December 20, 2024 • 31 mins
Completed in 1875, the Hoosac Tunnel was known to those who built it as the bloody pit owing to the 195 people that were killed during its construction.
Today people are warned not to venture into the tunnel, but not only because you might get hit by a train...
Written by Neil McRobert and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard McLain Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash
Unexplained pod. When we think of ghosts, we often think
(00:29):
in terms of human drama. We conceive of haunted places
as theaters, sites of post mortem performances that are no
less recognizable for the fact that the players are dead,
And as with all performances, it's the drama we tend
to pay attention to, not the stage itself. Guilt and grief,
(00:52):
anger and injustice, longing and loss. These are the things
that drive the spirits in our store. But not everyone
as conceived of hauntings in this way. Some think that
staging matters a great deal. Indeed, scientists and spiritualists alike
have theorized that elements of our physical world may not
(01:16):
be merely the sight of haunting, but both catalyst and cause.
In eighteen thirty seven, Charles Babbage, celebrated polymath and forefather
of the modern computer, pend a startling idea. The material world,
Babbage suggested as a vast library on whose pages are
(01:37):
forever written, or that man has ever said or woman whispered.
For Babbage, this was no metaphor. He was making a
very literal point that the movement of the air set
in motion by a human voice does not cease with
the words that prompted it, nor even with the death
of the speaker. Like endless ripples in an infinite pond,
(02:01):
are passing presence lingers in the world. He didn't extend
this theory to account for ghosts, but others made that leap.
In a nineteen thirty nine lecture to the Society for
Psychical Research, the then Society president A. J. H. Price
offered the concept of place memory. He insisted that objects
(02:24):
can capture and carry traces of past events, and that
when a suitably sensitive person is in close proximity to
such an object, they will have what he termed a
retrospective experience. According to Price, ghosts are not active, supernatural
visitors from beyond the veil, but more like photographic negatives.
(02:48):
They are effectively developed in the moment by those with
the right sensitivities to what Price called the psychic ether.
Twenty years later, archaeologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge would further refine
the idea in his book ghost and ghoul provoked by
his own uncanny experience. On a warm summer morning in
(03:21):
nineteen fifty nine, Thomas Lethbridge was outside his home in Devon,
waving across a stream to his neighbour when he apparently
saw a tall woman dressed in antiquated clothing standing not
a yard behind her. So curious did the old fashioned
woman look that Later in the day he asked his
(03:41):
neighbour who her visitor was. So you're seeing my ghosts
as well, now, she replied. When Lethbridge and his wife
investigated the immediate area of the sighting, both claimed to
feel a deep tingling sensation and a sense of pressure
akin to an electromagnetic lace. The whole production, he wrote,
(04:03):
was comparable to a television broadcast, the figures like pictures
transmitted by somebody or something else and merely received by him.
Lethbridge echoed Price's argument that ghosts are not spiritual entities
with agency and intent, but merely images replayed by an
(04:24):
unspecified energy source running through the natural world. He thought
the nearby stream might be important, as running water as
commonly featured in the law and logic of the supernatural.
This evolving hypothesis has since settled on a specific name,
a name that points to one material above all others
(04:47):
as the foundation for what we think of as ghosts.
It is known as stone tape theory. Stone, particularly quartz
and limestone, is thought by some to be uniquely case
of storing and projecting past events, especially when those events
are ripe with emotion, say at the point of death
(05:10):
or agony or great loss. Under these conditions, proponents of
the stone tape theory argue that something of that emotion
remains trapped in the bedrock and buildings, like energy in
a battery, waiting only for the presence of someone sensitive
to trigger a transmission. And what then, of a place
(05:34):
not just built from stone, but carved from it, a
place we have cut into the world with force and
trauma and mass tragedy. Is it any wonder that there
we might also have inscribed something of ourselves that still remains.
You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith.
(06:06):
The Hoosac Tunnel is a stretch of single track working
railway cut through the quartzoth rock and limestone of the
Berkshire Hills and western Massachusetts. Completed in eighteen seventy five.
It was the first major mountain tunnel of its kind
in North America, undertaken to provide a rail connection between
(06:28):
New York and Boston. For thirty years, it was the
longest tunnel on the continent. The tunnel's eastern end opens
up on the outskirts of Florida, Massachusetts. The western opening
is nearly five miles away in the small city of
North Adams. Between these two portals there is only darkness
(06:51):
and stone, the exposed innards of the mountain, illuminated for
only a brief few seconds by the lights of the
rushing freight train. From each entrance. The way ahead slopes
slightly upward to a meeting point in the middle. This
allows water to drain out, but for those on foot,
(07:12):
the rise is enough to obscure any site of the
exit ahead. It makes the Husack that rare thing, a
tunnel without a light at its end. Its construction is
a testament to the nation's industrial might, prove that nothing,
not even the land itself, can withstand American ambition. Though
(07:36):
if you read the history, it's clear that the land
put up a hell of a fight, and if you
believe the stories, that fight still echoes on the housack
was played by problems from its inception. Ground was first
broken in eighteen fifty two. Whenever spoke boring machine was
(07:57):
set to work on the mountain, it failed after only
ten feet and there it remained for years, its drill
bit trapped in the rock like the finger of a
greedy child. It was then that those in charge realized
the true scale of the challenge they faced. Engineers were
sent to Europe to research cutting edge drilling techniques, while
(08:20):
financiers waited in Massachusetts with mounting in patients. No more
work would take place for the next two years. In fact,
it would take a quarter century of hand digging, pneumatic drilling,
and blasting before the tunnel was complete, leaving a vast
artery in the earth twenty feet high and twenty four
(08:43):
feet wide. Workers dug inward from the east and west
simultaneously with the aim of meeting in the middle, and impressively,
they did so with less than an inch of error,
and that is without considering the need for a central
ventilation shaft, a thousand foot vertical chimney running all the
(09:05):
way to the top of the mountain, which itself took
four years to dig over two million tons of earth
and rock were cleared from the hills, the two million
dollar budget ballooning to ten times that amount in today's money.
