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Ghost train
In ghostlore, a ghost train is a haunted vehicle in the form of a locomotive or train. The ghost train differs from other traditional forms of haunting in that rather than being a static location where ghosts are claimed to be present, "the apparition is the entire train".
Ghost trains are reported in many different parts of the world where trains have at some point been prevalent forms of transportation. Accounts of ghost trains have been reported in Canada, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and in many states of the United States.
The St. Louis Ghost Train, better known as the St. Louis Light, is visible at night along an old abandoned rail line in between Prince Albert and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Two local students won an award for investigating and eventually duplicating the phenomenon, which they determined to be caused by the diffraction of distant vehicle lights. A history of the Canadian railways recounts, from a town in Saskatchewan, that "[t]he strange story of a ghost train has been told many times. The site where it occurs is a former railway crossing along a side road around eight kilometres north of the town".
Another Canadian story from May 1908 tells of a ghost train with blinding lights that travelled on non-existent tracks.
In Japan, the nisekisha (偽汽車) or yūrei-kikansha (幽霊機関車) is a folk tale of a phantom/counterfeit/ghost steam train involving the tanuki. Such tales were widespread by 1910, and folklorist Kizen Sasaki commented in 1926 that "probably everybody has heard this story somewhere at least once". The earliest instance of the tale that he had been able to trace was from some time between 1879 and 1887, but it had spread as the railways, first arriving in Japan only a few years earlier, had themselves spread across the country.
According to Sasaki, the tales of ghost steam trains are rather humorous, unlike the Japanese folk tales of ghost ships which are more mystical in character. The essence of the folk tale is that steam train drivers would hear the noise of a steam train coming towards them along the track, and they would initially stop to avoid a collision; but they would eventually carry on, when no train arrived, later to find a dead tanuki lying across the tracks. The tale would conclude with a humorous observation such as that "of course the tanuki really enjoy imitating things".
According to Michael Dylan Foster, a professor of Japanese at University of California at Davis, there are many allegorical interpretations of the tale, from industry versus the environment to the foreign versus the native. Its continued popularity, he suggests, was due to a widespread ambivalence on the part of the Japanese populace towards the steam era, on the one hand it providing better transportation, and on the other it destroying or (with the construction of the railway lines) physically reshaping the natural environment and homogenizing society and erasing local differences.
Symbolically, Foster also suggests, the tale can be read as the forces of traditional Japanese views taking a stand, through use of deception and tanuki magical powers of old, against the forces of industrial change and modernity, and ultimately, (in Foster's word) tragically, failing. That the tanuki is overpowered and killed by the train symbolizes not just the futility of opposing the advent of steam trains and concomitant industrialization, but indicates the acceptance of that futility, enshrining it in a folk tale.
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Ghost train
In ghostlore, a ghost train is a haunted vehicle in the form of a locomotive or train. The ghost train differs from other traditional forms of haunting in that rather than being a static location where ghosts are claimed to be present, "the apparition is the entire train".
Ghost trains are reported in many different parts of the world where trains have at some point been prevalent forms of transportation. Accounts of ghost trains have been reported in Canada, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and in many states of the United States.
The St. Louis Ghost Train, better known as the St. Louis Light, is visible at night along an old abandoned rail line in between Prince Albert and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Two local students won an award for investigating and eventually duplicating the phenomenon, which they determined to be caused by the diffraction of distant vehicle lights. A history of the Canadian railways recounts, from a town in Saskatchewan, that "[t]he strange story of a ghost train has been told many times. The site where it occurs is a former railway crossing along a side road around eight kilometres north of the town".
Another Canadian story from May 1908 tells of a ghost train with blinding lights that travelled on non-existent tracks.
In Japan, the nisekisha (偽汽車) or yūrei-kikansha (幽霊機関車) is a folk tale of a phantom/counterfeit/ghost steam train involving the tanuki. Such tales were widespread by 1910, and folklorist Kizen Sasaki commented in 1926 that "probably everybody has heard this story somewhere at least once". The earliest instance of the tale that he had been able to trace was from some time between 1879 and 1887, but it had spread as the railways, first arriving in Japan only a few years earlier, had themselves spread across the country.
According to Sasaki, the tales of ghost steam trains are rather humorous, unlike the Japanese folk tales of ghost ships which are more mystical in character. The essence of the folk tale is that steam train drivers would hear the noise of a steam train coming towards them along the track, and they would initially stop to avoid a collision; but they would eventually carry on, when no train arrived, later to find a dead tanuki lying across the tracks. The tale would conclude with a humorous observation such as that "of course the tanuki really enjoy imitating things".
According to Michael Dylan Foster, a professor of Japanese at University of California at Davis, there are many allegorical interpretations of the tale, from industry versus the environment to the foreign versus the native. Its continued popularity, he suggests, was due to a widespread ambivalence on the part of the Japanese populace towards the steam era, on the one hand it providing better transportation, and on the other it destroying or (with the construction of the railway lines) physically reshaping the natural environment and homogenizing society and erasing local differences.
Symbolically, Foster also suggests, the tale can be read as the forces of traditional Japanese views taking a stand, through use of deception and tanuki magical powers of old, against the forces of industrial change and modernity, and ultimately, (in Foster's word) tragically, failing. That the tanuki is overpowered and killed by the train symbolizes not just the futility of opposing the advent of steam trains and concomitant industrialization, but indicates the acceptance of that futility, enshrining it in a folk tale.