions about how many places the ghost of a single person can manifest in. But I would if we were to believe all these accounts, it would seem like a lot.
It's got to go both ways, right, Like how many different places can one ghost be in? And also how many different ghosts can be in one house. I would guess the White House probably has a lot.
They do. Now, we know from our media consumption that the maximum number of ghosts in a given location is thirteen. So I haven't done a full count, So Joe, you're gonna have to count them as I proceed here.
Okay, I'll be your Matthew Lillard.
According to the White House Historical Society, the White House
ghosts include the following. In addition to Abraham Lincoln, so let's go ahead and count him as one, we also have Willie Lincoln, his son who actually died in the White House in eighteen sixty two of typhoid fever, Mary Lincoln, as well Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Dolly Madison, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, first president to die in the White House, Abigail Adams, former landowner of the essentially the property there,
David Burns, Anna Surrett, mother of Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Sewrett, also an unnamed British soldier Jeremiah Smith, and then finally the ghost of a fifteen year old boy known only as the Thing according to reports around nineteen eleven.
Wow, I would not have guessed that many. And also like, didn't most of these people not actually die in the White House?
Yeah, most of them didn't. So yeah, raises questions like do you have to die somewhere to haunt that place or you can just have important associations with that place? Hard to say, But did we hit thirteen?
No? I failed in my mission. I forgot to count. There's got to be okay, I'll estimate. Yes.
Nixon's ghost, by the way, was not listed, though Nixon's ghost, of course, has appeared on The Simpsons. Yes, so I was not familiar with Lincoln's ghost trained before. I don't know if this, don't know to what extent this is still an active bit of a folklore. If this is active ghost story, an active ghost story at all. I don't know when the most recent alleged sighting of Lincoln's ghost train occurred. So this is definitely a case where I'd love to hear from anyone out there. Were you
aware with the tradition of Lincoln's ghost train? Were you aware of it like organically like and have you ever seen it? I definitely want to hear from anyone who has seen Lincoln's ghost train as it proceeds spectrally stopping clocks, you know, along the train line or anywhere. I mean, that's that's another question, like does it have to if this is a ghost train, does it have to adhere to the previous itinerary? Or can it just pop up anywhere?
Can it pop up in the New York Subway? I don't know.
Yeah, if ghosts of human bodies can walk through walls, which regular human bodies cannot do, can ghost trains leave the tracks which regular trains cannot do?
Maybe? So? I mean the Polar Express pulls out in front of the Boy's house, right, So yeah, it shows that anything is possible.
All right. Next, I wanted to talk about some connections between railroad lore and so called ghost lights. There are a number of connections of this kind in stories from all throughout the United States, and I believe some other countries as well. But there really are a lot of these that I'm aware of in US traditions. You can find them in you know, little local legends from places
all around the country. And in reading about them, I came to notice that in a lot of these stories, the so called ghost light is not actually said to come from a train itself. In a few cases it is, but in a lot of cases there's another source. So here's one example I wanted to talk about. That is the Mayco ghost Light. So there's a famous railway ghost light associated with a small community in southeastern North Carolina called Maco, which is just outside of the city of Wilmington.
And to establish the alleged origin of this story, I want to turn into a book by a scholar named Richard Wallzer. This was This book is called North Carolina Legends, published by the North Carolina Division of Archives in history in the year nineteen eighty. And here's what Wallser says. At a small Brunswick County station of Maco, fifteen miles west of Wilmington, a slow freight train was puffing down the track. In the caboose was Joe Baldwin, a flagman.
A jerking noise startled him, and he was aware that his caboose had become uncoupled from the rest of the train, which went heedlessly on its way. As the caboose slackened speed, Joe looked up and saw the beaming light of a fast passenger train bearing down upon him. Grabbing his lantern, he waved it frantically to warn the oncoming engineer of the imminent danger. It was too late. At a trestle over the swamp, the passenger train plowed into the caboose.
