Ghosts of the PA Wilds: The Headless Trackwalker of the I-80 Frontier

When it comes to interesting ghost stories, the I-80 Frontier landscape of the Pennsylvania Wilds has one advantage that the other PA Wilds landscapes don’t have: Henry Wharton Shoemaker lived there. Shoemaker was a folklorist and writer who lived in Clinton County. He gathered local legends and wrote them down, preserving them for future generations. A lot of his stories involved local ghosts and hauntings, some of them pretty close to home. And some of them were definitely very creepy.

One of his most popular stories is the Headless Trackwalker. This one comes from his 1913 book Susquehanna Legends.

The story is told from the point of view of an elderly gravedigger. A lot of Shoemaker’s writing began like that. He would introduce the reader to the character relating the story, probably based on a real person. The gravedigger is leaning against a gravestone, chatting about an old ghost story he knows.

The story begins with a young man. He’d been with friends in Lock Haven, visiting girls across town. As midnight came, the girls’ mother threw them out, reasonably enough. So the boys started walking home.

But there wasn’t going to be any chatting. The trackwalker was a headless figure, roaming the night with his lantern.

The trackwalker beckoned to the stunned boy, indicating that he should follow. The boy walked after the trackwalker, following along by lantern light. As they walked down the tracks, they came upon a pile of twisted metal, lying right where the train would be. And there was a train coming — the boy could hear it and see the light in the distance.

The boy tried to drag the metal off the tracks, but he couldn’t — it was far too heavy. Thinking quickly, he grabbed the lantern from the trackwalker and ran up the tracks, waving the lantern, trying to signal the train. The conductor saw the light, and applied the brakes, stopping just short of the pile of twisted metal that would have killed everyone on board.

The conductor and a couple of other employees disembarked, and the boy helped them remove the metal from the tracks. As they worked, the conductor began talking about a trackwalker along that line, the first one to die in the line of duty. He’d fallen between the trains, and had been decapitated.

And now the trackwalker was said to walk along the lines, protecting anyone else from being hurt or killed.

Much of the time, our folklore reflects the mindset of a culture. Scary stories spring up to reflect our actual fears. Working for the railroads could be dangerous back in those days, with a high risk of injury or death. The legend of the headless trackwalker may reflect that very real fear.

On the other hand, you never know. It could be that Clinton County has a headless guardian, still walking the railroad tracks with his lantern, watching out for the locals in the Pennsylvania Wilds.