The cost of that first big dig equates to almost
(09:25):
half a billion dollars, but there were other costs too,
losses that could never be recouped. The Hoosac Tunnel was
a deadly project. Construction accidents were hardly rare in the
(09:49):
mid eighteen hundreds, but even by the periods lacks health
and safety standards, workers on the Hoosack experienced notable misfortune.
The recorded number of deaths on the project totaled one
hundred ninety five, enough for workers to begin calling the
Hohosuck the Bloody Pit. Workers were exposed a daily peril
(10:13):
from falls and falling rock to fires and flooding. Above
it all loomed the dread of nitro glycerine. For over
ten years, Whosok miners relied on gunpowder to blast away
at the mountain, a crude and inefficient approach that was
stared down by the rock, often only removing a few
(10:35):
feet for each explosion. Nitro Glycerine was used for the
first time on the Hoosack dig in eighteen sixty five,
the first time it was ever put to use in
a major American construction project. The explosive compound more than
doubled the rate of progress, but it came with terrifying downsides.
(10:59):
Extremely volatile and sensitive to heat and shock, it seemed
almost to have a malicious mercurial mind of its own.
On March twentieth, eighteen sixty five, three explosive experts were
planting nitroglycerine deep inside the tunnel. Two of the men,
ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, were making their way to
(11:22):
the safety bunker to shelter from the blast when the third,
Ringo Kelly, lit the charge. Only he did it early.
Brinkman and Nash were buried instantly beneath tons of rock.
Kelly vanished almost immediately, and rumors soon began to circulate
(11:44):
that its actions had been intentional murderous. Even as the
story goes, it was just over a year later, on
the morning of March thirtieth, eighteen sixty six, when, with
the area now cleared, Ringo Kelly's relatively fresh body was
found two miles inside the tunnel, at almost the precise
(12:07):
spot where he'd brought the rock down on his colleagues.
A deputy sheriff, Charles Gibson, is said to have quickly
declared that Kelly had been murdered by strangulation. Examination of
the body suggested he'd been killed the night before. No
culbrit was ever found or pursued, but rumors soon began
(12:30):
to emerge. But for whatever reason, Kelly had returned to
the scene of the crime, only for the unforgiving ghosts
of Brinkman and Nash to murder him. They were the
first supposed ghosts thought to haunt the houssack, their shades
forever trapped in the rock that had crushed them. Over
(12:58):
the next few years, dozens more people were killed by
errant detonations in the houssac. On October ninth, eighteen sixty nine,
three miners truged a half mile from the Eastern Tunnel
entrance to the nitro glycerine stock to prepare the substance
for that day's work. Something went wrong, and the ensuing
(13:20):
explosion left only one of the three with a body
to be buried. The other two, Felix and Oswald and
Montaigue brothers, were entirely vaporized. At least seven more major
explosions were recorded over the remainder of the dig, including
the deaths of four men in April eighteen seventy one,
(13:44):
when incredibly a bolt of lightning struck the track outside
the tunnel and coursed nearly three thousand feet down the
metal rail before detonating the nitro at the other end,
a terrible accident that would forever define a more moderate
project for the husuc, though it was just one more
(14:06):
in a long sequence of tragedies. There is one especially
black day in the tunnel's history, however, that does stand out.
It was one o'clock on the afternoon of nineteenth of
October eighteen sixty seven, when a fire broke out in
the building on top of the central shaft. A lantern
(14:27):
was left too close to the tank containing flammable nafta gas.
When this tank was opened for checks, the vapor ignited
and rapidly enveloped the entire structure in flames. At the time,
thirteen men were at the bottom of the shaft. By
that point, the dig had reached just under six hundred feet,
(14:50):
about half of its eventual depth, but far enough doubt
that those inside must have felt as though they'd been
swallowed whole by the A rough structure of steps and
wooden platforms ringed the inside of that stone throat, leaving
only enough space for the bucket to pass with its
(15:11):
load of excavated stone. It was a cramped and frightening
place to work. The bucket had just ascended and been
emptied when the fire engulfed the machinery. A foreman tried
to lure it back down to help retrieve the tunneling men,
but the flames kept him at bay. He could only
(15:32):
watch helplessly as the ropes and cables melted and the
bucket dropped into darkness. Even worse, the platforms at the
top of the shaft were laden with tools and machine parts.
