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Just as the construction of the Elizabeth line (Crossrail) may have disturbed some slumbering spooks by tunnelling through millennia-old ruins and at least a couple of plague pits, this rather lurid recent article in The Metro speculates that work on the massive HS2 project could see "Roman ghouls rise from the dead"!

https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/05/hs2-...-of-roman-soldiers-say-ghost-hunter-16223301/

MIKI YORK​

Founder of UK Haunted
Scariest experience? At a Castle in North Wales, Miki had a bad feeling that something was going to come and get him. ?I can't explain why I felt that but I was so scared.? A year later they returned to this location and he did a lone vigil in this same area spending 20 minutes on his own at the bottom of the steps.

https://w.uktv.co.uk/celebrity-haunted-hotel/gallery/meet-paranormal-experts/
 
Just as the construction of the Elizabeth line (Crossrail) may have disturbed some slumbering spooks by tunnelling through millennia-old ruins and at least a couple of plague pits, this rather lurid recent article in The Metro speculates that work on the massive HS2 project could see "Roman ghouls rise from the dead"!

https://metro.co.uk/2022/03/05/hs2-...-of-roman-soldiers-say-ghost-hunter-16223301/

So if your kids get bored on long train journeys and keep pestering you with "are we nearly there yet?", just buy them the I-Spy book of ghosts to make that HS2 journey fly by!

spy.png


I gather it's 10 points for spotting a phantom coach, 20 for a highwayman (must include horse), 30 for a black dog, 50 for Roman soldiers plus a bonus 100 points if they're embedded up to their thighs in the road!
 
I have had victims of overt harassment upgraded to First Class and the offender kicked off at the next stop.

I once told such a guy to get off the train at Tottenham Court Road. He got whiny and defensive and then - kind of to my surprise - he did. (To be honest, I suppose it could have been his stop anyway.)
 
Dennis Hamley, The Railway Phantoms.

Fiction, but sounds interesting. Review by a Railway enthusiast with slight focus on that community.

 
The Mexborough Ragger
A little girl ghost in the abandoned Cadeby Tunnel.
A somewhat belated update; after I posted this in 2019, some ghost hunters went into Cadeby Tunnel looking for the Ragger, but instead they apparently met the ghost of a policeman.
they were suddenly blinded by bright torch light coming from the direction of their cars. The team turned to face the source of the light, they were unable to see who was holding the torch because it was shining directly at them, but Charlene said she was able to make out a bald head. Then they heard a deep voice say "South Yorkshire police." Chrissie challenged this and said "go on then, show us your ID," but then to her surprise the man and the light disappeared. She said, "he just vanished. His light disappeared. There was no footsteps away."
 
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A somewhat belated update; after I posted this in 2019, some ghost hunters went into Cadeby Tunnel looking for the Ragger, but instead they apparently met the ghost of a policeman.
https://www.higgypop.com/news/cadeby-tunnel-ghost-mystery/
Thanks, I'm jealous of them for being able to explore that location at night.

But...

You can blame it on how the media has written this case up, but there are lots of mentions of 'tunnel' and they are there to investigate the tunnel. I certainly initially thought they had encountered the man with the torch inside the tunnel, but they didn't, he was outside by their cars:

"Then, they were suddenly blinded by bright torch light coming from the direction of their cars"

Well, all decent torches are blinding at night and bald men are common (not quite yet one myself).

More about the tunnel:

"The explore... we arrived at the end of Garden Lane having passed through Cadeby village the lane leads to a large construction yard however it’s also littered with fly tipping and dubious local youths one particularly guy looked very suspicious so we turned back at parked on the A630 just topside Conisbrough then walked back towards Cadeby Tunnel over the Conisbrough Viaduct, very easy to spot when you know where the tunnel is no effort to get in either other than making sure you don’t slip in the mud, nice steady explore despite its short length it lit up nicely..."

https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/cadeby-tunnel-south-yorkshire-july-2020.124301/

I'm looking at images pf the tunnel entrance on Google maps and it seems to be surrounded by woodland. This seems to be where they parked at the bottom of Garden Lane:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.4904827,-1.2169479,3a,75y,314.65h,74.71t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sK9JMM29yWjFTaqBMhccSYA!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid=K9JMM29yWjFTaqBMhccSYA&cb_client=maps_sv.tactile.gps&w=203&h=100&yaw=104.99376&pitch=0&thumbfov=100!7i16384!8i8192

To be honest I believe they were in a heightened state after all their calling spirits in the tunnel for the 2-hour live stream and got freaked out by a copper with a torch checking vehicles at the parking site for fly-tippers and other ne'er-do-wells. He saw they weren't the people he was looking for (but rather three innocent women) and went quietly on his way so as to not give his presence away further.

