The Haunted Crossing at Ingall’s: Where Ten Night Watchmen Met Their Match

“If ghosts were as plentiful in fact as they are in newspaper columns white-robed shapes and people who can be seen through would be almost as numerous as stray cats.”
—White Plains Eastern State Journal, April 23, 1887

In the waning months of 1899, the Ontario and Western Railroad had a problem at Ingall’s crossing on its Northern Division near Middletown, New York. Not a problem with tracks or switches or timetables—those could be fixed. This was a problem of a decidedly more spectral nature. They couldn’t keep a night watchman at the post, no matter how desperately they tried.

Nine men quit. Then the section boss himself threw in the towel. All swore the same thing: the crossing was haunted by a multitude of shrieking, wailing ghosts.

The trouble allegedly began a year prior in September 1898, when—according to newspaper accounts—the Chicago Express ran into an open switch at Ingall’s, killing three people. A flagman’s cabin was erected at the spot, and someone needed to watch through the long hours of darkness to ensure no more disasters befell the crossing.

James Coe’s Two-Night Stand

James Coe, a member of the section gang, was the first to take on the lonely vigil. It seemed like easy work compared to backbreaking track maintenance. He lasted exactly two nights.

On the third day, Coe asked for a leave of absence. When he returned, he flatly refused to guard the crossing again. The ghosts, he said, were too much for him. Another section hand volunteered. He made it three nights before declaring the post untenable.

A Bloody, Mangled Introduction

The third watchman didn’t even make it through a single shift. His encounter was particularly dramatic. According to the Chenango Telegraph, he ventured into an adjacent lot to gather brush for kindling a fire in the cabin. As he dragged a brush toward the shanty, a bloody, mangled wraith materialized from nowhere and seized the other end, trying to prevent him from moving it. The wraith also, rather inhospitably, called him names.

The watchman abandoned both the brush and the field to “his mystic highness” and became the third man to resign.

The Parade of the Terrified

So it went. Nine men in total reported for duty at Ingall’s crossing. Nine men saw strange forms and heard strange noises in the dark hours of the night. Nine men resigned.

The descriptions varied but the terror was universal. Some spoke of phantom figures. Others mentioned disembodied voices. All agreed on the shrieking and wailing that pierced the darkness between the hours when decent folk were asleep in their beds.

According to one newspaper account, based on the number of ghosts seen, the crossing must have served as “a ghostly stamping ground for all who get killed in railroad accidents”—which would require roughly 300 spirits, not just the three allegedly killed in the September wreck.

The Section Boss Takes a Stand (Briefly)

Finally, the section boss had had enough of this nonsense. He would prove, once and for all, that the haunting was nothing but foolishness and overactive imaginations. He took the job himself.

Two nights.

That’s all he could stand. A man of responsibility, accustomed to keeping grown men in line and managing the complexities of railroad track maintenance, he lasted only two nights before admitting defeat. He told his superiors that whoever could hold down that job ought to get the salary of the President of the railroad.

The Mystery Deepens

By late January 1899, the story had spread across newspapers throughout the region. The Nyack Evening Star and the Middletown Daily Argus both carried accounts of the haunting, treating it with that peculiar mixture of skepticism and fascination that ghost stories of the era inspired.

Eventually, a man from Mexico, New York—desperate for work and apparently unbothered by supernatural discouragements—took the position. He held it for at least two weeks, which must have seemed like a lifetime compared to his predecessors’ tenures.

The Problem with the Story

Here’s where our tale takes an interesting turn. For all the vivid newspaper accounts of the Chicago Express wreck in September 1898, for all the detailed descriptions of bloody wraiths and shrieking spirits, there appears to be no historical record of such an accident occurring on the Ontario and Western Railroad at Ingall’s crossing.

The O&W Historical Society maintains extensive archives. Railroad accident records from the era are reasonably well-documented. Yet this particular wreck—the one that supposedly started the whole haunting—seems to exist only in the context of the ghost story itself.

The crossing was real. The Ontario and Western’s Northern Division ran through the area. But the precipitating disaster? That remains elusive.

A Different Kind of Ghost Story

Which leaves us with two possibilities. Either this was one of those delightful newspaper hoaxes of the 1890s—an era when ghost stories circulated through the press like currency, as the Eastern State Journal so dryly noted—or the wreck occurred but was never officially recorded, lost to history except in these ghostly accounts.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. Maybe there was an incident at the crossing, something less dramatic than a full-scale wreck but troubling enough to unsettle the men who had to stand watch there in the dark. Or maybe the whole thing was invented by section hands who simply didn’t want to work the night shift in the cold.

After all, claiming you saw a bloody wraith is far more interesting than admitting you’d rather be home by the fire.

The Ontario and Western Railroad itself would go on to have a long, if ultimately doomed, existence. It became the first Class I railroad in America to be completely abandoned, with its last train running in 1957. Perhaps it’s fitting that its history includes at least one ghost story, even if the ghosts themselves remain as elusive as the wreck that supposedly summoned them.

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The Ingall’s crossing haunting was reported in the Nyack Evening Star (January 24, 1899) and the Middletown Daily Argus (January 23, 1899). Despite extensive searches of railroad historical records, no documentation of a Chicago Express wreck at Ingall’s in September 1898 has been found.

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