Ghost Tracks

Readers will discover why railway men fear the number nine! . . . why a white horse is considered an ill omen . . . and why, in a profession where safety was a priority, often the supernatural was the only way to explain why accidents happened. Some of these episodes, which have now become folklore, can be explained as figments of imagination or mischief, like the supposed curse that haunts the bridges over Halifax Harbour. Others -- like the ''hoodoo'' on Intercolonial Railway locomotive No. 239 -- cannot be explained away so easily, and readers will be left to make their own determination. Few of these stories have been told before, and never in such detail as Underwood probes the individuals involved, the events as they unfolded, and the popular superstitions of the era, to explain why such stories existed. The locomotive was to the citizens of the 1800s and early 20th Century what the computer is to people today -- a symbol of the rapid and often impersonal advance of science and technology -- and ghost stories may exist simply to give some substance to the belief that higher powers are at work! These "ghosties and beasties" range from the monster that shook the occupants of a boxcar on a remote siding, to the lonely mother who sought the body of her dead son on the shores of Cape Breton Island, to visits from the Devil in New Glasgow and the spectre of death on "long black trains".