When they collapsed, hundreds of drill bits, chisels, and assorted
sharp metal spilled into the hole like deadly rain. After
(15:57):
that came the platforms themselves, which crumpled in a mixture
of timber and ash and sealed the mouth of the
shaft completely. People rushed to the site, including over a
hundred fire fighters, who eventually extinguished the burning plug. Once cleared,
(16:17):
they peered breathlessly into the opening that seemed to yawn
back at them like a screaming mouth, but not a
sound was heard. Eventually, a workman named Mallory volunteered to
be lowered into the shaft on a single rope. He
descended around four in the morning, swapping the gloom of
(16:39):
an October night for the deeper darkness below. A journalist
for the North Adams Transcript described Malory's descent as an
exhibition of genuine heroism, with no stirring battle music, no
(17:00):
rushing thousands to share and reduce the terror. His peril
was grim and dreadful, and he went alone amid silence
and shuddering suspense. Hundreds of onlookers huddled in anticipation for
the thirty or forty minutes that Malory was in the shaft. Eventually,
(17:21):
he was drawn back up, ashen faced and on the
verge of passing out from air, noxious enough to extinguish
his lamp. Before lapsing into unconsciousness, he could only gasp
out the words no hope. Malory described how he'd reached
the bottom to find that the shaft was flooded to
(17:43):
a good dozen feet. This was to be expected, as
the machinery that pumped water out of the shaft had
been destroyed by the fire. However, the series of ladders
and platforms that the miners used to climb out sat
seventy feet above the bottom. A hoist was needed to
bridge that gap, but it had been rendered useless by
(18:06):
the fire, and so it was decided. Even if the
men survived the hail of falling debris, they never had
a chance of escaping the flood. They likely died in
the darkness and panic as the cold water inched slowly
up their bodies. It was soon after that that strange
(18:28):
things began to happen. It started with the bodies of
lost work crew beginning to surface in the shaft, as
if the hoosack was reluctantly releasing its grip. Over the
course of that long, heart worn winter, whales were said
to be heard coming from the shaft, cries of anguish
(18:50):
and pain, only partially muffled by the earth. More bizarre
were the apparent sightings of hazy figures carrying pickaxes and shovels.
They didn't respond when addressed, and they would vanish in
a moment, leaving no footprints in the freshly fallen snow.
But they walked the sight like they knew it, like
(19:13):
they fitted in there. It was almost a full year
before the shaft was pumped dry and the final bodies retrieved.
Their discovery painted a new patterner of horror on events,
as it was found that some of the men had
apparently survived the initial disaster and even built a crude
(19:35):
raft from the fallen timber. Whether they had then died
slowly from a lack of oxygen or through the even
more prolonged agony of starvation, none could say, nor could
anyone suggest how Malory had missed them during his rescue attempt,
or that anyone knew as that they had lingered in
(19:56):
the pitch. Those ghostly cries said to have been heard
emanating up from it, perhaps not quite so ghostly after all.
(20:17):
That final burial of the men from the pit seemed
to put to rest the supposed sightings of eerie figures
on the hillside around the shaft, but it didn't dampen
the strange activity deeper inside the hoosack. With so much
trauma stacking up, disquiet had arisen among the workforce. Men
(20:38):
began to complain about hearing the voice of a man
crying out in agony from somewhere within the tunnel. They
became so nervous that entire teams refused to enter after sunset,
and some walked off the job for good. One of
the dig managers, and mister Dunn, insisted that the noises
(21:00):
and no more than wind rushing through the cavity, But
faced with the labour revolt, he reached out to his friend,
a mechanical engineer named Paul Travers, to see if he
could help. As well as being respected within the industry,
Travers was also a decorated cavalry officer who'd served in
the Civil War. Everything about him spoke of common sense
(21:24):
and strong nerves, and on the night of September seventh,
eighteen sixty eight, he and Dunn toward the tunnel to
try and help dispel the worker's superstitions. In a letter
composed the following morning, Travers wrote how he and Done
bought a good two miles into the tunnel, notably to
(21:45):
the area below the central shaft and near the place
where Ringo Kelly's body was found. There in the cold silence,
they did indeed hear what sounded like a man groaning
in pain right by their position, But when they turned
on their lamps, they saw that they were entirely alone,
(22:08):
I'll admit, Travis wrote, I haven't been that frightened since Shiloh.
