Tunnels

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Story 1: The Hoosak Tunnel Hauntings.

In the northernmost reaches of the United States, there is a train tunnel whose very foundations are saturated with the blood of the many workers who died hollowing it out.

Disturbing encounters with spectral entities were reported both during its construction and for many years afterwards.

What secrets lie at the heart of the Hoosak Tunnel Hauntings?

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Throughout the early 1800s, American railroad engineers laboured to find a way of connecting the northeastern city of Boston with the upstate districts of New York City.

This was a massive undertaking and facilitated the need for a colourful variety of sub-projects and architectural features in order to successfully link the two cities.

Key amongst these constructions was the requirement for a five-mile stretch of tunnel directly underneath the Hoosak mountain chain, running parallel to the Deerfield River between the town of Florida and the city of North Adams.

With only pickaxes, bare hands and rudimentary black powder explosives available, the going was tough, and many lives were lost to both tunnel collapses and the lack of ventilation.

It was not until 1865, a full 14 years after the project had commenced, that the advent of nitroglycerine enabled the workers to make real headway through the unrelenting barriers of rock and clay.

But this new technology did not come without a price, and it was not long after it was adopted that the first fatal accident occurred.

On the afternoon of the 20th of March, a three-man crew were experimenting with a new explosive at the head of the tunnel works.

A worker named Ringo Kelly detonated the explosive charge before his two colleagues, Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash, had made it back to the safety of their operations bunker.

The two men were killed instantly, crushed to death under an avalanche of falling rock and debris.

In the aftermath of the incident, Kelly became isolated and withdrawn.

He was skittish and nervous around his colleagues, claiming to see mysterious figures following him through the confines of the tunnel and hearing whispered voices whenever he was alone.

Several days later, he disappeared altogether, until his lifeless body was found two miles inside the tunnel, at the exact spot where Brinkman and Nash had been killed.

The local sheriff concluded that Kelly had been strangled by one of his colleagues in revenge for the deaths, but nobody was ever formally questioned about the murder, and the rest of the workers also began to report encountering shadowy figures moving around just beyond the extent of the light from their lanterns.

Sometimes these unknown figures could be heard apparently groaning in pain, or on occasion, they would deafeningly shriek out in terror.

Word soon spread that the ghosts of the two men now inhabited the tunnel, which led to a mass walkout, with a number of miners electing to leave the site for good.

Eventually, the project managers began to seek assistance from local clergymen and scholars.

in an effort to stop the ghost stories which had resulted in a notable downturn in productivity.

In 1868, Paul Travers was asked to come and inspect the site to see if the rumours could finally be dispelled once and for all.

Travers was a qualified mechanical engineer and had been a respected cavalry officer during the Civil War.

Rather than agreeing with the construction company that the noises were merely wind blowing down through the tunnel network, the engineer instead sided with the workers.

He claimed that during his visit, he had been bombarded with the sounds of the dead and the dying, chilling reverberations he had not experienced since the Battle of Shiloh.

But as unsettling as Paul Traver's experience was, the most chilling accident ever to occur at the site would not be long in coming.

An incident that would forever be etched in the memories of those associated with it.

A month after Traver's tunnel inspection had taken place, there was a gigantic explosion in the facility's central pumping station, following an unexpected build-up of Naphtha gas.

The 13 subcontractors who were labouring in the tunnel at the time were all caught in the blast.

Most were killed instantly, crushed underneath huge sections of burning wreckage.

As it would transpire, they would be the lucky ones.

The few survivors quickly discovered there was no way back up to the surface.

and found themselves being pushed deeper and deeper into the depths of the tunnel works by an unending wave of muddy water.

Those that did not drown survived a while longer, having fashioned a makeshift raft to cling on to, but with the tunnel's air pumps destroyed in the explosion, they eventually suffocated.

A worker by the name of Mallory volunteered to be lowered down in a bucket at a point further down the tunnel, hoping that he could retrieve at least some of his fallen colleagues.

When he was hauled back up several minutes later, he was barely conscious.

Between weak breaths, he told his managers there were no survivors to be seen, and all of the bodies were gone.

Where, he did not know.

It took several long months to drain the site, and during that time, at least some of the mangled and bloated corpses eventually found their way out of the flooded tunnel and into surrounding waterways.

