Echoes on the Rails, Part 2
Foaming for Phantoms! Our exclusive interview with Tim Prasil, an authority on spook trains and haunted railways
Catch up on Part 1 of our look into the phantom train phenomenon, and then check out our interview below with author and researcher extraordinaire, Tim Prasil!
THE OBSERVER: Thank you for sharing your phantom train expertise with us, Professor Prasil. What made you want to punch your ticket for this niche area of research?
Tim Prasil: I was an English professor for many years, teaching in Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. As I moved toward retirement, I started my own indy press. I knew anthologies of ghost stories would be my specialty, since I’ve been interested in such things since I was a kid. This merged with my love of trains and led to a book made up of phantom trains—and railroad hauntings more generally—that combined fictional stories, folklore, and non-fiction articles, since I see them as “feeding” one another. The resulting anthology, After the End of the Line: Railroad Hauntings in Literature and Lore, has a large section dedicated to phantom trains.
TO: The book is an outstanding resource. We like how you pulled examples from a variety of cultural sources to provide a rounded view of the phenomenon. It seems like you’ve spent a lot of time in the classroom. After years of higher education and a career in academia, surely you’ve solved the mystery behind phantom trains by now. What are they?
TP: I approach phantom trains from the perspective of a folklorist, which—thank heavens!—saves me from having to make decisions about whether or not they’re real, fake, psychological, etc. I’m focused on the stories themselves and why people share them so persistently.
TO: In the introduction to your book you identify phantom trains as a “modernization of earlier supernatural modes of transportation” and tie them to the tradition of spectral ships and carriages. What sets phantom trains apart from other types of apparitional phenomena?
TP: Usually, there’s a pretty big divide between ghost stories found in fiction and reports given by people who say they’ve actually experienced them. But when I investigated fictional, folkloric, and allegedly true railway hauntings, I found a surprising amount of overlap. No doubt, the fiction and folklore were often inspired by actual reports. However, I suspect the fiction and folklore then shapes what people think they actually perceive. It would be terribly strange to witness a phantom train—or what passes for a phantom train—and we naturally call upon something familiar to help us grasp something so utterly bizarre. In other words, stories that we know are make-believe help us to comprehend things we don’t otherwise understand. This interplay is a bit more recognizable in phantom train reports/lore/literature than in similar spooky stuff.
TO: Is there a connection between phantom train sightings and geography? Do they concentrate in certain areas or appear under specific conditions?
TP: Railroad hauntings are often said to be located in “liminal” spaces—a handy term for in-between or on-the-edge—and a surprising number of ghosts are reported in those spots. Think of basements, attics, hallways, stairwells, and the like. Often phantom trains appear on a curve in the track or passing over a bridge. These are liminal spaces in that they’re passageways from “here to there.”
One of the most interesting cases I’ve looked into starts with a train wreck that occurred in March of 1899 near Rittman, Ohio. A few months later, witnesses were reported to have heard the sounds of a train wreck, But when they rushed to the bridge to investigate, there was nothing at all there! Presumably, it was just an “echo” of the earlier wreck, right? But photos of the wreck show that the wreck didn’t occur at the bridge. The train threw a rod on a pretty ordinary stretch of track. Those witnesses, however, “transferred” the phantom train wreck to a bridge.
In the post about this case for my “Railroad Hauntings You Can Still Visit” series on Brom Bones Books, I speculate that these Ohioans were influenced by the terrible Ashtabula wreck that had occurred in Ohio a couple of decades earlier, which did involve a train plummeting off a bridge. Or maybe the witnesses just assumed a phantom train would appear at one of those liminal spaces. No matter why they claimed to have encountered the phantom train wreck at a bridge rather than where a real train wreck had occurred just a few months earlier, it made for a more traditional ghost story.
TO: We did a little digging into that Rittman, Ohio incident and found that the train manifested in the same spot as another well-known ghost. The original “visitor from spirit-land”1 was a Chippewa maiden, heartbroken and grieving for a lost love. She reportedly appeared in that exact cursed location for decades. We might be going off the rails here, but it suggests that there is something inherent in these liminal spaces that allows them to trap and release the psychic energy from an emotionally-charged event. Or something. What are some common theories about how and why phantom trains appear?
TP: The residual haunting theory seems to fit pretty well with phantom trains. Say someone gets brutally murdered. That shocking, horrible event somehow gets embedded into the place where it happened. It gets reenacted over and over. You can try talking to the ghost of the murderer or the victim, but they won’t answer because they aren’t really there—it’s just some weird record of the murder. Phantoms trains frequently seem to fit this pattern. I can believe people, dogs, cats, horses, maybe even tadpoles and turtles have spirits. You’ll have to do a lot of convincing to get me to believe entire trains do, too.
But this doesn’t really answer how trains and ghostly phenomena merged. Go hunting for old reports of railroad hauntings in newspaper archives, and one thing will jump out at you. Death. Train accidents. Wrecks. Tragedy. Here was this astounding new way to get from place to place or to transfer goods, but that came at a terrible cost. It’s kind of like a cemetery. There’s a long tradition of ghosts lingering around graveyards. Reminders of our mortality often evoke ghost stories, and trains carried a threat of gruesome death. But now I’m getting into psychological territory, so I’ll stop rambling.
TO: We agree with your train of thought about the psychological triggers that might cause an individual to experience a phantom train sighting. Why do you think some trains were silent-but-seen, while others were noisy-and-invisible?
