Spooky short stories have long been set at railway stations and on trains, writes Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh

 

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of train travel. In 1825, the inaugural journey was made on the Stockton and Darlington railway in north-east England. It was the first passenger train in history.
From their very beginnings, however, railways have also had a spooky side to them. Stories of railway hauntings abound all over the world, and writers of ghost and horror stories frequently use trains and railway stations as settings.

In 1866, Charles Dickens published the first well-known railway ghost story, The Signal-Man, and the genre has gone full steam ahead ever since.
What exactly is spooky about trains and railways? It’s true that many fatalities have occurred on them. But that’s true of every mode of travel. Perhaps it’s explained by the distinctive atmosphere of the railways, which can sometimes be creepy, especially at night or when there’s very few passengers around.
Or perhaps it’s that the railways’ precise timetables and long histories attract ghost stories, as ghosts are customarily creatures of habit.

Most of all, perhaps, trains are spooky because they are enclosed spaces. Between stations, it’s difficult to escape if someone (or something) is stalking you …

Although England is the home of the ghost story, the most famous ghost train in the world is American. And this is a ghost train in the most literal sense … the whole train is a ghost!
The Lincoln Ghost Train is a spectral apparition of the actual funeral train that carried the body of Abraham Lincoln to its final resting-place.

After his assassination in April of 1865, the great President’s remains were brought by locomotive from Washington D.C. to his home state of Illinois.
The carriages were dressed in black crepe for mourning, and there was a portrait of the great man fixed to its front. The journey took twelve days, as the “Lincoln Special” stopped in various cities to allow mourners to pay their respects.

But even that wasn’t the end, as the “Lincoln Special” has been seen many times since.

As early as 1896, a report in the Albany Evening Times reported the ghost train as a familiar phenomenon among railway workers: “Regularly in the month of April, about midnight, the air on the tracks becomes very keen and cutting. On either side of the tracks it is warm and still. Every watchman, when he feels the air, slips off the track and sits down to watch.
“Soon the pilot engine of Lincoln’s funeral train passes with long, black streamers and with a band of black instruments playing dirges, grinning skeletons all about.
“It passes noiselessly. If it is moonlight, clouds come over the moon as the phantom train goes by.
“After the pilot engine passes, the funeral train itself with flags and streamers rushes past. The track seems covered with black carpet, and the coffin is seen in the centre of the car, while all about it in the air and on the train behind are vast numbers of blue-coated men, some with coffins on their backs, others leaning upon them.”

Other reports mention a blue glow around the train, and clocks and watches are said to stop as it passes. Sightings have continued down the decades. There is an annual informal gathering in Urbana, Ohio every April 29th to catch a glimpse of the famous apparition.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own