The Ghosts of Ashtabula

On December 29, 1876, the town of Ashtabula, Ohio, became the site of the worst rail disaster in U.S. history up to that time. A blizzard (with winds topping 50 mph) had left more than 20 inches of snow. The No. 5 train, known as the Pacific Express, was two hours late arriving in Ashtabula, due to the inclement weather; the station was filled with passengers.

The train, despite the delay, was moving right along at a whopping ten miles per hour. The train included two locomotives, two baggage, passenger, and express cars, three sleeping cars, and a smoking car. No one can be sure exactly how many passengers were traveling the No. 5 that day, but the estimate is that there were at least 147 people, passengers and crew, on board.

Daniel McGuire was the engineer of the first locomotive. As the train approached Ashtabula, it had to cross the bridge over Ashtabula Creek. McGuire increased the speed, in order to push through the piles of snow on the tracks, not to mention fighting the high wind. As the first locomotive came to the other side of the bridge, however, McGuire had an odd feeling that the train was somehow heading up an incline. When he looked behind him, he saw the second engine and eleven more cars falling into the creek - a distance of more than eighty feet - along with much of the railway bridge. McGuire steamed ahead, breaking the coupling with the second locomotive and driving to a safe point.

The Ashtabula train station was only about a fifth of a mile past the bridge. Telegraph operator William Alsell, a telegraph operator, was the first person at the station to find out what had happened to the train. He had heard the whistle as the train came near the bridge, and walked toward it, in the hope that it was a passenger train and that he might ride through town on it. When he saw that it was indeed the No. 5, he turned back toward the station to get his belongings. It was then that he heard the crash; he swiveled back to see the cars fall into the void. He ran to the bridge - but the bridge was gone.

A young woman named Marian Shepherd survived the crash. At the time it occurred, she was in her berth in one of the sleeper cars. She heard an odd sound, as if the train were now traveling along the ties, rather than the rails. Then she heard glass shattering. Later, she remembered someone else in her car screaming “We are going down!” She then felt the car falling; the sleeper car hit the creek only a few seconds later.

In the darkness, Shepherd worked to find her way out of the berth. She didn't know it, but the cars were upright when they landed; this meant that the lowest cars were in the creek itself, where drowning was a distinct danger. The top car, however, had landed with the heater burning; it was only a few minutes before this car caught fire. It took very little time, then, for the cars and the locomotive to burn.

Many of the survivors worked with a rescue crew from Ashtabula, removing the others from the cars. Eventually, they were forced back by the heat of the fire; they didn't realize that many of those rescued had been slowly submerged in the creek - the frozen creek that had been melted by the fire. Many of those still trapped in the lower cars drowned when the water flooded into what was left of the No. 5 train. Daniel McGuire remembered a woman who was trapped, with the fire making its way quickly toward her. In her desperation, she begged the rescue crew to amputate her legs so that she could be pulled out of the train. Nobody could reach her, and McGuire watched her burn to death. Engineer Peter Levenbroe, McGuire’s friend, who was in the second locomotive, was among the victims, having been crushed in the locomotive as it fell into the creek. He was still alive when found, but he died en route to the hospital.

William Alsell was among the rescuers that night. Not only did he smash windows to reach the victims, he worked frantically to keep them safe from the fire and the water. Thieves, unfortunately, had also joined the able-bodied crew, and were busy robbing the wounded and dead.

The site of the tragedy wasn't clean for more than a week. The railroad sent more than a hundred and fifty men to investigate, the bodies were never identified in total. Some of the bodies could only be identified by jewelry - jewelry that had been overlooked by the eager thieves. A funeral was held at two churches the following year, on January 19. Afterwards, the unclaimed bodies were buried in Chestnut Grove Cemetery.

At an inquest to determine responsibility for the accident, the jury came to the decision that the railroad was solely to blame; that the bridge contained many defects; that the company had never given the bridge a complete inspection. The jury found that the company had used the wrong heaters, rather than the type that would have been extinguished when the train derailed. The jury also pointed the finger at the fire department, since it concentrated more on rescuing the victims than on putting out the fire. (Rumors still abound about the fire department's lack of action; it is thought that the members of the department simply had no idea how to put out a fire such as this, and decided to try to save as many people as they could.)

Railroad man and millionaire Amasa B. Stone, Jr., was the designer and builder of the bridge. For the rest of his life, he rejected responsibility for the tragedy; he claimed that an act of God had been the cause.

Charles Collins, who inspected the bridge only ten days prior to the accident, was very different in his reaction. It was said that he "wept like a baby" when he saw the site of the accident. It was said that he had been made to give a positive report on the state of the bridge. (Had Collins taken a closer look on that last inspection, he would have seen that some of the sections were badly out of alignment, and he would have known that the bridge was in imminent danger of causing the sort of tragedy that did, indeed, occur.) The luckless Collins shouldered much of the blame. A few hours after testifying on the disaster, he went into his bedroom, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger.

