The Iron Goat Trail near Stevens Pass, Washington follows the rail grade where 96 people died in the 1910 Wellington avalanche. Hikers report hands grabbing at their clothes, and voices in the old Cascade Tunnel. One medium asked the dead to speak. A voice told her to piss off.
The Iron Goat Trail runs along an abandoned railroad grade near Stevens Pass, Washington, and hikers on it report hands grabbing at their clothes. Screams. Whispered voices close by on an empty path. Most of the trouble gathers at the west portal of the original Cascade Tunnel, where the American Hauntings account of the site collects cold spots, stretches that turn oppressive for no reason, and voices echoing off the stone that later turn up on recording devices.
In 2023 a medium named Jill Dell filmed a hike near that tunnel. Her equipment quit on her there. She asked the dead to speak, she said, "so that I can share your story." A voice she could not place answered: "Piss off."
Two Great Northern trains came west through that tunnel in February 1910 and stopped at the town of Wellington, on a ledge above the Tye River. The Spokane Local and the Fast Mail sat there six days. The telegraph lines went down on the 26th and took the outside world with them. On the last day of the month the snow turned to rain, with thunder and lightning over the pass. The slope above the tracks had been stripped years earlier by clear-cutting and by fires thrown from locomotive sparks, and almost nothing was left standing up there to hold snow.
In the small hours of March 1 an avalanche came off Windy Mountain, half a mile long and a quarter mile wide, and swept both trains about 150 feet down into the valley. 96 people died: 35 passengers, and the railroad men sleeping aboard. 23 got out alive. It remains the deadliest avalanche in U.S. history.
The last one taken out alive was Ida Starrett, a Spokane widow riding with her three children. She was thrown clear and pinned face-down beneath a tree trunk with her infant son under her, and crews dug her out after 11 hours. Her 9-year-old daughter Lillian died. So did the baby, Francis. Her 7-year-old son Raymond lived with a 30-inch splinter of wood driven through his forehead.
Bodies came down the mountain by toboggan for the next four months, the last of them found in late July. That October the railroad renamed the town Tye, to get Wellington off the disaster.
The Northwest Paranormal Investigation Agency has worked the site nearly every week the weather allows since 2004, running video and audio equipment and refusing psychics and Ouija boards. "I've never been up there where somebody hasn't had some kind of experience," lead researcher Vaughn Hubbard told the Everett Herald. What the group says it has recorded there is a woman's voice singing and humming, as though moving through her daily chores, and a child wandering somewhere in the dark.
Neither of them has a name. Nobody has matched the singing woman or the child to any of the 96. Six of those 96 have no names either: laborers, entries 91 through 96 on the victims list, never identified.