Local residents began to contact the police, claiming to have been guided to the remains of the dead workers by mysterious figures, who immediately disappeared when each body was found.

One workman claimed to have seen a string of men, making their way down to a nearby water-filled pit, pickaxes on their shoulders and a lantern at the front of the column.

The figures did not reply when he had called out, and after he had followed them for a short distance, he suddenly found that they had vanished completely.

leaving behind no footprints or other trace of their passage in the wet mud beneath their feet.

On his arrival at the pit, the worker could just about make out a dark shape floating in the centre of the pool.

Suddenly, a pained cry broke the silence around him, the anguished scream of a soul in utter torment.

As the high-pitched wail continued, the man covered his ears, casting the light from his lantern onto the object in the water.

The dim candlelight revealed the bloodied and broken remains of a young labourer, not even 18 years old, clearly one of the victims of the flooded tunnel.

As soon as he realised what he was looking at, the man lowered his hands from his ears, the screaming stopped, and he was once again all alone.

The young labourer had vanished.

When the last body of the 13 dead workers had been recovered and provided with a proper burial, reports of spectral figures subsided.

But the sounds of disembodied voices groaning and shrieking in the dark depths of the construction works continued, prompting the owners to make further steps to rationalise what was taking place.

On the evening of the 25th of June 1874, Superintendent James R.

McKinstry arrived at the site.

He was the drilling operations manager for the project and had enlisted the services of a university lecturer, Dr.

Clifford J.

Owens.

McKinstry unlocked the gates to the building works and the two men descended into the bowels of the tunnel in search of answers.

Owens would later describe the tunnel as being as cold and dark as a tomb.

They had not travelled far when both suddenly halted, as an eerie and unsettling commotion floated up towards them from the dark depths.

It sounded like a human being in great pain.

It was then that Owens became aware of a dim light, steadily making its way up towards them.

When the light drew near, Owens could see that it was an unnaturally blue colour, unlike anything he had ever seen before.

As it neared them, it suddenly seemed to change shape, morphing into a roughly humanoid figure, but with an empty space where the head should have been.

McKinstry and Owens both found themselves holding their breath as the shape came to a halt directly in front of them.

It was hovering a few feet above the ground and seemed to be slightly regarding the two men.

For a moment, moment, there was nothing but a cold and oppressive silence before the apparition emitted a mournful shriek and retreated into the darkness it emerged from.

Further incidents would also indicate that the supernatural occurrences associated with the project were not simply restricted to the tunnel shaft itself.

Three months after Dr.

Owen's experience, a local hunter named Frank Webster disappeared whilst out in the woods not far from the work site.

It would be three days before he was was found again, in a disorientated state on the banks of the Deerfield River.

Webster claimed that he had been hunting deer in the forest when he had heard someone calling to him.

He had followed the voices through the trees and into a nearby fissure in the mountain rock.

In the dim light of the cave, he could see the shadowy outlines of figures working on the rock around him.

but they were completely silent.

Not even their pickaxes striking the rock made a sound, and they did not respond when he called out to them.

The hapless woodsman then described how his hunting rifle had been snatched from his grasp by an invisible force, and he had been repeatedly beaten with it until he lost consciousness.

His rescuers would later note how Webster did not have his rifle with him when he was found, and was indeed covered in livid bruises and abrasions, as if he had been subjected to a violent assault.

The first train successfully passed through the Hoosak Tunnel on the 9th of February 1875.

The project had taken over 25 years to complete, costing millions of dollars, but it was the human cost that was felt most by the men who had worked on it.

Over 200 workers had lost their lives within the suffocating darkness beneath the mountains.

The eventual opening of the railway line meant that there were now far less reports of disembodied voices emanating from inside the mountain, but reports of unearthly balls of light emerging from the depths of the tunnel during the hours of darkness still persisted, and other unsettling events also continued to take place.

In autumn of 1875, an employee of the Boston and Main Railway Company named Harlan Mulveny was delivering a wagon load of timber to the tunnel in order to replace some of the wooden supports that had become damaged.

The other men attached to the maintenance team had been waiting for him at the entrance and had waved at him as he passed.

As Mulveny's colleagues had lit their lanterns and gathered their tools to follow him, they were suddenly shocked to see the wagon come bolting past them back out of the tunnel, the horses pulling it, kicking and bucking wildly as they ran.

