Headless Woman Spooked Crews at Trestle

 

Trestle over Potomac at Twenty-first Bridge Road, Rawlings, looking toward West Virginia.

Too many ghost stories in old newspapers are vague on where, exactly, something took place. Refreshingly pinpointed, however, is this account from 1898, which I quote in full. My only change was to break up the long paragraphs, for online readability:

Trainmen on the Baltimore and Ohio and West Virginia Central railroads employed near Cumberland, Md., were recently frightened by the shape of a headless woman that makes her appearance at Greenwade’s siding, near Twenty-first bridge, between Cumberland and Keyser, W.Va.

Freight trains are side tracked there, and when the trainmen are waiting a headless woman emerges from an old culvert or bridge and walks up and down the track. Whenever any of the men attempt to follow her, she disappears.

One railroad man was so badly frightened that he left the service of the road. Others say that if the headless woman keeps up her antics they, too, will quit.

One railroad man, whose reputation for truth has never been questioned, says that a few nights ago he crawled under the locomotive to avoid seeing this headless object.

The men declare that the ghost can be seen almost nightly.

The other night[,] two trainmen on the Baltimore and Ohio who live in Cumberland were frightened by the specter and went to work the next morning with great reluctance.

One wishes, of course, that these witnesses had been named, which would make this read less like a secondhand yarn, the sort of friend-of-a-friend story that folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand much later would term an urban legend.

I also note that the account appeared in the Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, more than 300 miles away from the supposedly haunted siding, and from anyone who might have firsthand knowledge that contradicted the story.

Same spot as above, looking back at Maryland. This bridge carries an abandoned siding.

And yet … one still can turn off U.S. 220, a.k.a. McMullen Highway, just west of Hi-Rock Animal Hospital near Rawlings, and follow 21^st Bridge Road until it dead-ends at a Potomac River railroad trestle, and a siding that crosses the main line a few yards back from the water’s edge. As my accompanying 2021 photographs demonstrate, the site pretty well matches the description in that long-ago ghost story.

If we re-read the newspaper account, we note the adverb “recently” – which implies that the headless revenant was newsworthy in part because she was a new phenomenon, something rail crews hadn’t seen before. Maybe the siding was newly built, giving a venerable local ghost a new audience. Or maybe the siding was years old, but the (gulp) beheading was recent.

In either case, one wonders how the woman lost her head in the first place, and when. Some indication of her attire would have helped, but that, alas, was not reported.*

Did some fatality occur, at or near this spot, to make subsequent train crews very, very nervous about this area, and to see things that may or may not have been there? To what extent were those trainmen feeling guilty?

I said earlier that Twenty-first Bridge Road dead-ends at the trestle. More precisely, by the time a driver reaches the trestle, the road has pretty much dwindled into a weeded, ill-kept driveway that leads onward, to the wooded riverside site of … you guessed it … a cemetery.

I haven’t visited it yet, but I wonder whether one of the graves contains a body that was buried without a head.

*Noted in passing: Almost all apparitions – as opposed to noises, cold spots, “energies,” etc. – are reported to be clothed, rather than naked. This is a problem for any afterlife theory.

Sources:

“1898: Phantom Woman Minus Head.” Jerome Clark, Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Page 137.

“Headless Woman’s Ghost.” Marion [Ohio] Daily Star, 8 Jan. 1898, Page 13. Accessed 14 Oct. 2021 via Newspapers.com.