Hempfield Tunnel

A 350-foot railroad tunnel in Wheeling built directly beneath Peninsula Cemetery in 1857, where German immigrant Alois Ulrich was murdered with a hatchet in 1867 by serial killer Joseph Eisele. An 1869 newspaper account describes a figure dropping from the green-slimed ceiling with bloody, half-severed fingers, saying "Let the dead rest." The tunnel is now a walking trail, and the green substance on the ceiling persists.

A strange green substance drips from the ceiling of Hempfield Tunnel in Wheeling. Locals have a theory about what it is: the tunnel runs directly beneath Peninsula Cemetery, and they believe the moisture is seeping down through the graves. That explanation is almost certainly wrong (it's probably mineral deposits from groundwater), but it's telling that the people of Wheeling went straight to "corpse runoff" before considering geology.

The Hempfield Railroad Company carved this tunnel in 1857 to connect Wheeling to Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Peninsula Cemetery was already on the hill above. The railroad builders tunneled right under the graves and kept going. When a highway was built over the same area in 1964, workers exhumed and relocated over 2,500 bodies from the cemetery. But in 1857, nobody moved anyone. The tunnel went in, the trains ran, and the dead stayed put overhead.

On June 29, 1867, a German immigrant named Alois Ulrich walked into the tunnel and didn't walk out. Joseph Eisele, also German, killed him with a carpenter's hatchet and dumped the body in a culvert near the northeast exit. Eisele, who also went by the alias John Schafer, had already murdered Joseph Lilienthal in Parkersburg on June 15 for his pocket watch. He'd go on to kill Rudolph Tsutor on December 6 of the same year. Three hatchet murders in six months earned him the nickname "the Hatchet Slayer." Eisele became the last person executed by hanging in Wood County. Before his execution, he wrote his own memoir: "Life and Crimes of Joseph Eisele, alias John Schafer, The Parkersburg Murderer."

Two years after the murder, the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer published an account that launched the tunnel's ghost story. In 1869, a small group of men (the newspaper noted they'd been drinking, but described them as "men of respectable and truthful characters") entered the tunnel and heard groans echoing off the stone walls, followed by what sounded like a man begging for mercy. A figure dropped from the ceiling, swathed in the green slime that coated the stones, its arm outstretched with bloody fingers hanging half-severed. A guttural voice said something like: "Let the dead rest."

The men came back with witnesses. The same thing happened again. A third visitor, going through independently, reported a figure with a "bashed and bloody head" matching the injuries Ulrich would have sustained from a hatchet.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad acquired the tunnel and rebuilt it between 1902 and 1904. The ghost sightings didn't stop with the reconstruction. The tunnel is now part of the Wheeling Heritage Trail, a paved walking and cycling path that passes straight through. The walls are covered in colorful graffiti. The green substance on the ceiling persists.

Peninsula Cemetery above the tunnel adds another layer. A spectral woman in a black cape has been reported near a specific gravesite, though she gets less attention than Ulrich's ghost inside the tunnel below. The combination of a cemetery directly overhead, a documented hatchet murder, and a newspaper account from 1869 makes Hempfield Tunnel one of the most layered ghost stories in the state.

West Virginia's Department of Tourism added the tunnel to its official Paranormal Trail in 2024, which says something about how seriously the state takes the reputation. You can walk through any time the Heritage Trail is open. The tunnel is about 350 feet long and well-lit by daylight at both ends, though the middle section gets dark enough that the green dripping overhead becomes hard to see. Whether that's a relief or not depends on which explanation you prefer.