Tunnelton Tunnel

Night watchman Henry Dixon was murdered near the east entrance in 1908, case never solved. His lantern still swings in the dark.

Henry Dixon was twenty-seven years old when they found him dead about two hundred feet from the east entrance of the Big Tunnel in 1908. He had a fatal wound on the back of his head. His lantern was still lit, sitting next to the tracks. Dixon was the night watchman. Police suspected robbery. The case was never solved. Whoever killed him walked off into the Lawrence County hills and was never caught.

The Ohio and Mississippi Railroad bored the Big Tunnel, also called the Tunnelton Tunnel, through a limestone hill between 1855 and 1857 because the White River blocked its path and going around would have added eight miles. At 1,750 feet it was the longest railroad tunnel in Indiana when it opened. The first train ran through in 1856 and promptly stalled mid-tunnel, and passengers crawled out covered head to toe in coal soot. Between 1898 and 1909 the tunnel had to be enlarged and lined with brick because chunks of the ceiling kept falling on trains. Today it's 1,730 feet long and still active, operated now by CSX after passing through B&O and C&O ownership.

The tunnel kills people. It has for over a century. In 1907 a derailed coal train piled up five railcars inside the bore, and passengers almost suffocated before rescue arrived. In 1909 a head-on freight collision at the Fort Ritner end killed five railroad workers. In 1917, a National Guardsman accidentally shot and killed Private Edward Call during what was described as a "friendly scuffle"; the shooter suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1933 Julius Fullen fell asleep on the tracks at the east end and was struck by a passing train, his head and arm crushed. The 1882 Tunnelton Massacre, which left three would-be robbers dead at the hands of townspeople, happened nearby. A night watchman named Fields spent his shifts clearing rocks that fell from the ceiling after every train went through, which gives a sense of what working the Big Tunnel was like.

Dixon's ghost is the one everyone sees. A swinging lantern glides deep inside the passage, starting small and growing larger as it approaches. Visitors hear the engine-roar and wheel-grind of a train that isn't coming. A variant of the legend has a headless watchman, decapitated by a locomotive while signaling, still swinging his lantern through the dark searching for his head. The headless variant isn't supported by any documented death. Dixon was killed, not dismembered. Local folklore has a way of sanding off the messy details of an unsolved murder and replacing them with a cleaner horror-movie image.

The tunnel carries other stories. Construction supposedly cut through an old cemetery on the hill above, and caskets and corpses spilled into the excavation below. Some versions of the legend specify Native American burial ground, others Civil War-era graves. During Prohibition, locals said the mafia used the tunnel to dispose of bodies. One story has a mobster dragging a man inside, shooting him, and leaving the body to rot in the dark.

The Big Tunnel is still a working rail line. Trains pass through it several times a week. Walking into it is trespassing, and it's also a direct path to getting flattened by CSX equipment that can't stop for you. None of that has discouraged visitors, who keep reporting mysterious lights, phantom trains, sudden temperature drops, and dark figures at both entrances. Paranormal investigators have captured EVPs inside the bore that they can't explain. Henry Dixon's lantern, the one he was still holding when the blow came, is still burning somewhere deep in the limestone over a century later.