Though Amasa Stone staunchly denied any and all responsibility for the wreck, pointing fingers everywhere but at himself and hanging Collins out to dry, his end was no better. He was viewed as a murderer by the public, and his health began to deteriorate. In 1883, he locked himself in his bathroom and shot himself through the heart.

What about the ghosts?

They have been seen and heard - but not in the creek bed, as one might think. It is the Chestnut Grove Cemetery, the final resting place for those unclaimed dead, where apparitions have been seen. They wear 19th-century clothing; some carry carpetbags. Screams can be heard occasionally.

Not far from the mass grave of the unknown victims, Charles Collins is buried in a mausoleum. His ghost, too, has been encountered in the cemetery, near his burial place. As in life, unable to forgive himself for the tragedy, he is still suffering today. Often, he appears with his face in his hands, sobbing. "I'm so very sorry," he weeps, just before disappearing.

Ruth Chatterton

Most people wouldn't know the name these days. Ruth Chatterton was a stage and screen actress (among other films, she made the classic Dodsworth with Walter Huston and a young David Niven in 1933). She was also fond of flying; she flew the Atlantic solo many times, and was acquainted with the ill-fated Amelia Earhart.

Chatterton also wrote a fascinating story called "Ladies' Man", reprinted in an Alfred Hitchcock compilation titled Stories for Late at Night. The story - and a very well-written one, too - details her experiences at her good friend Noel Coward's country home, Goldenhurst.

It seems that, due to the house being filled with guests, Ruth was allocated a bedroom on the ground floor, next to Mrs. Coward's sitting room. There were no other guests near her; all the other bedrooms were on the upper floor. Late that night, a voice called out, "Ruth!" Chatterton instinctively called out, "Come in!"

The door swung open... and she saw only the blackness of the hall beyond. She heard, though, the sound of footsteps pacing through the room. In sheer terror, Chatterton closed her eyes, only opening them hours later, after sunrise, having fallen asleep despite her fear.

With the sunlight and activity the following day, Chatterton found it easy to dismiss the terror of the night before. She even convinced herself that it had been some sort of practical joke on her - but a conversation with Coward and another woman soon made her realize that the ghost was all too real, and that he had been seen by other women in the same room. While Chatterton heard a voice and footsteps, the other women had actually seen him, and had been terrified beyond belief.

Despite Coward's tales of the other women's experiences, Chatterton still tried to deny his story, until their mutual acquaintance broke in. The woman (given a false name in the story) told Chatterton that the room was haunted, and that she knew it... because she had been one of the previous guests in that room.

Your ghost stories

Anyone out there want to send in your experiences? Feel free! I might edit the stories, of course, and I reserve the right to print them should the occasion arise.

Go for it!

Banff Springs Hotel

The staff of the hotel will tell you that it isn't haunted. Others will tell you differently.

One of the ghosts seen at the hotel is that of a bride. There are two stories about her untimely death; in one version, she was walking down the staircase when her train caught fire from one of the candles on the stairs. In her panic to put out the flames, she fell down the stairs and broke her neck. In the other version, she tripped over her train, causing the neck-breaking fall. She has been seen dancing alone in the hotel ballroom.

A bellhop called Sam has been seen still doing his rounds, helping (living) guests with keys and performing other services.

A similarly helpful ghostly bartender tells guests when they've had enough to drink.

A headless piper still plays his bagpipes (how?).

One of the rooms was the site of a murder - either of a little girl or of a whole family, depending on the story you hear. It had to be walled up due to the fact that a child's fingerprints appeared on the mirror every time it was cleaned.

Chickamauga

The word "chickamauga" comes from the Cherokee language; it means "river of death".

This is a highly appropriate name for a field where more than 34,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed on September 19 - 20, 1863. It's now a park, but the events of 1863 linger on.

After the battle finally ground to a halt, many of the soldiers' wives took lanterns and searched through the night for their loved ones. The bodies left on the battlefield weren't buried for two months; given the state of the corpses by that time, they were simply buried three to four in a grave, usually in shallow graves. To this day, it's not unusual for one of the soldiers' bodies to be found in the park; it's a giant graveyard, with no map telling where the bodies are.

Civil War reenacters frequently come to Chickamauga, acting out one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles. One group, camping overnight in the park, met up with another group; the first group sat around the second group's campfire, trading stories, then returned to their own camp to get some sleep. The following day, no trace was to be found of the second group - no food, no tents, no sign of a campfire.

Visitors and rangers alike have experience paranormal phenomena. The spirits of the dead appear with ghastly wounds. Hoofbeats and footsteps are heard. Sounds of moaning, and of sobbing women (the soldiers' wives, most likely) echo through the area. A headless horseman has been seen. Mist swirls through the field.

