From the Vault: Trains of Terror, Part 2

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore a host of scary, train-related topics, from the Victorian “railway madness” panic to ghost trains and more. (originally published 10/3/2024)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Yes, we're in fall break this week,
but we have lots of Halloween related content for you.
This is going to be Trains of Terror Part two,
which originally published ten three, twenty twenty four. Continuation of
Trains of Terror Part one, So if you have your
ticket from that episode, we're going to check that ticket again,

(00:26):
but we're going to continue the ride.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
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,

(01:08):
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 of the

(01:29):
steam locomotive, And finally we got to the Victorian panic
about railway madness, a belief you'll find attested 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

(01:50):
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 talk about more that's right.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
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

(02:26):
it just me? Or do we just not actually have
a lot of stories about ghost trains.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
Well, it's interesting that you frame it that way, because
I was thinking about the ghost train 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

(02:52):
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.

(03:15):
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 frequented in life.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
But the house, the haunted house is usually an actual house.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
I guess.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, yeah, exactly so. But trains are like in this
in between realm where they 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 the same time, trains are locations like houses. People

(04:03):
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

(04:25):
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

(04:47):
then believe to be haunted like a haunted house. The
latter is possible in concept, it just seems like there's
less of that.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yeah, I think it is probably an idea that is
infected by these other concepts, Like you said, 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

(05:16):
a ghost train, because with ghost ships you have, of
course tales of a flying Dutchman and you know, 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

(05:37):
even 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,

(06:00):
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

(06:22):
it doesn't line up one with any of them either.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
M M yeah, I think that's right. This is kind
of a tangent. 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,

(06:47):
because I don't know, maybe 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

(07:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
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

(07:44):
be kind of pitied to tell a sad story about.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
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 well we'll touch on this again, but there are
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 up. Perhaps, So

(08:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
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

(08:51):
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 like to 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.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
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

(09:31):
out to be like a communist counter espionage thriller. But anyway,
I think 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 arriving to pick him up, but
then it just like seeming to pass without him ever

(09:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
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 to get some
of that sort of underground air coming at you if

(10:29):
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 that's the first,
you know, rough categorization for ghost trains. The second one
I want to highlight are just straight up overtly creepy

(10:51):
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 a category

(11:12):
that is going to include both. Just straight up, here's
a train. It doesn't look like it as people on it,
but it is a physical train. And also, here's a
train that is you know, there's nothing suspects about who's
piloting it. We know it's either we can see the
human or we know that this is an automated rail system,
whatever the case. But why is there a train with
no people on it? Why is it stopping and letting

(11:35):
no one out and then continuing on its way.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
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

(11:58):
little bit different because it's the 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.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
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

(12:38):
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

(12:59):
space that is made for people, devoid of people, but
still in motion, as if it's going somewhere but without people.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
A lot of horror movies used to great effect the
empty subway train. You know, the subway arrives in the station,
the door is open, there's nobody in sight, Nobody on
the train. It is a creepy feeling.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
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 Rugeri and Why Britain Has Secret Ghost Trains twenty
fifteen BBC, these are low frequency routes that often entail

(13:41):
mostly empty, if not entirely empty cars, and this is
a reality that the author describes as being due to
a quote bureaucratic hangover.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
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 they're going. That's correct.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
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

(14:26):
interesting to read about these because a lot of a
lot of people don't you know, aren't even a where
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

(14:49):
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 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

(15:11):
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, maybe a ghost station and a ghost
train line today could be vitally important, say five years

(15:32):
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

(15:56):
corresponding parliamentary ghost train stations again, and 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,

(16:17):
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

(16:37):
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

(17:00):
ghost tunnel of the Marta rail system here in Atlanta.
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.

(17:22):
I looked up and there's a 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

(17:43):
made cave in the earth, just you know, a stone's
throw from where I live.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Did you take this photo in our outline here?

Speaker 1 (17:49):
I did not. I've thought 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

(18:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
The steep cutting in the earth is 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.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, Now getting into some more examples of like straight
up ghost trains, actual spectrum trains, haunted trains, trains associated
with ghosts or supernatural creatures. We're going to turn briefly

(19:07):
here once more to Japan. I want to add the
caveat that again. There are 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 rides around. We're

(19:28):
not sure where 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.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
There for us.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
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 youkai 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

(20:04):
essentially dog can. They are not raccoon can except in
a very distant sense.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
They look like raccoons, though they've got that kind of
head shape and coloration.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
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

(20:34):
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

(20:57):
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 Dylan
Foster describes ways in which the tanuki and the locomotive
stand in stark opposition to each other. So you know,

(21:17):
reminder here the first Japanese rail line opened in eighteen
seventy two and remains an impressive and highly connected form
of public transportation. There.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
Yeah, but I recall 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.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
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 uki
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 know, imagine