Mulveny was stood upright in his seat, his face etched in terror, whipping furiously at the animals.

A few days later, A local hunter located the wagon and the horses, standing unattended in a forest clearing three miles away.

The timber lay undisturbed, with Mulveny's coat and pipe sitting discarded on his seat.

Of Mulveny himself, there was no sign.

He was never seen again.

During the 1970s, there was a renewed wave of public interest in the tunnel after the story of its haunting was published in a national newspaper.

Researchers and paranormal investigators flocked to the site, equipped with sound recording equipment and cameras, in the hopes of collecting some evidence that the Hoosak tunnel phenomenon genuinely existed.

One such individual was a man named Bernard Hasterbar, who announced in 1973 that he would walk the full length of the tunnel in order to prove that the whole affair was a hoax.

Watched by a small group of onlookers, he entered at the North Adams end of the tunnel and was never seen again.

A rescue team that retraced his steps the following day found no evidence suggesting what might have happened to him.

In 1976, an investigator claimed that one evening he had come face to face with the ghostly figure of an old man dressed in miners' overalls.

The man was seemingly backlit by a brilliant white light and walked straight through a sheer rock face when challenged.

Another researcher named Ali Ullmaker claimed to have felt an unearthly presence stood next to her when she ventured into the tunnel and to have caught the muffled sounds of crying and groaning on a tape recorder she had with her at the time.

However, it would seem that not all of the spirits who dwelt within the Hoosak Tunnel were malevolent in nature, and some were even protective of the men who worked there.

One railroad employee by the name of Joseph Impeco swore that the tunnel ghosts had saved his life on two separate occasions.

One evening, He had been working on a bend of the rail line not far from the tunnel's north entrance, shipping ice from the tracks.

Suddenly a male voice voice had whispered in his ear, Run Joe, run.

Impico had stopped what he was doing and looked around, but there was not a soul to be seen.

Seconds later, Impico had felt a violent shove to his chest and fell backwards away from the tracks.

Within moments, the number 60 engine had come streaming around the bend at unexpectedly high speed.

Without the warning and accompanying push, Impico had little doubt he would have been killed instantly by the speeding locomotive.

Six weeks later, he was again working on his own to free up some frozen freight cars, when a similar incident occurred.

This time he had been straining to part the heavy train wheels from the frozen track, when the same unknown voice had whispered, Joe, Joe, drop it, Joe.

Instinctively Impico had let go of the metal crowbar he was holding, only to see it immediately jolted and thrown violently against the tunnel wall by over 11,000 volts of electricity.

An overhead power line had short-circuited and fallen onto the tracks nearby, meaning that Impico's unseen guardian had once again saved his life.

The sheer scale of the human loss experienced by the builders of the Hoosak Tunnel earned it a haunting nickname, the Bloody Pit.

The location still remains in use today, with the Boston and Maine Rail Corporation running through it up to 12 freight trains a day.

It remains one of the longest active running railway lines in the world and is arguably the most haunted.

Are we to believe that for a quarter of a century, men working on one of America's most ambitious construction projects were terrorised and attacked by the spirits of their fallen co-workers?

Or is there perhaps a more rational explanation for what took place in this lonely and isolated area of Massachusetts?

In any corner of the globe, you will find that almost any place has stories of ghosts and other spirits associated with it.

When fatal accidents occur, it is all too easy to blame subsequent tragic happenings on the restless souls of those who died there in the past.

In the stifling and claustrophobic darkness of the underground tunnel, it is terrifying to imagine what tricks and misconceptions the darkness and lack of oxygen might have played on those unfortunate enough to be labouring there.

Robbed of their senses due to a lack of light and ventilation, every minor sound and movement could all too easily have been misinterpreted as something far more sinister.

That said, the unsold deaths and disappearances that occurred at the site do raise questions that are difficult to answer and elevate the tunnel to a level of scrutiny that perhaps other, more notorious haunted locations do not necessarily generate.

Maybe there is indeed truth in the reports of the workers, and the spirits of some of those killed underground have yet to find their way back to the surface.

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Story Story 2.

The Entity of Saracina

On the outskirts of a small village in Eastern Europe, there lies a three-decade-old mystery which still disturbs the servicemen and women who were involved to their core.

