128 years after horrific wreck, North Carolinians say the ‘ghost train’ still runs
A passenger train in North Carolina said to be making up for lost time in the early hours of the morning lurched off a 60-foot tall bridge and into the creek below on Aug. 27, 1891 — 128 years ago.
Now on the anniversary of the wreck, people swear the “ghost train” and its long-dead specters can be seen on the tracks at Bostian Bridge just outside Statesville.
“At the bottom of the fall, seven train cars crashed into Third Creek,” according to the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “A few of the passengers walked into Statesville for help. Others crawled out of the wreckage, dazed and confused, while some wandered around. Still others sat on top of the train cars until help arrived.”
The 20 dead passengers were laid out in the Farmer’s Tobacco Warehouse, the DNCR said. Nearly 30 more were injured.
Some drowned in the creek as the waters rose, according to the state office .
It was the “worst disaster in Iredell County’s history” at the time, the Statesville Record & Landmark said on the anniversary in 2014. It’s still second behind an influenza epidemic in 1918 in terms of lives lost, according to the newspaper.
Engine number 9 belonging to Richmond & Danville Railroad was 34 minutes late as it rumbled west to Asheville, according to a 2006 article from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.
The train descended into Third Creek at a speed of 35 to 40 mph less than five minutes after leaving the Statesville station, landing 153 feet from where it left the bridge, the article states.
A coroner’s inquest found the accident was caused by someone allegedly removing spikes from the rails.
The blog “Murder, Mystery and Mayhem in the Old North State,” edited by the N.C. DNCR, said the R&D Railroad hoped to solve the mystery by offering a $10,000 reward in newspaper advertisements.
But the culprits weren’t caught until six years later when two men who supposedly confessed to other inmates at the state penitentiary were convicted in 1897, according to the Encyclopedia of N.C.
In the years since, North Carolinians have reported strange sightings.
A woman waiting on the side of the road near the tracks in 1941 — 50 years after the accident — said she saw a train drive straight off the bridge, according to a North Carolina blogger.
The woman, who had been waiting for her husband to return after their car got a flat tire, ran to the embankment and saw “a twisted mass of wreckage being flooded by the waters of Third Creek,” blogger LeAnne Carey wrote on The Pamlico Porch.
When she brought her husband to see, no wreckage could be found. They reportedly asked the Statesville train station if any crashes had been reported and an agent told them about the 1891 disaster.
“As he said this, the woman screamed and fainted. She knew that she had seen a ghost train,” Carey said.
On the anniversary in 2010, the legend of the ghost train brought a team of 12 “ghost-hunters” to Bostian Bridge hoping to watch the wreck play out, according to WBTV, the Charlotte Observer’s news partner.
The Iredell County Sheriff’s Department said a 29-year-old died and two others were injured when they mistook a real train hurtling toward them for the “ghost train,” the media outlet reported.
A nearby resident, Peggy Ree Cook, told WBTV people often ask to walk through her property to visit the bridge.
“It was pretty much a tragedy,” she said.
This story was originally published August 28, 2019 at 7:01 PM with the headline "128 years after horrific wreck, North Carolinians say the ‘ghost train’ still runs."