Why? Well they may have stumbled into a covert fly-tipping or anti-poaching operation such as this one:

"Police were equipped with specialist 4x4s, night vision equipment and the police helicopter descended on the Cotswolds and Thames Valley in a joint operation to catch poachers and rural criminals.

Over five nights the officers from both forces patrolled areas, crossing police borders targeting areas in which poachers normally carry out their illegal activities. The operation also included numerous game keepers and land owners who were set in covert static positions acting as look-outs, utilising thermal imaging and night vision equipment to notify the officers of any sightings via a radio link."

https://www.cotswoldjournal.co.uk/n...ive-day-anti-poaching-operation-in-cotswolds/

The girls said they had the feeling their vehicle was being watched, well, yes it probably was.

If not a copper then maybe a landowner or game keeper helping with the operation who used the name of the Police when challenged as he was a part of the Police operation but of course didn't have ID and retreated to his hide. To these women he would have seemed to vanish as such people know how to move through woodland making as little noise as possible.

Or he may have been an actual poacher or fly-tipper. I know from reports of poaching activity on the Haldon Hills in Devon that they will drive their cars with no lights on to avoid being seen.
 
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I agree with all of this. Cadeby isn't a very salubrious area nowadays, since the demise of the pits. Those woods used to be NCB property; I wouldn't go there at night. But it is the living that you need to be wary of thereabouts, not the unquiet dead.
 
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I agree with all of this. Cadeby isn't a very salubrious area nowadays, since the demise of the pits. Those woods used to be NCB property; I wouldn't go there at night.
One example of the fly-tipping in the area:

"A number of confidential documents were discovered by farmer Tim Braithwaite at the entrance to one of his fields in Cadeby Lane near Sprotbrough yesterday."

https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/crim...ds-found-dumped-south-yorkshire-field-2841287

There are numerous more.
 
There was the ghost of Joe Baldwin, that haunted the tracks near Maco, North Carolina. Joe was a conducter, and was in the rear of the train when he realized the caboose had become uncoupled and was rolling downhill. He frantically waved his latern at the oncoming train, but to no avail. He was decapitated in the crash.

For years afterward, a light would appear on the tracks, swinging from side to side as it glided down the tracks, sometimes changing colors, sometimes describing a high arc into the grass. Many said it was the ghost of Joe. Other witnesses experienced strange "time shifts;" seeing the light and making it back to their cars without apparantly passing their friends along the way. :confused:

Hans Holzer went to investigate in the 60s and (typically) made the whole story focus on his celebrity as a ghost hunter!

Joe ceased to appear when they pulled the track up.

Going back to the very first post on this thread:

These 'railroad lights' are an interesting phenomenon and seem very much a part of US folklore - I can't think of any in the UK for example.

As far as the one at Maco goes I think the explanation is fairly obvious. People were seeing lights from cars on a bit of road some distance away.

I managed to prove this to myself a few years ago by finding the site of the old crossing on Google Maps. Some accounts mentioned the light appearing "near Hood Creek" and also that it was more often seen after rain. Sure enough when you traced eastward from the crossing site, you first passed Hood Creek and then (a mile or two further on) a stretch of the old railway line where a road ran directly alongside it for a while. So it seems apparent that people were seeing the headlamps of cars from that section of road probably distorted by the intervening damp air above the creek (hence the phenomenon being more obvious after rain).

When I looked at the site of at least one other well known American "ghost light" you had almost the same set up (a crossing, followed by a straight stretch of railway with, a mile or so further on, a stretch of road running alongside it). So - in short, it's a common optical illusion to which a particular bit of modern folklore has been attached.

As for the reason for this folklore growing up in the first place - well, I remember reading something in Bill Ellis' book "Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore" which might be a good way of looking at it. This mentioned the stories of hauntings at Slaybrook Corner in Kent (which eventually mutated into a Mothman-style 'bat' creature and UFO sighting). Ellis pointed out that nearly all the reports came from mixed groups of teenage people or couples. But the "common factor was that the girlfriend inevitably said she was terrified": in other words, these ghost stories emerge as a convenient way for young couples to get close to each other...

Unfortunately since I looked at Google Maps some years back there has been a huge amount of development in the area so it's no longer so apparent where the Maco light was.
 