Travers and Dunn heard only what they took to be voices,
evidence perhaps of Charles Babbage's theory that human utterances can
linger in the air long after we are gone. But
(22:28):
in June eighteen seventy two, another trip into the tunnel
climaxed in a more viscerule encounter. A doctor named Clifford
Owens accepted the invitation to explore the houssack alongside drilling
Superintendent James mc kinstry. As they later described it, the
two men entered the tunnel at precisely eleven thirty p m. And,
(22:54):
just like Travers and Dunn four years before, they walked
two miles into the darkness. Owens later described their procession
lit only by the dim smoky light of their lamp
as the outside air and moonlight dwindled behind them. Nearing
the middle of the tunnel, they paused to rest. Suddenly,
(23:16):
they both began to hear a mournful sound and allulating
cry approaching them from down the tunnel. Before they could
so much as query the source, they apparently saw a
dimly lit figure walking towards them from the western end.
At first glance, Owens took the figure for a workman,
(23:37):
perhaps lost or injured, struggling toward the rescue of their lamps.
As it drew closer, however, he noticed two alarming details. First,
the figure took on a strange blue hue, dimly illuminated
against the surrounding blackness, and though it had the familiar
(23:58):
shape of a man, there was no head above the neck.
Terrified into paralysis, Owens and McKinstry could only watch as
the blue shape apparently drew closer, so close that Owens
(24:19):
could have reached out and touched it. There it stopped
mere feet away, where it remained motionless for several seconds,
and though it had no head with which to do so,
both men agreed that they felt it was observing them. Abruptly,
the figure moved off, walking past the stunned men and
(24:39):
dwindling into the dimness. They beat a hasty retreat, all
the while aware that they were now pursuing the entity,
though it didn't appear again. Owens and mckinstrey's is the
most famous apparent encounter in the Houssack, but it is
far from the last. The first train passed through the
(25:00):
housack in February of eighteen seventy five, carrying one hundred
and twenty five curious passengers. Nothing went awry. The huge
undertaking had been a success. New England was now readily
accessible by rail, but the end of construction didn't bring
an end to the tunnel's dark infamy. Several workers from
(25:23):
the Boston and Main Railroad reported unnerving experiences while making
the route. In the autumn of eighteen seventy five, a
fire tender named Harlan Mulvany was transporting a wagon loaded
with timber into the tunnel. He'd only gone a short
way into the shadow when something spooked both him and
(25:44):
his horses. Onlookers watched as the panicked man roughly whipped
his horses into a tight turn and careened out of
the tunnel. Several days later, workmen found both the horses
and Mulvaney's tims wagon in the Adams Woods, more than
three miles from the Housack of Mulvaaney. However, there was
(26:07):
no sign and the man was never seen again. His
was not the only disappearance. A century later, a man
named Bernard her starboard walked into the North Adams end
of the tunnel with its fox terrier on a leash.
His plan was to walk the full length of the Hoosack.
(26:28):
When asked why, he simply said that he was in
the mood for an adventure. Whether he got one or not,
we will never know. Her starboard never emerged at the
eastern end. Police and rail workers searched the tunnel, but
no trace of the man or his dog was ever found.
(26:56):
The stone tape theory posits that ghosts are not spirits, agency,
or impact. Rather, they are supposedly just visual replays of
moments of high emotion. The men apparently seen wandering the
ground around the mouth of the central shaft, the lonely
voices heard within the tunnel. Both of these would be
(27:18):
accommodated within the stone tape theory. Joseph in Poco's story
puts a different complexion on the Housack. In Poco, an
Italian immigrant to the area, began working aged eighteen for
the Boston and Main Railroad in nineteen twenty two. He'd
heard tales of the Houssock's reputation, but laughed them off.
(27:41):
Maybe he retained his good humor for two years until
February of nineteen twenty four. When he was busy working
one morning chopping thick ice from the track, he found
himself separated from his workmates by five hundred feet, which,
in the blind dark of the Husac, may as well
have been miles. Joseph was working by lantern light in
(28:05):
the middle of the tracks when, as he later recounted,
suddenly the tunnel filled with smoke. It was then he
heard a yell, Joe, it said, jump Joe. The young
man looked up to see the bulk of the number
sixty Express train less than seventy feet away. He threw
(28:27):
himself sideways and lived to chip ice another day. Looking around,
he saw no one. The voice seemed to come from
thin air, and it had saved his life. Six weeks later,
Joseph was back at work in the tunnel, using a
heavy bar to free train cars that had frozen to
(28:48):
the track. Once again, he was alone when he apparently
heard that familiar voice yell, drop it Joe. When he
did just that, moments later, the iron bar was flung
against the tunnel war by the current from a falling
power line. Weeks later, when he narrowly avoided being crushed
(29:11):
by a falling oak tree just outside the tunnel entrance.
Joseph and his workmates claimed to have heard wild peals
of laughter, seemingly without source. It was enough to convince
Joseph in Poco to seek employment elsewhere. He resigned and
moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, but each year he made a
(29:34):
pilgrimage back to the Hoosac to pay tribute and give
thanks to what he called his friend in the tunnel.
Thank you so much again for listening to the show Unexplained.
We'll take a short break now for the holidays. We'll
be back in the new year on Friday, January tenth
(29:57):
with the next new episode. Until then, this episode was
written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith.
Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant
podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft
of horror, writing with everyone from Ta Nanaeve Do to
(30:19):
the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend
it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast
created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain
Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to
(30:41):
buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones,
and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show
wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get
in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories
you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an ex
explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can
(31:02):
find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach
us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at
Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
Hello, it's Richard McLain Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com Forward Slash
Unexplained pod. When we think of ghosts, we often think
(00:29):
in terms of human drama. We conceive of haunted places
as theaters, sites of post mortem performances that are no
less recognizable for the fact that the players are dead,
And as with all performances, it's the drama we tend
to pay attention to, not the stage itself. Guilt and grief,
(00:52):
anger and injustice, longing and loss. These are the things
that drive the spirits in our store. But not everyone
as conceived of hauntings in this way. Some think that
staging matters a great deal. Indeed, scientists and spiritualists alike
have theorized that elements of our physical world may not
(01:16):
be merely the sight of haunting, but both catalyst and cause.
In eighteen thirty seven, Charles Babbage, celebrated polymath and forefather
of the modern computer, pend a startling idea. The material world,
Babbage suggested as a vast library on whose pages are
(01:37):
forever written, or that man has ever said or woman whispered.
For Babbage, this was no metaphor. He was making a
very literal point that the movement of the air set
in motion by a human voice does not cease with
the words that prompted it, nor even with the death
of the speaker. Like endless ripples in an infinite pond,
(02:01):
are passing presence lingers in the world. He didn't extend
this theory to account for ghosts, but others made that leap.
In a nineteen thirty nine lecture to the Society for
Psychical Research, the then Society president A. J. H. Price
offered the concept of place memory. He insisted that objects
(02:24):
can capture and carry traces of past events, and that
when a suitably sensitive person is in close proximity to
such an object, they will have what he termed a
retrospective experience. According to Price, ghosts are not active, supernatural
visitors from beyond the veil, but more like photographic negatives.
(02:48):
They are effectively developed in the moment by those with
the right sensitivities to what Price called the psychic ether.
Twenty years later, archaeologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge would further refine
the idea in his book ghost and ghoul provoked by
his own uncanny experience. On a warm summer morning in
(03:21):
nineteen fifty nine, Thomas Lethbridge was outside his home in Devon,
waving across a stream to his neighbour when he apparently
saw a tall woman dressed in antiquated clothing standing not
a yard behind her. So curious did the old fashioned
woman look that Later in the day he asked his
(03:41):
neighbour who her visitor was. So you're seeing my ghosts
as well, now, she replied. When Lethbridge and his wife
investigated the immediate area of the sighting, both claimed to
feel a deep tingling sensation and a sense of pressure
akin to an electromagnetic lace. The whole production, he wrote,
(04:03):
was comparable to a television broadcast, the figures like pictures
transmitted by somebody or something else and merely received by him.
Lethbridge echoed Price's argument that ghosts are not spiritual entities
with agency and intent, but merely images replayed by an
(04:24):
unspecified energy source running through the natural world. He thought
the nearby stream might be important, as running water as
commonly featured in the law and logic of the supernatural.
This evolving hypothesis has since settled on a specific name,
a name that points to one material above all others
(04:47):
as the foundation for what we think of as ghosts.
It is known as stone tape theory. Stone, particularly quartz
and limestone, is thought by some to be uniquely case
of storing and projecting past events, especially when those events
are ripe with emotion, say at the point of death
(05:10):
or agony or great loss. Under these conditions, proponents of
the stone tape theory argue that something of that emotion
remains trapped in the bedrock and buildings, like energy in
a battery, waiting only for the presence of someone sensitive
to trigger a transmission. And what then, of a place
(05:34):
not just built from stone, but carved from it, a
place we have cut into the world with force and
trauma and mass tragedy. Is it any wonder that there
we might also have inscribed something of ourselves that still remains.
You're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard mc lean smith.
(06:06):
The Hoosac Tunnel is a stretch of single track working
railway cut through the quartzoth rock and limestone of the
Berkshire Hills and western Massachusetts. Completed in eighteen seventy five.
It was the first major mountain tunnel of its kind
in North America, undertaken to provide a rail connection between
(06:28):
New York and Boston. For thirty years, it was the
longest tunnel on the continent. The tunnel's eastern end opens
up on the outskirts of Florida, Massachusetts. The western opening
is nearly five miles away in the small city of
North Adams. Between these two portals there is only darkness
(06:51):
and stone, the exposed innards of the mountain, illuminated for
only a brief few seconds by the lights of the
rushing freight train. From each entrance. The way ahead slopes
slightly upward to a meeting point in the middle. This
allows water to drain out, but for those on foot,
(07:12):
the rise is enough to obscure any site of the
exit ahead. It makes the Husack that rare thing, a
tunnel without a light at its end. Its construction is
a testament to the nation's industrial might, prove that nothing,
not even the land itself, can withstand American ambition. Though
(07:36):
if you read the history, it's clear that the land
put up a hell of a fight, and if you
believe the stories, that fight still echoes on the housack
was played by problems from its inception. Ground was first
broken in eighteen fifty two. Whenever spoke boring machine was
(07:57):
set to work on the mountain, it failed after only
ten feet and there it remained for years, its drill
bit trapped in the rock like the finger of a
greedy child. It was then that those in charge realized
the true scale of the challenge they faced. Engineers were
sent to Europe to research cutting edge drilling techniques, while
(08:20):
financiers waited in Massachusetts with mounting in patients. No more
work would take place for the next two years. In fact,
it would take a quarter century of hand digging, pneumatic drilling,
and blasting before the tunnel was complete, leaving a vast
artery in the earth twenty feet high and twenty four
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feet wide. Workers dug inward from the east and west
simultaneously with the aim of meeting in the middle, and impressively,
they did so with less than an inch of error,
and that is without considering the need for a central
ventilation shaft, a thousand foot vertical chimney running all the
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way to the top of the mountain, which itself took
four years to dig over two million tons of earth
and rock were cleared from the hills, the two million
dollar budget ballooning to ten times that amount in today's money.
