The Hoosac Tunnel — 24 years of boring through the mountain, nearly 200 dead, and the ghost stories that followed.
Under the mountain you just drove over, there's a hole in the dark that folks around here have feared for a hundred and fifty years. It's a railroad tunnel — the Hoosac Tunnel — near five miles of it, bored dead straight through the solid heart of the mountain. And the men who dug it gave it another name. They called it the Bloody Pit.
They started in eighteen fifty-one, and Lord, they had no idea what they were in for. Twenty-four years it took — a whole generation of men, drilling and blasting by hand into rock that fought them the entire way. It was the first tunnel anywhere to use the new liquid explosive, nitroglycerin, and that stuff was a devil — it'd go off if you looked at it wrong. Men were blown apart, crushed under cave-ins, drowned when the water broke in, choked in the bad air a thousand feet down. Before it was done, close to two hundred of them were dead in that mountain.
And then there's the night that made it a ghost story for good. Eighteen sixty-seven, deep in the central shaft — a lamp leaking naphtha caught fire, and the flame dropped down the shaft into a building full of men working at the bottom. Thirteen of them died down there in the smoke and the flooding dark. It was months before their bodies could be recovered. And ever since, the railroad men swore the tunnel was haunted — lights that shouldn't be there, voices in the black, a workman's shape seen walking the tracks where no living man was. Some of them quit rather than go back in.
The trains still run through it to this day. It's the longest tunnel of its kind in the country, and it's still the Bloody Pit. Drive on over the top of it in the good clean daylight, and be glad you're up here in the sun — because there are men who never came back out of that mountain, and the folks who work the rails will tell you some of them are still down there yet.
Photo: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0