I was born within walking distance of Horsted Keynes station and so delighted the heritage Bluebell Railway has a ghost or two:

"A worker on the railway experienced an oppressive feeling, and a sensation as if someone were walking just behind or alongside them. The worker later discovered that other people had experienced the same feelings, and that signalmen working at Kingscote would receive calls from the tunnel's telephone, even though no one would be within"

The date given is 1999 and the location the tunnel at Sharpthorne, the longest on preserved railway.

https://www.paranormaldatabase.com/recent/index.php
 
I was born within walking distance of Horsted Keynes station and so delighted the heritage Bluebell Railway has a ghost or two:

"A worker on the railway experienced an oppressive feeling, and a sensation as if someone were walking just behind or alongside them. The worker later discovered that other people had experienced the same feelings, and that signalmen working at Kingscote would receive calls from the tunnel's telephone, even though no one would be within"

The date given is 1999 and the location the tunnel at Sharpthorne, the longest on preserved railway.

https://www.paranormaldatabase.com/recent/index.php

The Bluebell Railway is a wonderful place to visit. I have been there many times (yes, I confess I am a railway enthusiast). There are several ghosts associated with the preserved railway in Sussex. I have heard the stories about the tunnel being haunted. One of the steam locomotives is also apparently haunted:
 

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Chanced upon this allegedly haunted cafe on Yeovil Junction station:


Back in the early-90s I once bought a sandwich in that cafe whilst travelling from Salisbury to Exeter by train. There wasn't a refreshment trolley on the train and so the guard allowed us 10 minutes at Yeovil Junction whilst us passengers besieged that small cafe...! Fortunately it was a quiet train (mid-February) so we all got something to eat and drink. The service has improved a lot since then, with a faster, hourly service
 
Yesterday I rolled up for an early shift and chatted with a colleague. The subject turned to ghosts, especially those believed to haunt our depot, and he told me about something he'd experienced that very morning.

Seems he'd been walking down the service road towards the depot and had heard the front door swing open and slam shut on its spring. A distinctive sound, and there isn't another door within hearing distance.

He naturally assumed someone had walked in there before him; but there was nobody in, and the lights were still out.

Thinking someone was intruding or stealing, he put the lights on and searched the place: nope, empty.

There's only one way in and out, apart from a heavy sliding metal gate at the far end, and that hadn't been disturbed.

Andy is a hardheaded railwayman of 40-odd years' service, not given to yarns or imagining things. I believe him.
We enjoyed a frisson together. :chuckle:

He then told me a different station ghost story, new to me.
On the same road there is a service lift for taking goods etc between the road and the underground staff walkway.

The lift is in use all day for moving cafe supplies one way and mobile crates of rubbish the other. Andy told me that a couple of workers he knew refused to travel alone in the lift because they'd had a fright.
They wouldn't discuss what had gone on but one went so far as to say 'I know what I saw!'

This was a serious problem for staff whose job involved moving goods and rubbish all day. They'd get around it by either taking the long way round the station, involving a substantial walk and two unhaunted lifts, or blagging a colleague to escort them in the scary lift.

'I know what I saw!' - next time I'm in work I will certainly take a ride in that lift. :cool:

Have to say that as my much-anticipated recent ride in the local hospital's well-known haunted lift passed uneventfully, hopes are high for a sighting of the station lift apparition. :)

He knows what he saw. :omg:

(Edited for typos)
 
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Keep using it, then when least expected :freak: you will know what you saw.
Yup, I'd be in there every day except it's the goods lift and I'm unsportingly expected to patronise the boring passenger/staff ones.
I will of course go for it ASAP anyway.

Come to think of it, I don't see it used much. Perhaps others have seen it too? I will ask around.
 
Archaeologists suspected a mass gave within the Bedlam burial ground, where 42 individuals were found last summer, contained victims of Britain’s last bubonic plague. Now five of the 20 individuals tested in Germany have shown traces of the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, as Michael Henderson, a Senior Human Osteologist at Museum of London Archaeology, explains

https://museums.eu/article/details/...t-dna-of-the-bacteria-behind-the-great-plague
 
Hmmm. A headstone on a plague victim's grave? That's not how I understood it went. Tip the bodies in, shovel in some lime and cover 'em up, don't hang about putting gravestones on there...

2B4E648000000578-3195081-image-a-55_1439394241565.jpg


Experts believe the unlucky 30 perished as the result of the plague because a headstone nearby reads '1665' and the individuals appear to have been buried hastily on the same day. Part of the excavation is shown.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...Death-victims-17th-century-burial-ground.html

maximus otter
 
I seem to remember that the plague started out as total virulence in 1348, but by the time we'd got to the 1600s it was no longer cutting swathes through the population as it had in previous centuries. So maybe there was slightly more reverence around the burials by then?
 
I seem to remember that the plague started out as total virulence in 1348, but by the time we'd got to the 1600s it was no longer cutting swathes through the population as it had in previous centuries. So maybe there was slightly more reverence around the burials by then?
1665 was the last big outbreak in London, and the way Pepys reported it, things were still rather panicked. But I am happy to stand corrected.
 
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