THE WATER STOP: Ghosts of the Chicago-Alton Rail Disaster
Interior of passenger car, Chicago-Alton Railroad, 1909 (Library of Congress)
In August of 1873, eleven people were killed and more than thirty horrifically injured in one of the most atrocious railroad wrecks in American history, when a southbound passenger train on the Chicago-Alton Railroad collided with a northbound freight train near Lemont. The crash almost completely destroyed the former and led to eleven deaths and more than thirty-five almost indescribable injuries.
The passenger train had left Chicago for St. Louis at its regular 9pm departure time on August 17th. On the run were a baggage car, express passenger car and three coaches, as well as two Pullman sleeper cars. At about 10:20pm, when the train was three miles north of Lemont, it came around a bend to discover a coal train coming north on the same track, at about twenty miles per hour. A dense fog had come over the Sag Bridge area, and the passenger train engineer had had a rough time of it already. The fog and the bend combined with the lax actions of the coal train engineer led to disaster:
The two trains came together with fearful force. Being on the curve, however, both engines left the track and passed each other, that attached to the coal-train striking the baggage car a few feet from the end, breaking the coupling between it and the smoking-car, which the engine struck square in the end, and with such force as to throw the forward end in the air, so that the engine ran under it, tearing the floor completely out and hurling the fifty or sixty unfortunates who were in the car in a struggling mass to the lower end, where there was no chance for escape, and then ensued a scene of horrors which cannot adequately be described.[i]’
The smokestack and dome of the engine were knocked off by the collision and broken timbers of the smoking-car penetrated the boiler, letting loose a dense volume of hot steam, which poured into the car, blinding and scalding the helpless inmates, who with shrieks struggled vainly to extricate themselves. Meantime Conductor Russell, of the passenger-train, who was unhurt, and a number of passengers from the rear coaches, came forward and endeavored to assist the poor victims, but there was little left to do beyond taking from the wreck the dying and wounded, many of whom were fearfully scalded.
Surviving passengers and crew, stunned at first by the scene, quickly went to work to aid the injured at the shocking scene. One passenger observed:
In the meadows on either side of the track were lying human beings, yelling in agony, their flesh boiled off them. The freight engine bad run clean underneath the smoking-car, and there exploded, shattering the car into little pieces, and blowing the occupants high up into the air, and over the fence into the meadows. The other engine burst at the same time. A man I don't know who it was ran up to me, shrieking with agony, and threw himself into my arms. I tried to hold him, but his clothe tore off him, and the flesh came off with them. I was nearly stunned at the sight. There was a dozen or more, stripped stark naked, running up and down, crazy . . . They were tearing at their bodies and tearing off great handsful of flesh. [ii]
The surviving passengers immediately tended to the victims, tearing off pieces of their clothing to bind up wounds and trying to make thee injured comfortable in the coach seats and sleeping berths.
At dawn the train crawled into Chicago, hauling its mangled cars, the dead and wounded its ghastly cargo. It was determined that the cause of the accident was the criminal recklessness of the conductor and engineer of the coal train. His duty was to hang back at the Lemont station until the evening passenger train had cleared. The conductor of the freight train was considered a solid driver, with no strikes against him in the year and a half that he’d operated for the line. After the accident, he panicked and fled. The railroad company offered a $1000 reward for his capture; a relative turned him in and split the money with him. No prosecution, however, was ever started, and he went on to drive for years to come.
James O’Neill, engineer of the passenger train, had both legs broken in the crash but escaped the tragedy with no blame for it whatsoever. Bizarrely though, five years after the accident, the exonerated engineer was shot by a man named Dwight Wheaton, yard master of the Chicago and Alton railroad at Bloomington, as O’Neill walked home from the yard there on the night of December 28, 1878. Wheaton had suspected O’Neill of having an affair with his wife. After the murder, Mrs. Wheaton told police outright that her husband had killed O’Neill and that, moreover, her husband had told her to take his pistols and discharge them in a cemetery field in Bloomington. She also claimed that her husband had a wife out west.
In 1904 another deadly accident occurred at the same site where the 1873 tragedy had occurred. A Chicago-Alton train had stopped for water at the old Sag Bridge water tower. The engine of the second train plowed through twelve coal cars and thrust an oil tanker into the air, causing a massive fire.
The violence of the Sag Bridge collisions—and the drama surrounding James O’Neill—led to whisperings of a “Curse of Sag Bridge, and tales of hauntings at the site of the disasters. Not long after the 1873 collision, Engine 122 returned to duty on the Chicago Alton railroad. The first night back in service, the train’s cab lamps and headlights were mysteriously
extinguished by some supernatural agency, just as the train passed the eventful point (of the accident) . . .. At first the enginemen thought but little of it, except as a singular coincidence, but as time rolled along and the circumstance continued occurring at the same point upon all night runs, it became evident that there must be some invisible agency that marked engine 122 because of her connection with the great disaster. [iii]
According to one report, the night watchman stationed at Sag Bridge resigned, saying he could “stand it no more.” His superiors asked what he was referring to. “The ghosts,” he replied. He went on to state that, every Saturday night, when he went down to the watchman’s shack near the bridge, he saw the ghosts of a couple that had been killed in the collision of 1873. It was soon common knowledge along the railroad that Sag Bridge was haunted. [iv]
This was no small matter, as the site included a water tank that supplied most of the passing trains with water. A water stop here was made for most trains passing through the area. As time progressed, tales of ghostly encounters during water stops mounted. Legend says that another trainman resigned: a freight conductor who was plagued with sightings of “forms flitting to and from, ahead of him and behind him, as he clambered over the freight cards comprising his train.”[v]
Too, Engine 122’s engineer would frequently see a man and woman climb on the pilot of the locomotive as the train neared Sag Bridge, jumping off the moving train when the engineer approached.
One night, two brakemen on a night trip saw a “ghostly looking object” seated on the steps of their train’s caboose when they stopped for water at Sag Bridge. The figure fled the scene and the men followed, watching as the ghost climbed a nearby farm fence and disappear. Another brakeman talked of the ghosts of Sag Bridge, who were “plenty. Often, when walking by the train, examining the running gear, I could hear the chattering of teeth, the outcries of someone, as if in anguish, ‘til the chills would penetrate my very bones.” Retreating to return to the train’s comfort, however, he would be met with “faces peering into the windows at me.” The same man claimed to have shot at one of the figures, which “looked like a boiling mass of burning Sulphur” and which, upon being shot, “with a fiendish laugh . . . sank into the ground.”[vi]
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[i] Scientific American, September 5, 1873, p. 156
[ii] Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois 18 Aug 1873, p. 8
[iii] The Railway Conductor, 1896: Volume 13, p. 596
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
Read more about Chicago’s Victorian-era ghost stories, exorcisms and paranormal intrigue in my book, Haunts of the White City.
You may also enjoy the below video, in which I talk about the Chicago-Alton disaster and a similar accident that haunted Charles Dickens, influencing some of his darkest stories.