Joe was decapitated. His head flew into the swamp on one side of the track, his lantern on the other. It was days before the destruction caused by the wreck was cleared away, and when Joe's head could not be found, his body was buried without it. But the story does not end there because Wallser says that thereafter, I say, on misty nights, people would see a light in the darkness that was attributed to the ghost of Joe Baldwin, the headless ghost wandering around in the swamp or along
the train tracks looking for his head. Now, some versions of the story say that there's like a single light that swings back and forth like lantern, moving through the country, and as it gets closer and closer to the observer, it gets brighter and brighter until it kind of like flares up and turns into this big brilliance and then
just poofs disappears. There are other versions of the story that say that you might see like two lights maybe going toward one another, as if you know, one is the light from the caboo swinging to worn and then the other is the light of the approaching train, and then eventually they cross because I guess they're both ghosts in this case, so railroad ghost lore and a ghost light. But in most cases the ghost light is not thought to be the train itself. Rather it's the lantern of
this man who was killed in a terrible train accident. Now, a claim famously repeated all over in many sources is that here we come back to US presidential history. That US President Grover Cleveland, who was famously present the only president to have two non consecutive terms. So he was president from eighteen eighty five to eighteen eighty nine, and then again from eighteen ninety three eight to ninety seven that Cleveland personally witnessed the Maco Ghost Light, and I
thought that was kind of interesting. He allegedly enjoyed the story and talked about the Makeo Ghost Light in some of his speeches. But I was reading some follow up about this in an article for the Wilmington Star News by Ben Steelman. The article was titled did Grover Cleveland ever see the Maco Light? And despite the number of sources that spread this claim, especially in more recent decades,
investigation of older sources reveals actually something quite different. So Steelman mentions a feature in the Sunday Star News from March twenty eighth, nineteen forty eight, which says that, according to records, Cleveland was traveling on the Wilmington, Manchester and Augusta Railroad sometimes I think this was sometime between his two non consecutive presidential terms when the train stopped somewhere to refill its water reserves, and according to this article,
Cleveland got out of the train during the stop to take a walk, during which he noticed the conductor was waving two different lights, one green and one white, and so he asked the question, why are you waving two
lanterns instead of one. And someone explained to the president the story of Joe Baldwin and said that because Baldwin was, you know, always out here looking for his head with one light, railway workers had to use two lights on this stretch, two different colored lights to signal other trains. So if you're a train, you know, passing through this stretch of tracks, you see two different colored lights ahead, Okay, that's an actual signal to the approaching trains that we
need to stop. There's an obstruction on the tracks. But if you just see one light, that's just a ghost. Ignore, plow on ahead. Seems almost to have some similarities to the Tanuki magic thing. It's like, you know, oh, one light, yeah, don't worry about it, just a ghost to go on.
Yeah. And then also an example of like some of the haunt loses its power in the face of like modernity and logic, where it's like, oh, yeah, there's a ghost light out there yet, but it's not. It's not the appropriate color, it's not the right code, so it's no big deal. Just ignore it.
But I have doubts about this. I don't know, maybe somebody with North Carolina railroad knowledge could set me straight. But I just kind of doubt that if an engine driver saw one light, they'd be like, ah, it's fine, just keep going. Anyway, there's this difference in where the
Grover Cleveland story lands. Older sources do not say that Cleveland actually saw the light, just that somebody told him the story, And apparently this got garbled in subsequent published retellings beginning in the nineteen forties, and then ended up with the legend that a former president had seen the
ghost himself. However, here things get kind of interesting. Steelman also explains the work of a local historian named James Burke, not that James Burke a different one who had written books on the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, so sort of local railroad historian. And this guy looked into the origins of the Joe Baldwin Railroad decapitation story and could not find any evidence that the original story ever took place either.
In fact, he couldn't find any evidence of a person named Joe or Joseph Baldwin living around Wilmington at that time. Now there is something that may have gotten distorted here. The Star News article says, quote Burke did find accounts, however, of an accident on the Wilmington, Manchester and Augusta in January eighteen fifty six along a curvy stretch outside Wilmington known as the Rabbit Snake Grade near Hoods Creek, in
which a conductor named Charles Baldwin was fatally injured. Burke thinks the details of this incident were garbled in the oral tradition of the story. However, even this, so, this accident could not have taken place at anything called the Mako Station because Maco didn't exist in eighteen fifty six, so at the time the station had a different name. So we've got several different transformations of the original story on our hands. Who was injured, how when and where,
and who allegedly witnessed the ghost. All of these got changed in the retelling, which makes me think back to our episodes on the Telephone Game, you know, the empirical research about how details of stories get changed in retellings. The kind of just unavoidable process of the transformation of a story, including all of these types of key details
as it gets repeated and repeated. Yeah, finally, the Wilmington Star News article says, quote the light was unseen after nineteen seventy seven when the CSX line pulled up the railroad tracks in the Maco vicinity. More recently, paranormal investigations claim to have caught evidence of the Makeo light on camera and I looked it up and yeah, it does seem recently people have been like looking for it out there, trying to get it.
So, just to be clear, does the Maco light or the Maco lights do they have the presidential seal of approval here? Do we really know one way or another?