The cost of that first big dig equates to almost
(09:25):
half a billion dollars, but there were other costs too,
losses that could never be recouped. The Hoosac Tunnel was
a deadly project. Construction accidents were hardly rare in the
(09:49):
mid eighteen hundreds, but even by the periods lacks health
and safety standards, workers on the Hoosack experienced notable misfortune.
The recorded number of deaths on the project totaled one
hundred ninety five, enough for workers to begin calling the
Hohosuck the Bloody Pit. Workers were exposed a daily peril
(10:13):
from falls and falling rock to fires and flooding. Above
it all loomed the dread of nitro glycerine. For over
ten years, Whosok miners relied on gunpowder to blast away
at the mountain, a crude and inefficient approach that was
stared down by the rock, often only removing a few
(10:35):
feet for each explosion. Nitro Glycerine was used for the
first time on the Hoosack dig in eighteen sixty five,
the first time it was ever put to use in
a major American construction project. The explosive compound more than
doubled the rate of progress, but it came with terrifying downsides.
(10:59):
Extremely volatile and sensitive to heat and shock, it seemed
almost to have a malicious mercurial mind of its own.
On March twentieth, eighteen sixty five, three explosive experts were
planting nitroglycerine deep inside the tunnel. Two of the men,
ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, were making their way to
(11:22):
the safety bunker to shelter from the blast when the third,
Ringo Kelly, lit the charge. Only he did it early.
Brinkman and Nash were buried instantly beneath tons of rock.
Kelly vanished almost immediately, and rumors soon began to circulate
(11:44):
that its actions had been intentional murderous. Even as the
story goes, it was just over a year later, on
the morning of March thirtieth, eighteen sixty six, when, with
the area now cleared, Ringo Kelly's relatively fresh body was
found two miles inside the tunnel, at almost the precise
(12:07):
spot where he'd brought the rock down on his colleagues.
A deputy sheriff, Charles Gibson, is said to have quickly
declared that Kelly had been murdered by strangulation. Examination of
the body suggested he'd been killed the night before. No
culbrit was ever found or pursued, but rumors soon began
(12:30):
to emerge. But for whatever reason, Kelly had returned to
the scene of the crime, only for the unforgiving ghosts
of Brinkman and Nash to murder him. They were the
first supposed ghosts thought to haunt the houssack, their shades
forever trapped in the rock that had crushed them. Over
(12:58):
the next few years, dozens more people were killed by
errant detonations in the houssac. On October ninth, eighteen sixty nine,
three miners truged a half mile from the Eastern Tunnel
entrance to the nitro glycerine stock to prepare the substance
for that day's work. Something went wrong, and the ensuing
(13:20):
explosion left only one of the three with a body
to be buried. The other two, Felix and Oswald and
Montaigue brothers, were entirely vaporized. At least seven more major
explosions were recorded over the remainder of the dig, including
the deaths of four men in April eighteen seventy one,
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when incredibly a bolt of lightning struck the track outside
the tunnel and coursed nearly three thousand feet down the
metal rail before detonating the nitro at the other end,
a terrible accident that would forever define a more moderate
project for the husuc, though it was just one more
(14:06):
in a long sequence of tragedies. There is one especially
black day in the tunnel's history, however, that does stand out.
It was one o'clock on the afternoon of nineteenth of
October eighteen sixty seven, when a fire broke out in
the building on top of the central shaft. A lantern
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was left too close to the tank containing flammable nafta gas.
When this tank was opened for checks, the vapor ignited
and rapidly enveloped the entire structure in flames. At the time,
thirteen men were at the bottom of the shaft. By
that point, the dig had reached just under six hundred feet,
(14:50):
about half of its eventual depth, but far enough doubt
that those inside must have felt as though they'd been
swallowed whole by the A rough structure of steps and
wooden platforms ringed the inside of that stone throat, leaving
only enough space for the bucket to pass with its
(15:11):
load of excavated stone. It was a cramped and frightening
place to work. The bucket had just ascended and been
emptied when the fire engulfed the machinery. A foreman tried
to lure it back down to help retrieve the tunneling men,
but the flames kept him at bay. He could only
(15:32):
watch helplessly as the ropes and cables melted and the
bucket dropped into darkness. Even worse, the platforms at the
top of the shaft were laden with tools and machine parts.
