Stop on San Antonio's Ghost Tracks, shift into neutral, and the car rolls across the rails on its own. Dust the trunk with baby powder first and small handprints come up. The crash behind the legend happened in 1938, in Utah.
Drivers who stop at the railroad crossing where Villamain Road becomes Shane Road, on San Antonio's South Side, put the car in neutral and lift their foot off the brake. Then they wait. The car rolls forward on its own and carries them over the rails, and the story is that small hands are doing the pushing.
Most people dust the trunk with baby powder before they park. That is the part visitors come back talking about. One anonymous account collected by Snopes describes stopping right on the tracks, waiting, getting nervous, and deciding to leave just as the car began to move. "But what was scary," the account goes, "was the little sets of handprints all over the back of the car. All the size of children's hands." Ghost City Tours has been collecting the same story for years, including a visitor named Brenda Pacheco: "tiny hand prints! Plain and clear, and so, so tiny!"
The reason given is a school bus. It stalled on these rails sometime in the 1930s or 40s, depending on who is telling it, and a train came through and killed the children aboard. Ever since, they push stopped cars clear so nobody else dies the way they did. Nearby streets carry children's names: Bobbie Allen, Cindy Sue, Laura Lee, Nancy Carole, Richey Otis. Believers have pointed at them for decades as a memorial. Snopes found they were named for a developer's grandchildren.
There was never a crash. "No records of any accidents ever occurring on the railroad tracks in San Antonio," Ghost City Tours states flatly, and Legends of America turned up nothing in the Texas newspaper archives either.
The wreck the legend is built on happened more than a thousand miles away. On the morning of December 1, 1938, in snow and dense fog outside South Jordan, Utah, a Jordan High School bus driver named Farrold Silcox stopped at a crossing and opened the door to look and listen. He could not see the Flying Ute, a freight train of more than 80 cars running over 50 miles an hour. 23 children and Silcox died. The national rule requiring every school bus driver to stop at every crossing and open the door came out of that morning. So did San Antonio's ghosts: the city's newspaper ran roughly 10 days of front-page coverage that December, and a generation later people remembered the tragedy as local.
The push is the road. Shane Road tips gently downhill where the eye reads flat, and KSAT reported that the handprints are prints already on the paint, which the powder only makes visible.
In autumn 2018, Union Pacific laid 2 miles of siding track through the crossing and changed the elevation. The rails are still there. The roll is finished.
The children do have a monument. It stands outside a cemetery in South Jordan, Utah, and it lists all of their names.
