A Once-a-Year Manifestation
I reserve the right to tweak things here and there—and, of course, to add more information if it becomes available—but I’d say the Lincoln Funeral Ghost Train TARDIS is ready to be boarded. TARDIS, in this case, stands for Trusted Archival Resource Documents in Sequence, and unlike my earlier TARDIS pages, this one has two major parts.
The 1865 section looks closely at the original train that carried Abraham Lincoln’s body from Washington, DC, through Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, northern Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana to the assassinated President’s final resting place in Illinois. Thousands and quite likely millions gathered to pay their respects as the funeral train rolled by or, in some cases, stopped so that the casket could be visited in a capital building or similar public place.
Now, if we consider a “residual haunting” to be an ethereal imprint of a traumatic event that gets replayed over and over, the Lincoln funeral train qualifies times ten due to that outpouring of grief. And, sure enough, the Lincoln funeral train was afterward observed again, though in the form of a supernatural reenactment. It’s said to be an anniversary ghost, reappearing at about the same time of the year. Think of it as an annual variation on the haunted battlefield of Gettysburg traveling across seven states.
For that reason, I devote the first section of the chronology to a daily timetable of the original trip, striving to narrow down times to the minute whenever possible. My hope is that paranormal investigators will use these details as a guide to determine if the ghost train still runs its yearly route. I also did my best to show when the train was traveling at night, since that’s when the ghost train was reported to be witnessed and that’s when ghost hunters typically devote their free time to investigation.
The second section starts at 1872 with the earliest report of the ghost train. This is where we see the manifestation described as appearing once a year and at night. The witness in the first article says the ghost train comes “[r]egularly in the month of April about midnight” while an 1879 report says it’s “on that night [of the 1865 trip], every year, … during a certain hour (that varies in different subdivisions of the road).” Needless to say, ghost hunters will have to decide on their own schedules.
Speaking of Investigating Specific Locations…
This TARDIS is part of my Railroad Hauntings You Can Still Visit project. All of the individual posts there end with an invitation to ghost hunters to investigate the area under discussion and to share their experience, be it productive or disappointing, in the comments section. I extend the same invitation here. I hope this post, not the TARDIS page, acts as a gathering place for any and all who have held a spectral stakeout this coming late April or early May.
However, since the 1865 funeral train traveled along more than 1,650 miles of track, there’s no single location I can recommend. Just as investigators will have to make their own schedules, I hope they’ll do their own deeper research into the specific spot they’re investigating. Here are a few points to consider:
- While we can trust that the actual 1860s tracks have been replaced at some point, does the route still run in about the same place? Old railroad right-of-ways have a habit of staying put, even if they’re converted from, say, rails to trails. But there are exceptions.
- All of the states the 1865 train crossed introduced Daylight Savings Time in 1918, and DST now applies for the late-April and early May dates it ran. One should subtract an hour to match the times stated on the TARDIS. Even so, it’s doubtful the times I found in newspapers are 100% reliable. Give the ghost train ample time. Bring snacks. Have train-related songs on your playlist.
- Some of the descriptions of the ghost train include skeleton passengers, eerie music coming from the train cars, and an unsettling fog preceding the manifestation. Prepare to be scared on the chance this thing is real.
- Finally, remember that those witnesses who first encountered the ghost train did so with nothing more than their own senses. In other words, ghost hunting gadgetry is very optional.
You can visit The Lincoln Funeral Ghost Train TARDIS here. If it inspires you to go looking, I look forward to reading what you experienced.
Discover more
“Railroad Hauntings You Can Still Visit”
at the page for
After the End of the Line: Railroad Hauntings in Literature and Lore.
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