When they collapsed, hundreds of drill bits, chisels, and assorted
sharp metal spilled into the hole like deadly rain. After
(15:57):
that came the platforms themselves, which crumpled in a mixture
of timber and ash and sealed the mouth of the
shaft completely. People rushed to the site, including over a
hundred fire fighters, who eventually extinguished the burning plug. Once cleared,
(16:17):
they peered breathlessly into the opening that seemed to yawn
back at them like a screaming mouth, but not a
sound was heard. Eventually, a workman named Mallory volunteered to
be lowered into the shaft on a single rope. He
descended around four in the morning, swapping the gloom of
(16:39):
an October night for the deeper darkness below. A journalist
for the North Adams Transcript described Malory's descent as an
exhibition of genuine heroism, with no stirring battle music, no
(17:00):
rushing thousands to share and reduce the terror. His peril
was grim and dreadful, and he went alone amid silence
and shuddering suspense. Hundreds of onlookers huddled in anticipation for
the thirty or forty minutes that Malory was in the shaft. Eventually,
(17:21):
he was drawn back up, ashen faced and on the
verge of passing out from air, noxious enough to extinguish
his lamp. Before lapsing into unconsciousness, he could only gasp
out the words no hope. Malory described how he'd reached
the bottom to find that the shaft was flooded to
(17:43):
a good dozen feet. This was to be expected, as
the machinery that pumped water out of the shaft had
been destroyed by the fire. However, the series of ladders
and platforms that the miners used to climb out sat
seventy feet above the bottom. A hoist was needed to
bridge that gap, but it had been rendered useless by
(18:06):
the fire, and so it was decided. Even if the
men survived the hail of falling debris, they never had
a chance of escaping the flood. They likely died in
the darkness and panic as the cold water inched slowly
up their bodies. It was soon after that that strange
(18:28):
things began to happen. It started with the bodies of
lost work crew beginning to surface in the shaft, as
if the hoosack was reluctantly releasing its grip. Over the
course of that long, heart worn winter, whales were said
to be heard coming from the shaft, cries of anguish
(18:50):
and pain, only partially muffled by the earth. More bizarre
were the apparent sightings of hazy figures carrying pickaxes and shovels.
They didn't respond when addressed, and they would vanish in
a moment, leaving no footprints in the freshly fallen snow.
But they walked the sight like they knew it, like
(19:13):
they fitted in there. It was almost a full year
before the shaft was pumped dry and the final bodies retrieved.
Their discovery painted a new patterner of horror on events,
as it was found that some of the men had
apparently survived the initial disaster and even built a crude
(19:35):
raft from the fallen timber. Whether they had then died
slowly from a lack of oxygen or through the even
more prolonged agony of starvation, none could say, nor could
anyone suggest how Malory had missed them during his rescue attempt,
or that anyone knew as that they had lingered in
(19:56):
the pitch. Those ghostly cries said to have been heard
emanating up from it, perhaps not quite so ghostly after all.
(20:17):
That final burial of the men from the pit seemed
to put to rest the supposed sightings of eerie figures
on the hillside around the shaft, but it didn't dampen
the strange activity deeper inside the hoosack. With so much
trauma stacking up, disquiet had arisen among the workforce. Men
(20:38):
began to complain about hearing the voice of a man
crying out in agony from somewhere within the tunnel. They
became so nervous that entire teams refused to enter after sunset,
and some walked off the job for good. One of
the dig managers, and mister Dunn, insisted that the noises
(21:00):
and no more than wind rushing through the cavity, But
faced with the labour revolt, he reached out to his friend,
a mechanical engineer named Paul Travers, to see if he
could help. As well as being respected within the industry,
Travers was also a decorated cavalry officer who'd served in
the Civil War. Everything about him spoke of common sense
(21:24):
and strong nerves, and on the night of September seventh,
eighteen sixty eight, he and Dunn toward the tunnel to
try and help dispel the worker's superstitions. In a letter
composed the following morning, Travers wrote how he and Done
bought a good two miles into the tunnel, notably to
(21:45):
the area below the central shaft and near the place
where Ringo Kelly's body was found. There in the cold silence,
they did indeed hear what sounded like a man groaning
in pain right by their position, But when they turned
on their lamps, they saw that they were entirely alone,
(22:08):
I'll admit, Travis wrote, I haven't been that frightened since Shiloh.
Travers and Dunn heard only what they took to be voices,
evidence perhaps of Charles Babbage's theory that human utterances can
linger in the air long after we are gone. But
(22:28):
in June eighteen seventy two, another trip into the tunnel
climaxed in a more viscerule encounter. A doctor named Clifford
Owens accepted the invitation to explore the houssack alongside drilling
Superintendent James mc kinstry. As they later described it, the
two men entered the tunnel at precisely eleven thirty p m. And,
(22:54):
just like Travers and Dunn four years before, they walked
two miles into the darkness. Owens later described their procession
lit only by the dim smoky light of their lamp
as the outside air and moonlight dwindled behind them. Nearing
the middle of the tunnel, they paused to rest. Suddenly,
(23:16):
they both began to hear a mournful sound and allulating
cry approaching them from down the tunnel. Before they could
so much as query the source, they apparently saw a
dimly lit figure walking towards them from the western end.
