The plan having been developed, a volunteer was selected and it was decided that he would set out the following day. Since he would be standing outside the town's limits, the thought was that the conductor would stop the train and help. The idea was that as the train approached, the man would signal for help with his lantern. They would send one of their own through the Moonville Tunnel to the outskirts of town with a lantern. Low on supplies, the people in Moonville came up with a plan. As a result, the entire town of Moonville was quarantined-trains were ordered not to stop in Moonville anymore. The most complete version of the Moonville Tunnel legend is the one regarding an epidemic that had swept through the town. The accident resulted from a too free use of liquor. He was taken on the train to Hamden and Doctors Wolf and Rannells sent for to perform amputation, but the prostration of the vital energies was too great to attempt it. This seems a little too romantic, especially since the actual newspaper article from the McArthur Democrat on Matells a much more mundane, albeit grizly, story:Ī brakesman on the Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad fell from the cars near Cincinnati Furnace, on last Tuesday Maand was fatally injured, when the wheels passing over and grinding to a shapeless mass the greater part of one of his legs. And if all those different variations aren't enough to make your head spin, then how about the only version that names the person who is hit by the train Rastus Dexter, who is described as an 8-foot tall African-American. In some instances, the person hit is a woman and sometimes the woman is pregnant. In other retellings of the legend, the person is someone from the town of Moonville who just got caught on the tracks and was unable to avoid an oncoming train. Sometimes the person is a man who is somehow connected to the railroad, such as a conductor or engineer. The first candidate is simply someone who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the Moonville Tunnel legend is one of those tales that's based on historical fact, though it has been distorted by telling and retelling over the years. The only thing that's consistent about the hauntings of the Moonville tunnel is that it's the result of someone being killed inside. Of the two, the ghosts have chosen to make the tunnel their haunting ground. Today, all that remains of the town of Moonville is the small cemetery and the tunnel. ![]() Both cemetery and tunnel are about as far from civilization as its possible to get in this state-a full hour's drive from Nelsonville or Athens, buried in the Wayne National Forest along Raccoon Creek. Many of the residents of Moonville are buried just west of town, in an old cemetery at the top of a steep, winding gravel road. By the time the 1900s rolled around, the town was all but abandoned already.
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