Shadows in the Steam

by David Brandon

  Betjeman’s short story of a lone commuter has provided plenty of material for variations on this theme, although some of these have been much less subtle than South Kentish Town. The London Underground has provided a mass of fertile material for literature, film and TV, including many tales of the supernatural. Whilst the terrors of Betjeman’s unfortunate clerk were mainly in his own mind, other characterisations set on the Underground have produced more sinister phantoms and creatures that threaten those who dare to be alone.

  John Wyndham (1903–69), a well-known science fiction writer whose work included Day of the Triffids, wrote a short story called the Confidence Trick. It involves a commuter, Henry Baider, who travels by Underground from Bank Station on his way home from the city. As the crowded train travels west, Henry suddenly realises that there are only three people in the carriage. Could they all have alighted at Holborn? The train goes faster and faster and Henry checks his watch. ‘Unusual. Nearly half an hour at full bat, without a station? It’s absolutely impossible’. A woman pulls the emergency handle but nothing happens. Midnight arrives when the train slows down and stops at a station. ‘It was something Avenue’, a woman said.’ A voice announces, ‘All change. End of the line.’ As they step onto the platform a horned creature with a tail, holding a trident, meets them. They follow the creature on what has become a train ride to Hell.

  The Last Train (1975) by science fiction writer Harry Harrison is set in both the 1970s and the Second World War! The narrator comments, ‘I was on the Gloucester Road…and there was the tube entrance in front of me…I knew the station well…Fine bit of Victorian railway architecture…District and Circle Lines, name right up there in eternal ceramic tile.’ He enters the station and goes down the ‘dark and grim’ stairwell, and then realises he must have gone down an exit by mistake. He sees a stationary train and asks, ‘Why wasn’t the train moving?’ There were no crowds waiting for other trains. ‘Yet we just stood there and stood there and I looked around and felt this sudden, penetrating chill.’ He then notices a man reading a newspaper dated 8 December 1941. Could he be among the ghosts of that time?

  London Revenant (2006) by Conrad Williams deals with the drop-outs who haunt the Underground. Among them is the ‘Pusher’ whose pleasure is to push people under trains as well as torturing people who live above ground. Tobias Hill’s Underground (Faber, 2000) takes the reader down long-lost tunnels, makeshift passages, locked and forgotten stations in search of a series of macabre murders. In Nicholas Royle’s The Director’s Cut (2000) a psychotic film-maker finds shelter in a disused station in between murdering passengers on the tube.

  The Gothic was a fashionable architectural style in the Victorian period, and this was reflected in many stations and other railway buildings and installations. The style added to the atmosphere and romance of steam and provided an ideal setting for tales of the supernatural. It is surprising then that there have not been more books and films about railway ghosts.

  Railway and film have a long historic association. In December 1895 in Paris the first motion picture L’Arrive d’un Train en Gare, was shown to the public (albeit to an invited audience). The film by the Lumiere brothers showed a train pulling into a station, and although the theme was simple enough it caused the audience to duck behind their seats for fear that they might be run over! France, Germany and the United States developed the theme of railways and the supernatural more quickly than the UK.

  When the Devil Drives (1907) is a British film in which a taxi driver of a four-wheeled cab takes a suburban family to a railway station. Suddenly the cab driver changes into the Devil. As he arrives at the station he then mysteriously vanishes leaving the confused passengers alone with their luggage. As they board the train and settle down the Devil reappears, this time as the train driver, having got rid of the driver and his mate, and embarks on an incredible journey, much to the anguish of his terrified passengers. The train flies high into the sky, along the coast, plunges into an abyss, seemingly about to enter a tunnel, before it changes course at the last second and takes to the air again. The film ends with a close-up of the Devil’s manic, laughing face.

  Probably the most famous railway ghost story is The Signalman by Charles Dickens. It was first published in 1866 in the Christmas edition of All the Year Round. Dickens had his own personal experience to draw on for this short story. He was involved in the Staplehurst rail disaster in Kent in June 1865 in which ten passengers were killed and forty injured. The story apparently takes its inspiration from the cavernous entrance to Kilsby Tunnel in Northamptonshire on what was originally the London & Birmingham Railway. Dickens creates an eerie atmosphere with the railway cutting shrouded in gloom and isolation. The story centres on a conscientious signalman who has been haunted by a ghost. Each appearance of the apparition brings with it a tragic accident. The ghost is a harbinger of doom. The signalman meticulously attends to his job controlling the movement of trains in a signal box next to a tunnel on a lonely stretch of line. In the event of any danger on the track a fellow signalman contacts him via telegraph. However, the signalman of the story receives three phantom warnings of danger when his alarm bell rings. Each ring of the bell is marked by the appearance of an apparition at the entrance to the tunnel, which is then followed by a dreadful tragedy. On the first occasion two trains crash in the tunnel.

  Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood. A disagreeable shudder crept over me.