At first glance, Owens took the figure for a workman,
(23:37):
perhaps lost or injured, struggling toward the rescue of their lamps.
As it drew closer, however, he noticed two alarming details. First,
the figure took on a strange blue hue, dimly illuminated
against the surrounding blackness, and though it had the familiar
(23:58):
shape of a man, there was no head above the neck.
Terrified into paralysis, Owens and McKinstry could only watch as
the blue shape apparently drew closer, so close that Owens
(24:19):
could have reached out and touched it. There it stopped
mere feet away, where it remained motionless for several seconds,
and though it had no head with which to do so,
both men agreed that they felt it was observing them. Abruptly,
the figure moved off, walking past the stunned men and
(24:39):
dwindling into the dimness. They beat a hasty retreat, all
the while aware that they were now pursuing the entity,
though it didn't appear again. Owens and mckinstrey's is the
most famous apparent encounter in the Houssack, but it is
far from the last. The first train passed through the
(25:00):
housack in February of eighteen seventy five, carrying one hundred
and twenty five curious passengers. Nothing went awry. The huge
undertaking had been a success. New England was now readily
accessible by rail, but the end of construction didn't bring
an end to the tunnel's dark infamy. Several workers from
(25:23):
the Boston and Main Railroad reported unnerving experiences while making
the route. In the autumn of eighteen seventy five, a
fire tender named Harlan Mulvany was transporting a wagon loaded
with timber into the tunnel. He'd only gone a short
way into the shadow when something spooked both him and
(25:44):
his horses. Onlookers watched as the panicked man roughly whipped
his horses into a tight turn and careened out of
the tunnel. Several days later, workmen found both the horses
and Mulvaney's tims wagon in the Adams Woods, more than
three miles from the Housack of Mulvaaney. However, there was
(26:07):
no sign and the man was never seen again. His
was not the only disappearance. A century later, a man
named Bernard her starboard walked into the North Adams end
of the tunnel with its fox terrier on a leash.
His plan was to walk the full length of the Hoosack.
(26:28):
When asked why, he simply said that he was in
the mood for an adventure. Whether he got one or not,
we will never know. Her starboard never emerged at the
eastern end. Police and rail workers searched the tunnel, but
no trace of the man or his dog was ever found.
(26:56):
The stone tape theory posits that ghosts are not spirits, agency,
or impact. Rather, they are supposedly just visual replays of
moments of high emotion. The men apparently seen wandering the
ground around the mouth of the central shaft, the lonely
voices heard within the tunnel. Both of these would be
(27:18):
accommodated within the stone tape theory. Joseph in Poco's story
puts a different complexion on the Housack. In Poco, an
Italian immigrant to the area, began working aged eighteen for
the Boston and Main Railroad in nineteen twenty two. He'd
heard tales of the Houssock's reputation, but laughed them off.
(27:41):
Maybe he retained his good humor for two years until
February of nineteen twenty four. When he was busy working
one morning chopping thick ice from the track, he found
himself separated from his workmates by five hundred feet, which,
in the blind dark of the Husac, may as well
have been miles. Joseph was working by lantern light in
(28:05):
the middle of the tracks when, as he later recounted,
suddenly the tunnel filled with smoke. It was then he
heard a yell, Joe, it said, jump Joe. The young
man looked up to see the bulk of the number
sixty Express train less than seventy feet away. He threw
(28:27):
himself sideways and lived to chip ice another day. Looking around,
he saw no one. The voice seemed to come from
thin air, and it had saved his life. Six weeks later,
Joseph was back at work in the tunnel, using a
heavy bar to free train cars that had frozen to
(28:48):
the track. Once again, he was alone when he apparently
heard that familiar voice yell, drop it Joe. When he
did just that, moments later, the iron bar was flung
against the tunnel war by the current from a falling
power line. Weeks later, when he narrowly avoided being crushed
(29:11):
by a falling oak tree just outside the tunnel entrance.
Joseph and his workmates claimed to have heard wild peals
of laughter, seemingly without source. It was enough to convince
Joseph in Poco to seek employment elsewhere. He resigned and
moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, but each year he made a
(29:34):
pilgrimage back to the Hoosac to pay tribute and give
thanks to what he called his friend in the tunnel.
Thank you so much again for listening to the show Unexplained.
We'll take a short break now for the holidays. We'll
be back in the new year on Friday, January tenth
(29:57):
with the next new episode. Until then, this episode was
written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith.
Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant
podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft
of horror, writing with everyone from Ta Nanaeve Do to
(30:19):
the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend
it highly enough. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast
created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain
Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to
(30:41):
buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones,
and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show
wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get
in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories
you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an ex
explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can
(31:02):
find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach
us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at
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