TP: That heard-but-unseen or seen- but-unheard characteristic certainly does seem to be a defining feature of several phantom train cases. Again, the best I can offer is a folklorist’s view. It makes for a really creepy story! Imagine those people who first encountered a train in the early to mid-1800s. What stands out? Visually, the sheer size and the billowing smoke and the movements of the drive rods. In terms of sound, the engine, the whistle, and the brakes are really noisy! Want to tell an unsettling story? Take one or the other of those out. Weird, huh? That’s a story that might linger!
TO: Phantom train reports share many similar motifs. Are there any cases that don’t fit the usual template?
TP: The Lincoln funeral train stands out as atypical. Many phantom trains can be traced to an actual wreck or fatality that had happened on the spot, some terrible calamity that turns into what’s called a residual haunting or a ghostly reenactment of the traumatic event. But the Lincoln funeral train, while obviously connected to death, is something else. At the risk of delving into psychology again, I imagine that case can be linked to a nation coping with a terrible death of a different kind.
TO: Before we run out of steam, we can’t forget to ask about the role local myths played in the development of phantom train sightings. Did one influence the other?
TP: I don’t want to be reductive here, but there is something to be said about experiencing a haunting that one was expecting to experience. In other words, if you investigate a haunted house, you’re very primed to encounter a ghost. You almost can’t help but want to encounter a ghost, and it’s hard to be objective in that case. Good ghost hunters know this and do what they can to push against it. Local legends set up expectations.
In that Rittman, Ohio, case, the phantom train was experienced by a doctor (and maybe his companion—it’s tough to tell from the article). Afterward, there were three more witnesses who also claimed it had occurred at the bridge. Did they actually hear it? Did they hear it because the doctor’s story was in the backs of their heads? All I know is it’s a neat case and a great story.
TO: What do you make of it all? Are there solid answers to this mystery, or has the train left the station for good?
TP: The only sweeping conclusions I’ve come to are that trains had a profound impact on people when they became relied upon in the early to mid-1800s. Along with the telegraph and steam- powered ships, they fundamentally changed how people understood distance and time. We sometimes say that the internet has changed how we perceive the globe, and it certainly has, but I suspect that the “shrinking world” feeling began long before smart phones and even television.
We in the late 1900s and early 2000s were well-rehearsed for amazing technologies to radically alter how we live. Folks in the early 1800s? Maybe not so much. Trains were part of that, and so weird stories about trains held a special fascination for people. And the tradition began. Traditions, then, grow deep roots, and even though trains are nothing very new to us, the stories about them being something other—something more—than big, fast machines still attract us. Maybe your research shows that this isn’t quite right, but I sense that reports of phantom trains are just starting to fade. If so, this suggests that deep-rooted tradition is beginning to wither.
TO: Tim, thank you for putting us on the right track about phantom trains and the cultural factors that shaped their development. And thanks for suffering through so many train related puns. We hope they weren’t too derailing.
Even after ruminating on Professor Tim’s valuable insights, we still feel like we’re waiting for a train that isn’t coming. All we have are a handful of reports and some interesting leads, but no concrete conclusions. Some of these locomotives are loud and visible. Others are only loud, or only visible. They often resurface in the same place, at the same time, and appear to favor sections of rail where death or destruction have occurred. Some trains foretell future disasters, while others are stuck repeating their own tragic pasts. Sometimes patterns reveal a deeper truth—but despite a list of predictable characteristics, answers about these mysterious phantom trains still elude us. Maybe these mechanical spooks are spectral reincarnations of large-scale tragedies—the disembodied spirits of victims somehow providing the psychic energy required to manifest both man and machine.
Or perhaps they’re activated through an obscure natural process involving a combination of iron rails, granite and limestone rock ballast, and nearby groundwater. It’s another take on the “stone tape theory,” which suggests that inert materials can absorb and store emotional energy from events that occur in their vicinity. Under the right conditions, this energy is later released, treating witnesses to a ghostly “playback” of past events. It’s a well-traveled hypothesis, but as Mr. Prasil stated in our interview, trains don’t have emotions, or souls (except for Soul Train), so it’s hard to see how the theory could apply.
Final Destination. Finally.
By the end of World War 2, highways were overtaking railways, and travel by train was becoming a novelty—but there was still enough track to accommodate our phantom friends.
A 1949 article from Michigan highlights the persistence of the phenomenon while adding a new twist—spook engineers that interact physically.
It all started one morning when an elderly gentleman lost his balance and fell onto the railroad tracks in front of his home. His housemates watched in horror as a freight train suddenly appeared around the corner, heading directly for the helpless man. Miraculously, the locomotive labored to a stop with only inches to spare. Shortly thereafter, two courteous crewmen exited the cab and carried the uninjured man safely back into his house. His roomies vouched for the entire display despite denials from officials about the presence of any trains in the vicinity.2
What, if anything, can we discern from these displays? Possessing a variety of attributes, phantom trains symbolize more than just a single narrative. They reflect a rich tapestry of myth and memory, shaped by the very landscapes they traverse. As transportation technology continues to advance, it’s likely that new fleets of spook vehicles will emerge to carry on the tradition of these mysterious modes of travel.
“Another Voice from the Dim Past.” Akron Daily Democrat, 2 May 1901, p. 5.
“Mysterious Ghost Train Spares Aged Man's Life.”Clare Sentinel, 21 January 1949, p. 5.
The U.S.A. is not the only country to claim phantom or ghostly trains. Canada also has a rich history of such paranormal rail spooks. See Hammerson Peters, Mysteries of Canada website: Railroad Mysteries: Part 1 - Phantom Trains in Canada. Alberta Ghost stories. All aboard!