In Brief
The Moonville Tunnel in Vinton County, Ohio, is the last standing piece of a vanished mining town, and locals say four ghosts haunt it: an engineer with a lantern, a brakeman whose eyes shine like fire, the Lavender Lady, and Baldie Keeton, the town bully who throws pebbles from the roof.
The Full Story
The Moonville Tunnel cuts through a wooded ridge in Vinton County, Ohio, and four ghosts are said to haunt it. Each one has a name. Each one has a story the locals can tell you, start to finish.
The strange part is that the town those ghosts belonged to is gone. Moonville was a coal-and-clay mining hamlet, named after a Mr. Moon who ran the store, nothing to do with the moon at all. It peaked at a little over 100 people in the 1870s. The last family walked out in 1947, and the railroad pulled up the rails in 1988. The curved brick tunnel, built around 1856 and roughly 250 feet long by most accounts, is the last piece of Moonville left standing.
What the town left behind was a body count. A folklorist who studies the line counts roughly 27 deaths along this stretch of track over the decades, and the four ghosts are drawn from the named dead.
There is the Engineer, an engineer named Lawhead killed in a head-on collision in the early 1880s. After the wreck, crews working the line reported a figure carrying a lantern near the tunnel mouth. There is the Brakeman, a lantern-swinging shape inside the tunnel itself, tied to a railroad worker killed walking the tracks at night; the Ohio Exploration Society's retelling says his eyes "shine like bulbs of fire." And there is the Lavender Lady, named in local lore as Mary Shea, killed on the tracks long ago. Visitors describe a thin, older woman in old-fashioned dress who vanishes as you watch, leaving behind the smell of lavender with no flower anywhere near.
The fourth is the only one with a grave you can find.
David "Baldie" Keeton was a real Moonville-area man, a known fighter, who died in 1886 and lies in Keeton Cemetery a few miles off. He was the town bully in life, and the legend keeps him petty in death. The story goes that he climbs to the top of the tunnel and flicks pebbles down at hikers passing underneath.
So of the four, the engineer, the brakeman, and the lavender-scented woman are figures no record can quite pin down. But the bully has a headstone. You can stand at his grave, read his name and the year he died, and then walk back to the tunnel where, more than a century on, he is said to be perched on the brick overhead, dropping rocks on whoever passes beneath the only thing his town left behind.