The "River of Death" continued to act thirty years later, when troops of men were stationed at Chickamauga for training prior to being shipped down south to fight in the Spanish-American War. Many of them fell ill and died.

These days, the park is also a spot where people have been murdered, or where murder victims have been taken and dumped; the soldiers of 1863 aren't the only ones whose remains have been found here. One memorable story concerns a man whose wife and her lover attempted to murder him. He managed to escape, though badly wounded, and ran screaming through the park before a ranger found him. The two would-be murderers were still chasing him, each of them armed with a knife.

Several photos showing inexplicable images have been taken at Chickamauga - misty forms, strange shadows, and so forth.

The park is open daily - and at night, I'm sure it's even more open, but be sure to get permission, if you feel like braving the nighttime atmosphere.

Poveglia

The island of Poveglia is located in the Venice Lagoon, between Venice proper and the island of Lido.

The story - a good one, but of dubious (at best) authenticity, is that during the Great Plague, Venice's fast-dying victims were put on Poveglia. Even those who weren't dead, but considered to already have the plague, were dragged out of their homes and forced to the island, where they were thrown into plague pits with the dead. A cloud of smoke usually however over the island, from the bonfires built to burn the corpses.

In 1922, so the story goes, someone got the bright idea to build a psychiatric hospital on the island. The doctor in charge was a sadist who liked to "experiment" on the patients. The patients, by the way, reported hearing strange noises and seeing the ghosts of rotting bodies, but these complaints were put down to mental illness. The doctor in charge continued his little hobbies on the patients.

Finally, the doctor himself fell from a high tower in the hospital, and was choked to death by a strange fog that forced itself into his mouth.

Poveglia is regarded as one of the ten most haunted places on earth. It is off-limits to tourists.

A haunted house that really is haunted!

A menacing voice warns visitors to "Get out!" of a certain fifth-floor room.

A woman, bleeding from her slashed wrists, screams out, "Help me!"

The scent of cooking food wafts down the hall from a long-disused kitchen.

The Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky was once a famed hospital for victims of the early-20th-century "White Death", better known as tuberculosis. Regarded as one of the best sanatoria in the country, the treatment methods in those pre-antibiotic days are horrifying to modern readers. Fresh air was thought to be beneficial for tuberculosis sufferers, so the patients were put into large rooms with the windows wide open, even in the dead of winter, to "clear" the germs from their lungs. One last-resort treatment is one that must have been pure agony for the patients. A balloon was inserted into the lungs and inflated. This "treatment" often involved the removal of one or more ribs, to inflate the lungs even further, and almost invariably resulted in the death of the patient.

The sanatorium had a "Body Chute", a secret passage that the staff used to remove the bodies of those patients who had died. Realizing the the sight of corpses being carted out of the sanatorium on a daily basis would have a demoralizing effect on the rest of the patients, they devised a way to take them out in secret, unseen by the residents. This passage was also used by the staff to enter the sanatorium in inclement weather.

As with so many "hospitals" of its kind, the Waverly Hills Sanatorium eventually closed with the onset of newer and more effective (not to mention far more humane) treatments for tuberculosis. The imposing, rather scary-looking building fell into disrepair.

Now, the premises are used as - surprise! - a haunted-house attraction, with the novel twist that this is one place that has its own ghosts, not those dreamed up by a creative team. Room 502 is said to be the most haunted room; the fifth floor is where patients with mental illnesses were kept, and it continues to be the most atmospheric and disturbing of the building. In 1928, a nurse in her late twenties hanged herself in this room. Rumor has it that she had had an affair with a married doctor on the staff, and became pregnant. Rather than face the social ostracism of being pregnant and unmarried, she chose suicide. This is the room where the words "Get out!" are frequently heard.

In 1932, another suicide occurred when a nurse threw herself off the roof patio.

So far, it seems that most of the ghosts are not those you would expect - not the patients, who underwent tortures in their search for a cure, but the specters of the despairing nurses (and, perhaps, an orderly, for whom there is no background story). The fifth floor, though, seems to have absorbed the insanity of its erstwhile residents; could that be why the pregnant nurse of 1928 chose to hang herself there?

Now, the curious can have a good look at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium. The current owners have put in a lot of hard work to clean up the place; carting off garbage, removing dangerous asbestos, laying new floors. They offer 4-hour and 8-hour "ghost hunts" to the intrepid. The Waverly Hills website contains all the details, including some of the hospital's history, and photos that may or may not show some of the disembodied residents.

WARNING: The sanatorium is private property. Nobody is allowed on the grounds without a reservation. The "ghost tours" are ONLY for those 18 years of age and older. See the website for further information.