Urban Legend: Cohoke Ghost Light in Virginia

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Click play to listen to a fully narrated story around Virginia's Cohoke Ghost light and their personal experience going out to the tracks.

The Urban Legend: Cohoke Ghost Light

Along this railroad track back in the 1880s, a train was having trouble with one of the hitches tugging at the engine weird as they moved. They decided to come to a full stop to see exactly what was going on.

The engineer stayed put, but one of the conductors was sent to inspect it. Turns out, some of the chains weren’t hooked up right and jumbled around in a big knot. So it would stretch and pull the car forward as it moved.

The hitch itself wasn’t even done right or hooked up at all. So the conductor starts getting the heavy chains untangled before he could hook up the hitch again. But, something went wrong. The engineer later at the trial said he swore up and down he saw the conductor leave the gap between the two cars.

He said he thought he saw the conductor give him the A-ok sign with his right hand and that he stepped on the train way back instead of coming back to the engine pit. The engineer told someone later in a bar that when he locked eyes with the conductor, he had a malevolent smirk as though he’d just achieved something.

So the engineer starts the steam engine again, the front cars inch forward. Then he hears a garbled scream, followed by silence and an audible crack sound.

He turns back to see the cars aren’t connected and he’s spreading the gap more. The engineer now hops down from the engine to walk back to the two cars. Lying on the ground staring up at him with wide-open eyes and a gapped mouth, the severed head of the conductor nestled in between two rail rungs.

Blood coated the chains and spilled like thick black milk over the metal track. Gushing from the conductors neck and body. The trial pieced together what they think happened. The tangled mess of chains somehow got around the conductors neck, and when the engineer started to pull forward….. It decapitated him.

So now when you go to visit a specific set of tracks in Cohoke you may end up seeing a spirit orb over the tracks, or hear train whistles in the distance. Some say there's more to it than just that. There's something wrong with that space, it makes you see things.

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This story was submitted by Carl Shaible who grew up in Virginia during his teen years. The story told in the above recording was a dramatic adaptation of an interview I had with him in 2016.

In fact to quote Carl during my interview with him:

Tasha: So haunted train track huh?

Carl: Yeah, So haunted train tracks. So back when I was young dumb stupid, wasn’t a member of the church, so I drank prolifically. Um, we were all sitting around at a house one night and someone started talking about these train tracks out in Western Virginia where I lived. Saying that it was haunted, that apparently one of the conductors was inspecting the tracks one night and the engineer didn’t see it. And started off and actually killed the guy. And apparently, they say the conductor still walking the train tracks looking for his head, because apparently he got decapitated by the train....