  The second warning involves the death of a young woman in mysterious circumstances:

  As a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us.

  Finally the signalman admits that he has seen the spectre several times within the past week, and the final warning is a horrifying premonition of the signalman’s own death: ‘at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.’

  The story was adapted for BBC television in 1976 with Denholm Elliot ideally cast as the signalman. The adaptation, which was filmed on the Severn Valley Railway, is a faithful following of the story and creates the ghostly atmosphere to good effect.

  A successful story, which was adapted to both stage and film, was the Ghost Train (1923) written by Arnold Ridley (1896–1984), well known for his role as Private Charles Godfrey in Dad’s Army between 1968 and ’77. He also wrote over thirty plays. The Ghost Train was a huge success for over two years when performed at St Martin’s Theatre in London. It was later adapted into film, first in 1931 with the comedian Jack Hulbert and then the well-known version of 1941 starring Arthur Askey, whose antics and humour may have been amusing to some then but are now simply irritating and distract from what is a good story. Ridley’s inspiration for writing the play came from stories he had heard about Mangotsfield Station just north of Bristol (long since disused). Some accounts suggest the story was based on his own experience of having found himself all alone on the station one night. The story revolves around a group of passengers who find themselves stranded in the waiting room of an isolated country station. An agitated stationmaster tries to get them to leave because, as he warns them, there is a local legend of a ghost train that dooms all those who see it to a premature death. We discover later that the train is in fact smuggling arms and the story has been concocted to frighten away strangers.

  All the Year Round. Cover of the magazine in which Dickens’s story, The Signalman, was published.

  Ri
dley also wrote a sequel called The Wrecker (1924), which is about an engine driver who believes his engine is malevolent. His fears are confirmed in the finale when there is a huge train crash. Gainsborough film studios made a film of the story in 1928 with the crash scene filmed on the Basingstoke & Alton Light Railway.

  Gainsborough also did the 1941 remake of The Ghost Train. The film was made at Lime Grove Studios because railway stations were unavailable for filming during the war. The film was shot in several locations around Devon and Cornwall. In addition to Askey, it included his straight-man Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch (1907–90) who played Teddy Deakin.

  Askey portrayed a music hall entertainer, Tommy Gander, who travels to Cornwall to perform in a show on the seafront. On the journey he loses his hat out of the train window and pulls the communication cord to bring the train to a stop. This short delay means that the passengers miss their connection when the train pulls into Fal Vale Station. The next train is not due until the following morning and Gander is clearly not popular. The stationmaster, Saul Hodgkins, played by Herbert Lomas, tells the stranded passengers they must travel to the nearest town but when he tries to arrange transport the phone line fails. Seemingly unable to move the group on, he tells them the legend as they sit around a fire. Forty-three years ago that very night a train was heading for Fal Vale Station when Ted Holmes, the stationmaster, collapsed and died before he could stop the passenger train hurtling past the station. This led to the death of everyone on the train except the driver, Ben Isaacs. According to the legend the phantom train could still be heard on some nights as it roared past the station – and woe-betide anyone who saw it!

  The stationmaster then departed, leaving the passengers to make the most of their wartime rationed meal. As the weather gets stormier and the night draws in, the stationmaster makes a dramatic reappearance by stumbling into the station, collapsing and dying – at exactly the same time as Ted Holmes had all those years ago. Although the film was made nearly seventy years ago it had the potential to be much better, and its atmosphere is not really helped by Askey’s style of comedy.

  In 1937 the comedy classic Oh Mr Porter was released starring Will Hay (1888–1949) as the new stationmaster of a Northern Irish train station at Buggleskelly. Together with his fellow workers, played by Moore Marriott (as Jeremiah Harbottle) and Graham Moffatt (as Albert), they encounter the legend of ‘One-Eyed Joe’, a ghost who is said to haunt the lonely rustic station. The local postman (Dave O’Toole) takes great pleasure in telling the legend to the new stationmaster:

  Every night when the moon gives light, the ghost of the miller is seen, as he walks the track with a sack on his back, down to the Black Borheen… He haunts the station, he haunts the hill, and the land that lies between.

  The legend, as with many other local legends, turns out to be a distraction used by gun-runners to conceal their criminal activities. This was a real tactic used in seaside communities of the past when tales of ghosts coming out at night encouraged people to stay at home while the smugglers went about their business.

  A slight variation on the crashed train is Train of Events (1949), which attempted, but not very successfully, to follow the stories of three sets of people as they travel on a night train from Euston to Liverpool. Although not specifically a ghost story, there is a sense of impending doom underpinning the tale. The engine driver, played by Jack Warner, says what will be a tragic and inevitable farewell to his wife. The passengers include an actor who has murdered his unfaithful wife, an orphan girl who is in love with a fugitive German prisoner-of-war, and a famous conductor who cannot choose between his wife and a glamorous pianist. Although the doomed train will cruelly resolve the problems of the characters, the audience is left to speculate over who will survive.