(22:13):
a lonely train track running through the wilderness in Japan.
And and you're if 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

(22:33):
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,

(22:56):
there was no train, and in this case, be the
supernatural Yokai explanation. This was clearly the work of the
tanukis mimicking the sights and sounds of the train to
mess with these humans.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
Ah, little trickster is okay. So this I think is
a slightly more humorous take on the ghost train, Like
there's a bit of a spirit of pranksteriness about it.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, yeah, where it's like, oh, Tanuki's they got us again.
But then there's a flip side to it, 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

(23:43):
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

(24:04):
technology could make the magic powerless, transforming a supernatural creature
into nothing more than an animal body. Lying dead beside
the tracks of progress.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
Oh, that's quite poignant.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
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 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, seems to

(24:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
Yeah, that the magic is gone once it once their
presence fails to convince anyone to slow the giant machine down.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Now, there are other supernatural beings associated with trains. 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 Tikki Tikki. I'm not sure if

(25:17):
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,

(25:38):
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

(25:59):
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 yokai and you were
that seem to be associated with the fear of young
people venturing into perhaps dank or quiet bathroom areas.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
Oh Man have we ever done a Halloween episode on
scary bathrooms? I feel like that should be a series.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
Oh yeah, that would be a good one. There are
a number of yokai that line up with that.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Wait, do we have everything planned for this month? Maybe
we should sub that in. That's a pinch hit.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Oh, we'll see. We'll have to look at the calendar.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Now, there's also a railway tunnel said to be haunted
joe Mon 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

(27:03):
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

(27:26):
or falling to the elements and natural disasters and so
forth later on. According to Andrea D. Antoni in 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 CAAVIAT. Anytime we bring

(27:46):
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 others wise you can find
in different cultures around the world. But in Japanese usage,
the term hitobashira, meaning human pillar itself, can also refer

(28:09):
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 Mun Tunnel.
And this leads to various ghost stories that invoke actual
ritual premature burial. So to read more on this, so
it turned to one of the books that Heroko Yoda

(28:30):
and Matt Alt wrote. I reference to these a lot.
They wrote one on ninjas, they wrote one on Yokai,
and they wrote one on Yuri.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Well.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
In the Yuri book Yuri Attack, they point out that
officials initially dismissed these accounts for years that Jomun 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,

(29:00):
apparently in a standing position, and dozens more were buried
outside of the tunnel. Some accounts say hundreds of some
seem to point towards a far lesser but still disturbing
amount of skeletons.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
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.

(29:35):
And Andrea D'Antoni, in the paper I say it previously,
also discusses the probability that these were forced laborers as well.
So not a ghost train, but a ghost train tunnel.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
Is there any known modern folklore about this like, do
people believe there are hauntings related to this tunnel? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:55):
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
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

(30:17):
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
locations that have some sort of dark history, and they
become a target for dark tourism.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
I'm a sucker for a ghost tour, even a cheesy one.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
In rocket Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
It kind of messes with your search results sometimes.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
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
terrain of the inside of a train varied enough?

Speaker 1 (31:12):
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 there's a one
off gimmick, I'd be down for it. Haunted subway train,
that's great, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (31:33):
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

(31:53):
train there.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Well, all aboard for Lincoln's funeral train, the spectral 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

(32:16):
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 then
people you know heard this go by or gathered to
watch it go by included a map for you hear
Joe showing all the different cities it hit on the way.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
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
the through like Albany and Buffalo, and then down through Ohio,
Indiana and finally Illinois.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
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

(33:14):
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 is
a nineteen forty five article in New York History by
folklorist Louis C. Jonas Session titled some Historic Ghosts of

(33:38):
New York.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Okay, let's hear it.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
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 frights,

(34:01):
is blanketed. Men know which day and spring the ghost
train has passed through. For all clocks stop and wait
five to eight minutes before they begin again.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
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

(34:34):
saying stopping clocks as it goes along.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
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

(35:23):
of it is fate at is 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.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Also tying into the uniqueness of tunnels, passing into that
literally under the earth.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
You know.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
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

(36:17):
sounds by the tracks and so forth.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
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?

Speaker 1 (36:38):
I guess they wanted. I guess the author's trying to
drive home the idea that it's that it's tasteful.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
I don't know, you know, it almost seems like it's
like a very respectful ghost story, you know, and 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.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
No, there's no like ghost's going to get you. Yes,
it does seem to be more of this expression of
communal shock and grief.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
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.

(37:34):
But I would if we were to believe all of
these accounts, it would seem like a lot.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Okay, I'll be your Matthew Lillard.

