In Brief
The baggage room at Buffalo Central Terminal has a spirit named Rose. Investigators who hunt her say she answers women over their recorders and refuses to speak to men. One night a voice told them where she was, then warned them off.
The Full Story
In the cavernous baggage room at Buffalo Central Terminal, investigators called into the dark, "Where are you, Rose?" A woman's voice came back from somewhere in the black: "the corner." When they asked if they could come closer, the answer was flat and hard. "NO!"
Rose is the terminal's best-known spirit, reported in the baggage-claim area, and the groups who hunt her have noticed the same thing for years. She won't talk to men. She answers women, readily, over EVP recorders and spirit boxes, and goes silent the moment a man speaks. No one knows who she was. No grave, no name in any record, no death tied to the building explains her. She is only the voice on the tape.
The building she haunts opened on June 22, 1929, with a luncheon for 2,200 guests in the concourse. The New York Central Railroad built it in Art Deco to handle 200 trains and 10,000 passengers a day, crowned by a 15-story tower meant to be seen 15 miles off when lit. It opened months before the crash. Its busiest years were World War II, and then the trains thinned out, until the last one, the westbound Lake Shore Limited, pulled out at 4:10 in the morning on October 28, 1979.
The story the ghost hunters tell goes back to those war years. The way they tell it, dead soldiers came home through stations like this one, their remains handed across the baggage counter to the families waiting to claim them, and some baggage was never claimed. "During World War II many men of the war would never come back to claim their baggage," one local account puts it, "it is these men who are said to haunt the halls." No record proves it happened in this exact room. It lives as the legend behind why the baggage area is the loudest place in the building.
Rose is not the only one. Up in the tower offices, investigators leave out toys and glow-in-the-dark balloons to coax a boy they call Zachary and a young girl alongside him. Anthony Fedele, who bought the wreck for $75,000 in 1979 and lost it at auction seven years later, is said to have drifted back to the restoration he couldn't finish.
The terminal is restored now, hosting the very ghost hunts that go looking for her. And in the corner she named, when the women ask, Rose still answers.
