Tragedy and Mystery at Bostian Bridge
North Carolina has its fair share of train wrecks and eerie ghost stories. This one involves two gruesome train fatalities at the same site, more than 100 years apart.
On August 27, 1891 in the wee hours of the morning, a locomotive went off the tracks at the 60-foot high Bostian Bridge two miles from Statesville. In an era where train travel was especially dangerous and the news replete with disasters, this one was particularly shocking and horrific in North Carolina history: more than twenty people were believed killed and many seriously injured. Witnesses said the train, traveling too fast, was airborne when it fell into the chasm of Third Creek below. It was reported that the sleeper car crashed to the ground more than 150 feet from where it had left the bridge. Cars were jumbled down the embankment and in the water, the dead and wounded strewn about in the woods or beneath the wreckage. Some dazed survivors managed to the make it through the woods at night to return to town to report the accident. Doctors from nearby communities came to tend to the injured. It remains the worst train disaster in the state’s history.
The train was traveling too fast, apparently to make up for departing a half hour late on its way to Asheville. The railroad became convinced that foul play was afoot, as spikes had been found missing from ties. A coroner’s inquest was convened in the matter and ruled that the accident resulted from unsound tracks and structural issues with the bridge, the responsibility of the railroad. Still, the Richmond & Danville Railroad took out newspaper ads offering a $10,000 reward for information about the alleged criminal tampering. Within a few weeks of the disaster, newspapers reported that a person believed guilty was arrested when caught trying to sell jewelry that belonged to one of the accident victims. He was released by a grand jury on insufficient evidence. Six months later, two incarcerated men confessed to the crime. Yet, the railroad found itself liable for thousands of dollars in repairs and lawsuits.
Over the next weeks and months, the papers reported a few other incidents of potential tampering at the site, including one on December 24, 1892 in which additional ties were placed on the rails. An extra freight train, running ahead of the scheduled passenger train, managed to knock them off the tracks without derailing the train or serious incident.
Local North Carolina newspapers from 1891 well into the 20th century are full of articles recalling the great train disaster, reminiscences and eyewitness accounts on anniversaries, and other train mishaps and odd occurrences at the bridge. And as if the carnage of August 27, 1891 weren’t enough to cast an eternal pall over the site, the 50th anniversary of the wreck brought another eerie occurrence.
In their 1970 book This Haunted Land, North Carolina folklorists Nancy and Bruce Roberts told the account of the appearance of a ghost train at Bostian Bridge to a woman from South Carolina — on the 50th anniversary of the 1891 wreck. She and her husband were traveling along the nearby road at night when their car broke down. While her husband went in search of a mechanic, she saw an oncoming train plunge off the bridge into the darkness and heard the blood curdling cries and screams of the victims. Her husband and the mechanic later searched for signs of a train crash, but none were found. When the couple stopped at the station in Statesville to report the event, they were told of the accident 50 years prior to the day. Not surprisingly, she fainted.
In 1942, another freakish occurrence happened at the bridge. On Sunday, March 29, a woman, her husband and her young nephew were driving along the highway near the bridge when they decided to stop to take a look at the bridge. According to a newspaper report, the woman caught her foot on the track, fell and fainted as a train came hurtling down the track. Her husband didn’t have time to get her away from the tracks, so the three lay as flat as possible on the outside end of the cross ties. Miraculously, they were all unharmed as the train passed just inches above them!
But the most eerie occurrence came in 2010 with the apparent weaving of the spectral realm with the physical when a real-life tragedy emerged from the lore. On August 27, 2010, the anniversary of the original disaster, a band of ghost hunters went to the bridge in the small hours of the morning hoping for a sighting of the ghost train. When a train came down the tracks in the darkness, they didn’t get out of the way, truly believing it to be nothing other than the ghost train. Two were injured and a third, a 29-year-old man, was killed when the train struck him as he attempted to push the others to safety.
~by Kelly Agan
