Silver Run

This is the story of the Silver Run ghost who haunts the railway in a small town in Canada. People who have seen the apparition say she is a raven-haired apparition young woman with pale skin and dressed in a long gown. The ghost always appears at the mouth of the Silver Run Tunnel.

Silver Run is a ghost town today and you can still see the old tunnel and the abandoned houses nearby. But 100 years ago, trains went through Silver Run on an hourly basis.

Nearing midnight one late August night, a train was making it’s way toward the Silver Run Tunnel, when the engineer spotted a young woman standing in dead center of the tracks. He blew his whistle to warn her, but the woman just turned and stared at him. She had black hair and white skin and wore a flimsy white dress. At the moment the startled engineer thought that his train was about to slam into the woman, he watched her shoot up into the air and disappear into the night.

The engineer brought the train to a halt and got out to search the tracks. But he could find no trace of the mysterious woman. Convinced he’d had too much coffee and too little sleep, the engineer pushed this unsettling occurrence out of his mind and continued on his way.

But the ghost of the young woman made several more appearances at the tunnel over the following weeks. Each week a train came to a stop and each time the figure flew upward and disappeared into the darkness of the night.

Talking with other railroad employees in Silver Run, the engineer was surprised to learn that the apparition had appeared to other railroad men over the years. It so happened that one engineer by the name of O’Flannery hadn’t yet run into the Ghost of Silver Run. In fact, he had never seen any ghost at all and claimed he didn’t believe in ghosts, and called the other men fools and liars.

He laughed and vowed that no ghost was going to stop his train, saying he’d run her down first.

About two weeks later, as O’Flannery’s train was nearing the Silver Run Tunnel, he noticed a flutter of pale movement along the railroad tracks. Much to his surprise, he saw that it was a young woman standing there. She made no effort to move. And, as described by other railroad men earlier, it appeared the raven-haired apparition flew into the air and was spirited away into the darkness, to be seen no more.

O’Flannery was shocked but continued on his way through all the other stations. When he had finished for the night, he met up with other railroad employees and bragged about how he ran the Ghost of Silver Run down.

But the employees had a strange tale to tell. Apparently, all that night, calls flooded into train station from people who had seen the train passing by and claimed there had been a ghostly plae woman in white clinging to the front of the train and screaming horribly as it passed through the stations.

According to locals in Silver Run, the apparition is the ghost of a young woman who was killed on the train. Apparently, the richly dressed young woman was riding into Parkersburg to meet her fiance and never arrived. After an exhaustive search, the woman’s body was never found. No one knew what happened to the young bride. Some say she fell off the train and was killed, others say she was murdered and her body was thrown from the train.

Years later, when part of the Silver Run tunnel was torn down, the skeleton of a woman was found by workers walled up in the brickwork. The workers knew it was the skeleton of a woman because it wore a white bridal gown. Although the remains were never identified, the skeleton was given a proper burial in an old cemetery next to the Silver Run Tunnel. After this funeral , the Ghost of Silver Run was never seen again.