The Search for the Moonville Ghosts

Waves of fog crash against my windshield. The fog lamps on my car wash the road in an amber hue. I shift into four-wheel drive to make my way back up the thin, unmaintained roads leading away from the Moonville Tunnel. 

My girlfriend, Valerie, sits next to me, wrapped in a flannel and half asleep. Evelina, one of my closest friends, is completely asleep in the back seat of the car. 

We’re driving back from Moonville, a haunted tunnel deep in the country and almost four hours away from Oxford. 

Driving through the night, I’m still haunted by the crash we saw on the way there . 

“I doubt the driver survived,” Valerie said as we passed by, referring to a Nissan with an eviscerated front end. 

The engine was sitting comfortably between where the steering wheel and the seats once were — a spot it was likely sharing with the driver.

I don’t want to think about it. 

I remember another time I passed by a car pulled over on my way to Columbus. There was a woman being pulled out on a gurney, completely still. I knew she was dead before I even saw her. 

The only thought that echoed through my head was, “That could’ve been me.”

Any time I see an accident, I think, “That could’ve been me.”

Driving on the rough roads back from the tunnel, a coyote rushes onto the road and I slam on the brakes — it just barely makes it out of the way in time. I heave a sigh of relief, then feel a rush of anxiety over what could’ve happened. “That could’ve been the end,” I think.

***

We first arrived at the Moonville Tunnel just as the sun began to set. The roads leading down to it were rough and spiraling, often twisting back and forth down the sides of hills and sometimes breaking through to open plains scattered with rusted-out trucks and unidentifiable chunks of metal. 

Most of the paths were made up of loosely-set rocks, and a few of them felt narrow enough that one wrong turn or loose bit of dirt would’ve sent us careening down the edge. 

Coming to the bottom of the final hill, we spotted a small sign outside a large gravel clearing. “MOONVILLE TUNNEL,” it read. It was the only signifier of a long-lost ghost town – one that succumbed entirely to the passing of time. 

A cursory search online told me some of the various legends surrounding the tunnel: the ghosts of children, mechanics, and various others who wandered into the tunnel at the wrong time. Each had some signifier, be it a bright light or soft laughter. 

Other tales couldn’t be found online. More vague descriptions of strange occurrences that came from friends, only hinting at the supernatural, instead of outright saying it: strange noises, rustling, the feeling of movement behind you — the kinds of things that you could easily attribute to nature but are a lot more fun if you don’t. 

We parked at the beginning of a path leading to the tunnel, next to a van decked-out in zombie apocalypse-themed graphics. Stickers, including one for the band My Chemical Romance and another for the SCP Foundation — an online creative writing group based around paranormal activity —  were haphazardly scattered on the back. 

It was a strange contrast to my Jeep. Bright blue, sunset graphics with the words “If it ain’t stupid, I ain’t driving it!” on the back. But regardless, a collection of strange, adventure-oriented vehicles was a good sign. 

Before approaching the tunnel, we walked up to a bridge, a massive slab of metal running over a shallow river. Both sides were blocked off by wire fencing — hopefully only to prevent climbers, whose presence was well-indicated by the graffitied names and phalluses covering the unreachable corners of the support beams. Regardless, my mind flooded with all the more morbid reasons the fence might be there. 

I looked down and thought I saw bones at the dry parts of the river. 

I had hoped they were just from a deer.

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It felt like the bones gazed back up at me. 

“That could’ve been you.”

In the distance, a hill loomed. It beckoned as we approached, slowly growing to reach up at least twenty feet, tall enough for trains to pass through. All the ghost stories talked about people unlucky enough to be hit by trains back when the tunnel was operational. 

There weren’t even train tracks left anymore, only layers of graffiti lining the walls, arching just below the highest point I could reach. I guessed that most vandals were of average height. 

On the outsides of the tunnel, harsh slopes led to the top of the hill. Tall steps were carved into one side. Evelina was the only one willing to brave them. She climbed up, stretching her legs up as far as she could to move between each of the stairs, slowly but not carefully. As she emerged from the top, a grin spread across her face. Even that far up, we could all see it. She danced, flipped us off, and almost lost her balance. I was terrified she might fall, but there would’ve been nothing I could do to catch her.

 “That could’ve been it,” I thought as I watched her descend the opposite side of the entrance. 

As we passed through, our small phone flashlights slowly made their way across the walls of the tunnel, illuminating each spray-painted doodle we walked past. 

Uncited Wikipedia entries mentioned “a ghostly figure wearing an all white robe, holding a lantern which emits a blinding light” inside the tunnel.

At the other end, a bright, circular light came on. I whispered what I remembered of the legend to Valerie and Evelina.

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My words echoed through the tunnel, lingering in the air well after they’d left my mouth. 

The light swayed back and forth as it approached us, growing brighter. As it passed, a couple covered in tattoos waved at us, flashlight in hand. 

We were lucky it wasn’t a ghost. 

When we emerged from the tunnel, the sun sat lower, with specks of hazy orange peeking through the trees along the horizon. The clean path slowly disappeared and was replaced by a light covering of grass, leaves, and other growth. Bridges stretched across larger paths, each running over a stream parallel to the original river. A biker rushed past us into the dark, and we never saw her again. 

Half an hour down the path, the moon rose above us. The clearings closed in and felt almost suffocating. A cacophony of frogs echoed around us, and we heard them rustling around our feet. 

As all of this became more apparent, we realized that walking any further would be dangerous, but tracing our path back wasn’t any safer. 

The wind breathed down our backs, howling, feeling much more powerful than just changing air pressure. We thought footsteps were echoing behind us, but none of us were inclined to look back to confirm. Instead, our own footsteps grew faster. 

As we rushed back through the tunnel, none of us thought to check for oncoming lights from lost spirits or bikers. If a spectral train were to have rushed down the long-buried tracks, we wouldn’t have even noticed the ground shaking beneath us. We would’ve been just as dead as the ghosts living there now. 

Of course, it had been over a century since a train last passed through the tunnel. Nonetheless…  

“That could’ve been us,” I thought. 

As we walked across the bridge a second time, frogs scurried away from us, crawling between the cracks into the underside of the bridge. They saw lights, listened for the shaking ground, and got away. They were safe. 

To them, we were a train. We were the ghost stories that they heard growing up. The same as my car was to the coyote . Or the same as a truck to a Nissan on the interstate. 

We all heard stories growing up, cautionary tales warning of what would happen if we weren’t careful, if we made a wrong step, if we lost track of our lives one more time. 

And those warnings are everywhere even now, always whispering to us, always reminding us how it could’ve been us, not them. 

Now, as I’m driving home, fighting against the fog, I pull over. Valerie’s awake now — more awake than I am. We’re about an hour away from Evelina’s. 

I ask her if she can drive the rest of the way back. 

“I wouldn’t want it to happen to us,” I think.