  A collection of railway ghost stories, both factual and fictional, was brought together in the book The Ghost Now Standing on Platform One (1990) edited by Richard Peyton. Although these stories include a number from the United States, the few set in Britain include Charles Dickens’ The Signalman. Also included is Journey into Fear, by Arnold Ridley, which takes place on a branch line station during a journey from London to the Pennines, and bears some similarity to The Ghost Train.

  Amongst other eminent writers is L.T.C. Rolt (1910–74), engineer and prolific author of many books especially on transport and railways. Lionel Rolt’s story, The Garside Fell Disaster, is told by an old railwayman who worked on the Carlisle line south of a fictional Highbeck Junction where, ‘you could travel the length and breadth of England before you’d find a lonelier place than Garside’. As one might expect with such a railway enthusiast as Rolt, one with an eye for detail, the story is well-informed. It takes the theme of an earlier disaster on the line and is set against an atmosphere of storms, a dark night and unexplained events. As the narrator runs to the signal box he finds a worker, Perce Shaw, whose ‘hair was all singled out, his face was as white as that wall.’ ‘“My God!”, or “You can’t do anything”, was all he’d say, over and over again.’ What had frightened the man? ‘What exactly happened in that tunnel we shall never know’, says the narrator. The setting has to be the Settle & Carlisle Railway.

  A station waiting room can be a lonely and eerie place when no one else is about, and they have provided the setting for a number of short stories. Robert Aickman (1914–81) was an author of supernatural fiction, and in The Waiting Room he conveys to good effect an atmospheric ghost story. His tale concerns a man, Edward Pendlebury, who misses a connection from York to Scarborough because of a late-running train from Kings Cross. He catches a slow ‘milk and mail’ train and falls asleep, goes past his stop and has to get off six stations further on. He then resigns himself to sleeping in the waiting room. He is horribly aware of his lonely isolation on this remote station where: ‘beyond…it was so dark that the edges of the two windows were indistinct.’ Pendlebury becomes conscious of a deathly cold and the thickness of the air begins to increase. His loneliness is shattered when the air settles and the room is suddenly full of people. What he does not know at this stage is the waiting room was built on top of a burial ground!

  Another waiting room story is The Kill by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s brother. In this short story two men sit in the cold waiting room on a small railway station in the west of England. Typically, it is foggy and the train is delayed – indefinitely. After a long period of silence the younger of the men senses that there is something strange about the other man in the room. As they eventually begin to converse the young man’s initial fears about the stranger are confirmed. A variation on this theme is the story by ghost and horror writer A.M. Burrage (1889–1956); The Wrong Station. Two men sit ‘in the miserable waiting-room at Ixtable junction…and had not spoken…A dense fog had thrown the train service into utter confusion. It was not at all a cheerful kind of night.’

  Lost in the Fog (1916), by J.D. Beresford (1873–1947), starts with the sentence, ‘London was smothered in fog’, and recounts a man’s journey to the Midlands. The journey is thrown into confusion when he winds down the window and cannot distinguish anything familiar in the dim grey mass swirling past. The train draws to a halt. He asks a guard what station this is only to discover he is on the wrong line. ‘I felt lonely and pitiable. It was bitterly cold, and the mist was thicker than ever. I could hear no one.’ He eventually finds some relative comfort in a waiting room where he meets a man warming his hands by the stove. However, there is something in the man’s ‘attitude and the tone of his voice…I had a curious sense of touching some terrible reality.’ His instincts prove to be right as the man begins to tell him a haunting story.

  Sir Andrew Caldecott (1884–1951) was a former governor of Hong Kong (1935–37), but he could also turn his hand to writing a good supernatural story. Branch Line to Benceston is a tale of murder, revenge and an uninviting branch line.

  In 1866 Charles Collins (1828–73), the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, wrote a short railway ghost story, Compensation
House, for the Christmas edition of All Year Round. The story is about a building at Mugby Junction, ‘a dark and gloomy-looking building, [which] had been purchased by this Company for an enlargement of their Goods Station.’ The tale involves an old man, Mr Oswald Strange, ‘who had recently come to inhabit the house opposite,’ and ‘is obsessed with the absence of any mirrors in the goods station building.’ Mr Strange is certainly strange by name and nature. The narrator soon meets a doctor, also an old friend of Mr Strange, who proceeds to reveal the old man’s medical condition. He is ‘haunted in the strangest fashion that I ever heard of.’ The doctor tells of an incident where he walked into a room and saw Strange:

  It was a great bare room, and so imperfectly lighted by a single candle that it was almost impossible…to see into its great dark corners…There were, moreover, two ancient chairs and a dressing-table. On this last, stood a large old-fashioned looking-glass with a carved frame…from the moment of my entering that room, the action of my senses and of the faculties of my mind were held fast by the ghastly figure which stood motionless before the looking-glass in the middle of the empty room.