I think we do not know. Okay, the administration has been ambiguous on this, but note that you know this is part of a broader phenomenon of ghost lights, which don't always necessarily connect to trains. A lot of times they're just disconnected. People in a certain vantage point claim to see, or in some cases definitely do see lights that don't have of very easy to explain origin. We've
talked about this on the show before. We've gotten into some of the main scientific or skeptical explanations where these mysterious lights come from. There are a number of different possibilities, but very often they're just like reflected lights from normal sources that are being seen from farther away than you would imagine. They could be seen a lot of times, they're like headlights from a highway. So, for example, there is another train associated ghost light in northern Michigan known
as the Paulding Light. This is in the Upper Peninsula, and I was reading about this. Apparently there was some investigation into this light, and finally it turned out that it's car headlights. It's car headlights just appearing in a place where you wouldn't expect to see them.
Yeah, growing up, there was some sort of ghost story about a local train track light, and I never saw it. I never sought it out. But I think you encounter things like this in a lot of places. And there's again some likely spillover between these stories and stories of will of the Wisps and other strange lights in the night.
We've always had these stories. A lot of it comes down to a mix of actual phenomena and just our desire to dive into different stories and supernatural explanations of what we've seen.
All right, Rob, if you don't mind, I want to cap our discussion today with a little interesting little invention. Note I came across semantically related to ghost trends. So back in twenty seventeen, there were some press releases about a new invention in development by an employee of Fermi Lab, and the invention was called the ghost train generator. Now, for those not familiar, Fermi Lab is formally called the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. It is a particle physics lab high energy particle physics that's housed in Batavia, Illinois, which operates under the US Department of Energy. One of my main sources here is a Fermi Lab press release by Daniel Garristo. So, what on earth would be the purpose
of something called a ghost train generator? Well, this takes us back to the territory of railway obstructions and collisions, specifically, what happens when a wheeled vehicle like a car or truck, gets stuck while crossing railroad tracks and then is hit by a train. At the time of this Fermi Lab press release, about seven years ago, the Federal Railroad Administration stats revealed that this was happening hundreds of times a year,
which was shocking to me. I had no idea that it was this common to have a collision between a train and a wheeled vehicle. I went to check on updated numbers and found that, at least according to preliminary statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration, in twenty twenty three, there were two one hundred and ninety two vehicle train collisions at railroad crossings in the United States, and that there were two hundred and forty seven fatalities and seven
hundred and sixty six injuries. I found these stats reported by the way on the website of a rail safety organization called Operation Life Saver. So I don't know. To me, that is just like way more vehicles and people getting hit by trains at highway crossings than I would have guessed. And despite what you might assume based on those numbers, this is not a problem that has recently gotten worse. The number of crossing accidents used to be astronomically higher
decades ago. According to that same safety org there were something like twelve thousand of these incidents in nineteen seventy two, and that's at a time when the US population was only like two thirds of what it is now. So now we're down to like twenty two hundred a year now, so it's much better than it used to be. But still at least that's just way more common than I would have guessed.
Yeah, yeah, this always reminds me. There's a great Mystery Science Theater three thousand short riffing on a nineteen fifty nine educational short film from Union Specific Railroad titled Last Clear Chance about the dangers of railway crossings, and it's a fun riff. Off the top of my head, I can't remember which movie this is attached to, if it has the line and why don't they look? And I've
seen this short so many times over the years. But it's also like, it's a really serious message, and I feel like, even though there are lots of laughs watching the riff version of it, the message still kind of drives home for you and you realize, no, yeah, trains are dangerous and that they're holy, blameless creatures as well
as they riff on it in the short. You know, it's like, trains are dangerous, can be dangerous, especially if you're not being careful around them and you're not listening, you're not obeying like basic train related safety tips.
Yeah, you know, it's not the train's fault that these collisions happen. The train cannot stop quickly it is not able to you know, it might take it a mile to stop. So yeah, you know those those safety the bars come down and the lights go up. For a reason, it is not worth it trying to get across the tracks, as you know, before the train comes, you can wait a few minutes.
Yeah, especially if you're dealing with a train that's moving at a considerable speed. I think sometimes it's easy to take this for granted if you're more familiar with trains passing through urban settings, like you're in Atlanta, where by the time the train is coming through town, it's usually not going it may or at least it doesn't seem
to be going that fast. Now you can also get into a serious discussion about how fast that train is really going if it needs to stop suddenly because your car is on the tracks when it shouldn't.
