IsabellaLinton wrote:
Fnord wrote:
I miss Hallowe'en. My kids are grown up, I am about to retire, and no one believes the old legends anymore.
In my hometown, a legend has it that on October 31, 1927, a group of 13 miners were killed in a cave-in somewhere along the river. Supposedly, if you hid yourself along the riverbank on Hallowe'en, the 13 miners would emerge from the ground at midnight (the end of their shift) and try to make their way home, with their headlamps glowing a sickly green and their flesh hanging from their bones.
Of course, it was great fun for us (as kids) to dare each other to sit by the riverbank and wait for the miners to appear. It was even more fun to dress up as a zombie miner and scare the other kids along the riverbank, too!
That sounds like Charles Dickens' short story "The Signal-Man" (1866).
I had to look up the synopsis. Similar only in that both are "ghost stories".
Another "ghost story" from my hometown featured the railroad trestle near Scout Park, where Boy- and Girl-Scouts would camp out to earn their merit badges. As the story goes, a young girl arrives at the park, thinking that she was already late for her troop's camp-out. Instead, she encounters a group of homeless men[1] who chase her onto the trestle. She is about halfway across when a train rounded the far bend. With the train in front of her and the men behind her, she had no choice but to jump into the river, about a hundred feet below. Her body was never found, and the men were never caught[2].
It is said that on moonless nights, her ghost can be heard somewhere along the riverbank, weeping and calling out for her momma.[3]
[1] Some say escaped inmates, others say migrant farm worker, still others say local hoodlums.
[2] So how could anyone else have learned the story?
[3] There are no newspaper accounts of any such incident. However, local girls have gone missing from time to time; mostly runaways.
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The mere fact that science may not yet adequately explain an object, event, or experience does not mean the immediate explanation should automatically default to a conspiratorial, extraterrestrial, paranormal, or supernatural cause.