Speaker 1 (38:03):
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,

(38:25):
William Henry Harrison, first president to die in the White House,
Abigail Adams, former landowner of the essentially the property there,
David Burns, Anna Seurrett, 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

(38:47):
as the Thing according to reports around nineteen eleven.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
Wow, I would not have guessed that many. And also like,
didn't most of these people not actually die in the
White House?

Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, most of them didn't, So 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?

Speaker 3 (39:10):
I failed in my mission. I forgot to count. There's
got to be okay estimate.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
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 train before.
I don't know if this I don't know to what
extent this is still an active bit of a folklore.
This is active ghost story, an active ghost story at all.

(39:37):
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 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,

(40:01):
you know, along the train line or anywhere. I mean,
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.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
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?

Speaker 1 (40:27):
I mean the polar Express pulls out in front of
the Boy's house, right, So yeah, it shows that anything is.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
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

(40:56):
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 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

(41:19):
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 Maco 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.

(41:43):
And to establish the alleged origin of this story, I'm
going to turn to 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 Mako, fifteen miles

(42:05):
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,

(42:26):
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

(42:49):
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, say on
misty nights, people would see a light in the darkness

(43:13):
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 a lantern, moving through the country,
and as it gets closer and closer to the observer,

(43:35):
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

(43:57):
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

(44:21):
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 to ninety seven, that
Cleveland personally witnessed the Maco Ghost Light. And I thought

(44:44):
that was kind of interesting. He allegedly enjoyed the story
and talked about the Maco 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 make O Light? And despite the number of
sources that spread this claim, especially in more recent decades,

(45:08):
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

(45:31):
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

(45:54):
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.

(46:15):
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. It seems almost to have some similarities
to the Tanuki magic thing. It's like, you know, oh,

(46:36):
one light, Yeah, don't worry about it, just a ghost
to go on. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
But I have doubts about this. I don't know. Maybe
maybe somebody with North Carolina rail road 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

(47:16):
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

(47:41):
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 the original story

(48:01):
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

(48:25):
along a curvy stretch outside Wilmington known as the Rattlesnake
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

(48:48):
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.

(49:08):
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,

(49:34):
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 Makeo vicinity. More recently,
paranormal investigations claimed to have caught evidence of the Mako
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.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
So, just to be clear, do the Makeo does the
make A light or the make A lights? Do they
have the presidential seal of approval here? Do we really
know one way or another?

Speaker 3 (50:06):
I think we do not know. Okay, the administration has
been ambiguous on this, but note that 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

(50:29):
a 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

(50:49):
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

(51:11):
car headlights just appearing in a place where you wouldn't
expect to see them.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
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 spill over between these stories and stories
of Will of the Wisps and other strange lights in

(51:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
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 trains. So
back in twenty seventeen, there were some press releases about
a new invention in development by an employee of Fermi Lab,

(52:26):
and the invention was called the ghost train generator. Now,
for those not familiar, Fermi Lab is formerly 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

(52:46):
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

(53:10):
is hit by a train. At the time of this
Fermilab 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

(53:32):
to preliminary statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration, in twenty
twenty three, there were two thy 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

(53:54):
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

(54:14):
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

(54:37):
more common than I would have guessed.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
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, if it has

(55:02):
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 trains are dangerous and
that they're holy, blameless creatures as well as they riff

(55:25):
on it in the In the short you know, it's like,
trains are dangerous. They can be dangerous, especially if you're
not being careful around them, and you're not you're not listening,
you're not obeying like basic train related safety tips.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
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

(56:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
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

(56:53):
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,

(57:16):
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, We're covering the rails,

(57:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
That makes sense. I had not thought about this before,
but yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
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

(58:27):
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,

(58:49):
and so when a train is present on the tracks
within a signal block, the train's wheels and axles create
a connection between the two rails. They compleet 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

(59:11):
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

(59:33):
special conducting wire, so it would be equipment essentially to
connect 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,

(59:55):
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

(01:00:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
I mean maybe there was a religious objection to it,
just based on the title. It's like, we don't need
more ghost trains, TASS funded ghost trains on our rail systems, No, sir,
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
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. So I wonder could we get

(01:01:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Yeah, I'd be down for that.

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
I don't know what information it would provide. It goes
by somebody's yelling at you, like, don't go in.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
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

(01:01:39):
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 like that. You know,
as someone who used to ride the train a lot

(01:02:03):
to work and back, you were always 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 something you know that stands out,
and then I don't know the mind or supernatural tendencies

(01:02:24):
create the rest around it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
Well, do we think does that do it for trains
of Terror?

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
That movie has some twists, got some good ones.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
Yes, and some science. We'll have some things to say
about the science of Horror Express.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
Extremely sound, all.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
Right, just reminded of 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.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
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 a topic for the future, or just to
say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
Plant is later lat