This train horror story took forty-one minutes. That’s how long I sat at a railroad crossing in western Kansas, in 2016, watching a freight train that should have passed in three. People around there trade very scary stories about that crossing. I never believed them until that night.
I was twenty-two. I worked the closing shift at a grocery store in a town of about four thousand people. I lived with my aunt on a farm twelve miles south. The drive home was flat and straight, two-lane blacktop through wheat stubble, with one railroad crossing about halfway.
The crossing had the full setup. Red lights, bells, white gates that came down across the road. Freight trains came through a few times a night. You’d sit there for two or three minutes, watching the cars go by, and then the gates would go up and you’d keep going. I’d done it a hundred times.
On a Tuesday in early November, I got to the crossing at 11:42 p.m. The lights started flashing just as I pulled up. The gates came down. I stopped, put it in park, and turned the radio down so I could hear the bells.
Car Number 48817
The train came from my left. I heard the horn first, far off. Then the engine went by, loud and bright, and then the freight cars started.
Boxcars mostly. Brown, red, rusty. Some with graffiti. The usual. I was half watching my phone.
Then I noticed one car because of the graffiti. A big yellow smiley face, spray-painted, with X’s for eyes. And a number stenciled on the side in white. 48817.
I only noticed it because it was kind of funny. X-eyed smiley. I took a picture of it with my phone.
About a minute later, it went by again.
Same smiley face, same X’s. Same number. 48817.
I told myself trains have sister cars. The same company paints a bunch of cars with numbers in a row. The same graffiti artist hits a whole yard in one night. That’s what I told myself.
Then it went by again.
I started counting. Every forty or fifty cars, there it was. The smiley face. 48817. I counted it nine times.
The bells kept ringing the whole time. I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel and I realized I couldn’t hear the engine anymore. Freight trains are loud. You hear the wheels, the couplings, the clanking. All of that had faded down to something soft and steady, like wind through a fence.
It was 12:10.
The Windows
At 12:16, the cars changed.
They weren’t boxcars anymore. They were passenger cars. Old ones, the long silver kind with rows of windows. And the windows were lit, yellow and warm.
There were people sitting in them. Every seat. They were all sitting the same way, facing forward, very straight. Men in hats. Women with their hair pinned up. A conductor walking down an aisle.
None of them looked out the windows. Not one. They looked straight ahead, toward where the train was going.
Except one woman.
She was in a window near the back of one car. Older, gray coat. As her window passed my headlights, she turned her head and looked right at me. And she lifted her hand off her lap, just a little, palm out. Like you’d do to stop someone from crossing a street.
Then she was gone, and the next car went by.
I put the car in reverse.
I backed up probably a hundred yards with the bells ringing in front of me. Then I turned around in a field approach and drove back to town the way I came, and took the long way home on the highway. Thirty-one extra miles.
When I got to my aunt’s house it was almost 1:30. I sat in the car in the driveway and looked at the picture on my phone. The smiley face with the X’s. 48817.
At least that part was real.
What the Railroad Said About My Train Horror Story
The next day I called the number on the blue sign at the crossing. Every crossing has one, for reporting problems. I told the woman who answered that the gates had been down for forty minutes the night before and I wanted to know what train it was.
She looked it up. She said there were no trains through that crossing between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. that night. She said the signal logs showed the gates went down at 11:42 and came up at 11:45. Three minutes. A normal train.
I asked her to check the car number. 48817.
She was quiet for a second. Then she said that number wasn’t on any active roster. She said it was an old number, from before a merger in the nineties. She said that car would have been retired a long time ago.
My aunt didn’t believe me. Nobody did, really, except my aunt’s neighbor, an old farmer named Lyle who’d lived out there his whole life. When I told him, he got very still. He said that when he was a boy, a passenger train used to run on that line. He said they stopped it in 1959. He didn’t say anything else.
I still have the picture on my phone. I’ve moved twice since then, to Wichita and then to Kansas City, and I’ve backed it up every time.
Two summers ago I drove back to visit my aunt. On a gravel road near her place, there’s a farm where somebody bought an old boxcar years ago to use as a storage shed. You see that a lot out there. It sits on blocks in a pasture, faded brown.
I’d driven past it a thousand times. But that day the sun hit it just right, and I saw the paint under the rust.
A yellow smiley face with X’s for eyes. And a number stenciled on the side in white. I don’t need to tell you which one.
I asked the farmer how long it had been there. He said since 1998.
I haven’t driven over that crossing since. I’m not sure what I’d do if the gates came down.
If creepy legends from the road are your thing, read the truck stop horror story about Shower 6, a rest stop horror story about a payphone in Oregon, or one of our ghost hunting stories from an Indiana poor farm.
Have you ever been stuck at a crossing too long?
Have you ever waited at a railroad crossing and felt like the train was never going to end? Share your train horror story, or any ghost train stories from a lonely crossing at night, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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