The Roaring Train

​If you’ve ever lived anywhere near a set of train tracks, you know that you rather quickly get used the sound of the trains. Some might even associate that sound with a relaxing calm, but not me. See, when I was a kid, my family lived in an old neighborhood somewhere in the Mid-West. Where exactly, doesn’t really matter. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone to hear that our little town had a few railroad tracks that ran right through them. I would guess that probably almost all little towns like that in the Mid-West had at least one set of tracks. Whether or not they were still in use, of course, was up in the air.

​The tracks by my old house were old and outdated. And they weren’t supposed to be used. But that never stopped the trains from barreling through town at night every once in a while. And that’s the very reason that I find the sounds of trains to be so disturbing. Those tracks were missing every other rail. The wood was rotten and metal was rusted. And yet, for whatever reason, a ghost train still felt the need to use them. I know what you’re thinking, ghost trains don’t exist.

But you would believe otherwise if you grew up in that town, back in those days. I remember it being the middle of the night when I would hear the far away whistle of a train approaching in the middle of the night. It would only happen maybe once every couple of years, but I was always filled with complete dread at the sound of it. I knew that in only a matter of minutes, that whistle would be deafening in my room. I would have gotten up and ran to my mother, if not for being frozen with fear in my bed. The whistle was always bad, but the worst part was always yet to come.

The screeching was followed by a deep rumble in the floor of the house. And the closer it got, the worse the shaking became. No matter how many times I went through that horror, I always felt like the train was going to coming crashing through my bedroom wall. It was always the worst when the ghost train was finally thundering through the neighborhood tracks, because it felt like the whole house was going to come tumbling down in a heap.

​What felt like hours would pass in those horrible minutes and I was always left with a feeling of complete terror and relief once the rumbling and the whistling past on. Nobody in the town would ever talk about it. Even my own parents would just write it off as being a storm, even though the ground was always dry the next morning. You can’t tell me it wasn’t a ghost train, though. I know it for a fact. I also know that I can’t stand the sound of trains!

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