The hiker walked faster, their boots thumping a dull, steady rhythm on the trail with each step.
They hadn’t wanted to be out there that late but had lost track of time. The area was beautiful. The woods stretched on for miles. It was hard to believe that they were in the middle of southern Ohio.
The hiker had come there to get away from the stress of their office job. Someone at work had told them that it would be just the thing. They were skeptical at first, but their co-worker bugged them enough that after a few weeks that they had decided to try it.
Even on the way down they weren’t sure if they were doing the right thing, but they became a believer as soon as they got into the woods. The world just seemed to melt away around them, and everything that had been bothering them seemed so far away.
Their co-worker had told them that there used to be a railroad that ran through the area. It had been gone for years, now converted into hiking and biking trails.
As relaxing as it had been, it was time to go home. The sun had just started its slow decent toward the horizon, and the hiker really wasn’t thrilled with the idea of stumbling down the trail at night.
As they passed the old train tunnel, the hiker stopped to catch their breath. They stood, hands on their hips, breathing hard. While they weren’t out of shape, they definitely weren’t used to going through the woods like this.
As they watched, they thought they saw something in the tunnel. It was just a flash, but they were sure they had seen something.
The hiker stared toward the tunnel, trying to make out something in the darkness inside.
Suddenly it came again. It was fast; just a flash of light moving in a short arc. A few seconds there was another flash, moving in the opposite direction.
As the hiker peered closer into the darkness, the flashes started to come faster and faster. Suddenly they could just barely see the outline of an old-fashioned lantern swinging in the darkness. In a few moments, a figure gradually came into view.
It was an old man, with a white beard and wearing dirty coveralls. They were incredibly, almost impossibly tall; the hiker guessed at least seven, maybe even eight feet tall. They held the lantern out in front of them, and it swung back and forth as it took lurching steps forward down the tunnel.
The old man’s eyes burned with a hellish light, his mouth hanging open in a silent scream.
Before they knew it, the hiker was running down the path. All they knew is that they had to get away as fast as they could.
The hiker had just met one of the many ghosts that allegedly haunt Moonville, Ohio.
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In 1856, Samuel Coe made the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad an unexpected proposition.
Samuel Coe owned land with good coal and clay on it, and he wanted to sell it. The problem was that the area was remote, and it was hard to transport out large amounts of his product to markets where he could sell it.
However, if the Marietta and Cincinnati would build a railroad line through that land – which he would give them for free – then he could easily ship it out. They would get the land for free in exchange for shipping his goods out.
The M & C quickly realized that the proposed rail line would provide a better route for them from Marietta, Georgia to Cincinnati, Ohio.
A deal was struck, and the line was built.
Before long, a small town had sprung up. It was mostly made up of coal miners and railroad workers. The named it Moonville.
At its height, Moonville only had about 100 residents. However, it did have houses and a school for the local children. It was a good thing, too.
Moonville was as isolated as it was small. There were no roads that ran into it, making the only way to get there was either by walking through the thick woods that surrounded it or by coming in by train.
Even in the early years, the 8-mile stretch of track earned a reputation for being dangerous. An unusually high number of train-related deaths took place there. The train tunnel, appropriately called the Moonville Tunnel, was too narrow for someone walking down the track to get out of the way of an oncoming train. The same went for the trestles.
Others blamed the thick woods for the deaths. They said that they had a dampening effect on the sounds the trains made as they made their way through, with walkers unable to hear them coming down the track until it was far too late.
Over the years it was in operation, the track claimed upwards of 27 lives.
Five train workers were killed in job mishaps when they were smashed between train cars or accidentally fell under the wheels of a moving locomotive. Three train wrecks also occurred on the tracks around Moonville.
According to Ohio folklore, not all the track’s victims left to enjoy an eternal rest.
In the 1890’s, people in the area around Moonville started telling stories of a man wearing white robes walking the track carrying a lantern. Some said that it was the spirit of a train engineer named Frank Lawhead.
Lawhead had been killed in one of the horrific train wrecks in the area when his train had collided with another train heading the opposite direction. Lawhead and another train worker, Charlie Krick, had both died in the accident.
Whoever the specter was, it quickly became known as the Ghost of Moonville.
Another ghost is said to have been an older woman who was hit by a train while going through the Moonville Tunnel. The legend says that it hit her so hard that her body came flying out of the tunnel.
The stories say that she wore a lavender perfume, or she rubbed a lavender-scented lotion into her skin. I know, I know – it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets hit by the train again.
After her death, people began to smell lavender around the area, seemingly with no source. People began to say that when they notice that smell, the woman’s spirit is near.
Yet another ghost that is said to inhabit the area is “Baldie” Keeton.
Legend has it that someone murdered Baldie and threw his body on the tracks. In the appropriately gory style of so many legends, his corpse was run over by multiple trains before finally being found the following day.
Apparently, Baldie holds a grudge against people in general, as it’s said that his ghost will sometimes sit at the entrance to the Moonville Tunnel and throw rocks at people walking by.
Others have claimed, like our completely made-up hiker at the beginning of the story, to have seen the spirit of an 8-foot-tall spectral brakeman, wandering the path with glowing eyes. They must not let him see well in the dark because he sometimes carries a lantern.
Several train engineers claimed to have seen lights swinging in the tunnel. A swinging lantern or light was a railroad signal that meant there was something wrong up ahead and to stop the train as soon as you could.
The engineer would immediately heed the warning, the train wheels grinding the locomotive to a stop. When they went to see what the problem was, there was nothing wrong. More disturbing, there was no one on the track or anywhere around it who could have swung the lantern.
It happened often enough that the railroad installed a signal light at Moonville, with all train engineers given strict instructions that they were to ignore all other lights in that area but the new light.
By the 1920’s, the Ohio coal fields had played out, with most of the available work in the area drying up with it. Gradually, families moved out of the area, going to where they could find work. By 1947, Moonville was empty.
Eventually the line itself was abandoned completely. The rails were pulled up and removed in 1988, and the area where the line ran converted to hiking and biking trails. The pristine beauty of the Ohio woods makes it hard to believe that the path they walk were witness to several gruesome deaths.
Today, curiosity seekers can still visit the remains of Moonville. There’s not much left besides the tunnel, the cemetery, and some old foundations. That, and maybe, the ghosts.
Sources
Moonville Tunnel. Ohio Department of Natural Resources, ohiodnr.gov
Moonville Tunnel. Moonvilletunnel.net.
Carpenter, Robert. Moonville – It’s an Ohio Ghost Town. Ohio Traveler.com
Clay. Ohio Department of Natural Resources, ohiodnr.gov
Gottsacker, Erin. How the ghosts of Moonville are keeping the town’s history alive. The Ohio Newsroom, 10/12/2023.
Soul of Athens. 2020.soulofathens.com