It’s a warm and silent night as you walk along the abandoned railroad tracks that run through your town with your buddies, you’re all laughing and having a good time that stops as one of your friends says pointing “Dude, look.” in front of the group. About ninety to a hundred feet away, you see what stopped your friend, up ahead is a light. It’s not perfectly round like a flash light would be, but more of a flickering almost like a lantern in the wind…there is no wind, not even a breeze. You can’t see the person holding the light, but you know it’s moving closer at a steady, even pace. Swinging gently back and forth doesn’t stop until about fifty feet away from your group, suddenly it speeds up, stops and wavers for a minute then swings wildly into an arch as if thrown into the air and disappears completely maybe less than a full twenty feet from your buddies and you. You all cast a glance at each other, freaked out, you all split as quickly as possible.
You have just witnessed a scene scores of people all over this country and around the world have been apart of since the golden age of railroads. it has a name, but it’s usually a variation on the same theme, phantom lights, ghost light, phantom brakeman, Paudling light etc. The story is usually starts and goes like this, a railway worker (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brakeman
Wikipedia) is killed in a horrible way somewhere along the rail line while either performing or failing to perform his duties. (https://www.legendsofamerica.com/co-marshallpass.html) Sometimes the victim is not a railroad worker at all but just some hapless guy (these stories are hardly ever centered on females) whose foot is caught, the oncoming train doesn’t see him or can’t stop in time and the results are terrible. There have been reports of people seeing whole “ghost trains” along the sites where major accidents have occurred, they say they can not only see the train but hear the horrific accident and accompanying screams.
These types of stories grew with the railroad system (https://americanfolklore.net/folklore/railroad-folklore/). As the rails began to represent freedom to more and more people legends popped up here and there and what is a good ghost story if not a legend? Many may have started as a cautionary tale in order to try to discourage “train hoppin” as it became an increasingly prevalent mode of transportation among the dirt poor who traveled the rails in search of work and morphed into stories of the “phantom brakeman.” But why have they endured? Could it be that since many people in this country and century have never actually been on an old fashioned train that the rails (in most towns the rails are long since abandoned and covered in weeds) hold some kind of mystery to the imagination, almost like they first did when they were laid down forging a connection to the past, or that when walking along a dark stretch of any type of road the human brain tricks the eyes and ears?