Be exactly, And of course it's quite clear that it is dangerous for the vehicle in the train's path, but in some cases it's not that common. But in some cases it can even derail a train, so it's a bad thing. Yeah, but I used to have this question. This is sort of a tangent, but this reading about this answered this question for me. I used to have this question, how does it happen at all that trucks
or buses get stuck on the railroad tracks? Because I would see I would read about this, and I would think, just like, what are the odds that your vehicle breaks down or stalls out right there? Like how often could that actually happen? But apparently there is at least one reason, especially large vehicles get stuck on railroad tracks. And I was thinking about it wrong. It's not usually that they happen to like break down because of an engine malfunction
right there. Rather, it's that they bottom out. Railroad tracks tend to be elevated for drainage reasons. You can imagine the problem if you know, water were covering the rails, so they tend to be raised up a little bit so water drains away. And at intersections with highways, the tracks often form a hump in the road. When a vehicle with low ground clearance, like say a bus or certain types of truck and trailer combinations, goes over the hump, they can get hung up on the hump.
That makes sense. I had not thought about this before, but yeah, and.
So obviously that's a big problem. Anyway, this brings us back to the ghost train generator. So there is a proposed solution to this problem. That was the idea of a FERMI lab specialist named Derek Plant. Plant came up with the idea of a device that could take advantage of the railroad's automated signaling system by faking the presence of another train on the tracks, Hence the ghost train generator,
and the way it works is this so. Modern railroads are broken up into segments called signal blocks that have stretches of tracks that are at least a mile long, sometimes several miles, in which an electrical signaling system is
hooked up to each of the two separate rails. And so when a train is present on the tracks within a signal block, the trains wheels and axles create a connection between the two rails, They complete the electrical circuit, and the signal block activates lights all down the line that indicate to oncoming trains there is a train on the block up ahead, maybe something is stalled out or behind schedule, and this gives the approaching train time to
slow down and stop. The ghost train generator would be a small portable device that could be stored inside any truck or bus along with other emergency equipment, you know, like a fire extinguisher or jumper cables or whatever. And the device would be made from two magnets with a special conducting wire, so it would be equipment essentially to connect to the two rails. So if your vehicle gets stuck on the tracks, you would quickly get out and attach one magnet to one rail, the other magnet to
the other rail, and the circuit is complete. So the signaling block thinks a phantom train is obstructing the line. This sends a signal up the path to any approaching train, so it has plenty of time to stop so that you can get your car out of the way. So the last I've seen of this is talk about a conference presentation and patent application from several years back now, so I don't know if this ever went into production anywhere. Maybe there was something that's not actually viable about it.
I don't know, or maybe they are out there. I don't know exactly where this idea went, but assuming it works, I think it's a really cool idea. I love the idea of summoning spectral trains to prevent destruction and potentially save lives.
Maybe there was a religious objection to it just based on the title. It's like, we don't need more ghost trains, pass funded ghost trains on our rail systems, no, sir.
You know, I think about how many horror stories there are where there's a ghost that at first is scary, but then the twist at the end. This is really common, I think, is that the ghost is actually trying to be helpful and warning or trying to help the protagonist against a really threatening human villain. And so I wonder could we get a story where there's a ghost train of that kind, Like it's scary at first, but the train is really just trying to help.
Yeah, I'd be down for that.
I don't know what information it would provide. It goes by somebody's yelling at you, like, don't go in.
There, man. But seriously, I would love to hear from everyone out there if you have some great ghost train stories you want to share with us, be it something that's just completely fanciful or something that seems to connect with reality on some level or another. There was one that we were looking into a little bit, the Silver
Train of Stockholm, that we didn't get into here. But I did find it interesting that one possible explanation for this one was that, well, there was like maybe like one silver colored train car that was being used that was like a prototype or something, and just stories began to generate about it because it stood out and it looked different, And yeah, I kind of I kind of
like that. You know, as a as someone who you know, used to ride the train a lot to work and back, you were always on the on the lookout for different trains, and I would actually have recurring dreams about catching a different train that had like a different design to it. So there is something kind of attractive about that. You look for for something you know that stands out, and then I don't know, the mind or supernatural tendencies create the rest around it.
Well, do we think does that do it for Trains of Terror?
I believe it does. We're gonna go ahead and cap it here, but yes, right in, we'd love to hear from you, And if you were a fan of our Weird House Cinema episodes, tune in tomorrow because we'll be talking about the nineteen seventy two train based horror film Horror Express. That one should be a lot of fun as well.
That movie has some twists. It's got some good ones.
Yes, and some science. We'll have some things to say about the science of horror.
Express extremely sound.
Yeah, all right, just reminded. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, weird house cinemas on Fridays. That's when we set aside most serious concerns, would just talk about a weird film. Not all of our episodes are normally horror themed, but it is October, so we are leaning into the season.
That's right. Huge, Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.