Why did the Bulgarian army spend two years excavating the foothills of the Balkan mountains, only to hide all evidence of their activities?

The answers lie buried along with the entity of Saricina.

The force of the impact hurled the young soldier across the room, sending him crashing into one of the chamber walls.

There was a sickening crunch as his head connected with the polished stone, before he slumped to the ground, where he remained motionless.

For the briefest of moments there was silence, and then the confined space was filled with the sound of gunfire.

The colonel watched in amazement as his men fired rounds into the haze that now formed across the centre of the room, shielding the thing that was buried in the wall opposite where they were standing.

As the bullets entered the shimmering field, they halted in mid-air before falling harmlessly to the ground.

The riflemen were still firing.

as another of their number was suddenly thrown across the room like a rag doll by an invisible force.

Stray rounds from his weapon struck at least two of them.

As the din of the gunfire was replaced by the screams of the wounded, the commanding officer made the decision to order a retreat.

The soldiers began to make their way back up to the surface, along a network of spiralling corridors which were never intended for humans to walk through.

As he ensured that the wounded were moved ahead to the front of the party, Colonel Kurnov took hold of a rifle and paused for a moment.

Pressing his hand to the smooth cold stone of the corridor wall, he detected a steady vibration, which was growing in intensity.

A faint green light had started to creep along the floor of the narrow tunnel behind them, which was growing in strength along with a thrumming sensation.

A few feet away, the psychic was screaming at him, saying that they should never have come to this cursed place, that none of them would would make it back to the surface alive.

He snapped back, telling her that if she wanted to die down here, he would gladly oblige, before ordering two riflemen to take her away.

Kurnev tried to ignore the pleading expressions on the faces of the two soldiers, who he now ordered to act as their rearguard, curtly reminding them of their oath to protect the Bulgarian people.

The main party had only travelled a short distance further, when they heard more gunfire echoing up the tunnel behind them, which was quickly and brutally cut short.

Finally, the air grew much cooler, and the path ahead was illuminated by daylight.

The party staggered out into the open.

Orderlies and medics rushed forward to assist them.

The colonel shouted for the engineers to seal up the tunnel entrance using their excavators.

only to be told that the machines were not working.

The two tanks guarding the site perimeter were similarly malfunctioning, and so explosive charges had to be brought forward instead.

The psychic was still shouting at him, cursing him for ignoring her advice and that of Babavanga.

For a moment he considered shooting the woman on the spot, but instead motioned for one of the orderlies to sedate her.

She was a problem that could wait for another time.

Several minutes later, the charges had been detonated, burying the bodies of his men deep underground, with whatever had killed them.

History teaches us that Bulgaria is no stranger to conflict.

Ever since the Thracian tribes first banded together to establish their nation, the Bulgarian people have been locked in a perpetual cycle of invasion and uprising.

From the Persians to the Romans, and the Ottomans to the Soviet Union, an unending parade of empires have attempted to subjugate the territory, only for its inhabitants to re-establish their independence after periods of brutal and bloody struggle.

The unremarkable village of Sarichina is located approximately 20 miles northwest of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.

Up until 30 years ago, it was a place that was unknown to the majority of the Bulgarian population, let alone beyond the country's borders.

But on the 6th of December 1990, a large military force descended on the settlement, cordoning off a sizable tract of farmland in the process.

Codenamed Operation Sunray, the project was commanded by Colonel Svetko Kurnev, with the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence announcing that the aim of the endeavour was to locate a treasure trove that was believed to be buried there.

For centuries, rumours had circulated around the region that Samuel, the Bulgarian Emperor, had buried a huge cache of gold near the village before going into battle with the Ottoman Empire.

It was now Colonel Kurnev's task to locate and recover the lost fortune.

Once the site was secured, Kurnov ordered his men to begin digging a large shaft deep into the earth.

The work proved problematic, as in addition to the risk of flooding from a nearby underground lake, The soldiers found that all the electrical equipment that they had brought with them began to malfunction.

Excavators and power tools failed to operate properly, and so the men were instead forced to use pickaxes and shovels.

At a depth of approximately six meters, the workers suddenly encountered a thick layer of stone, which they were unable to penetrate with hand tools.

Explosives were used to eventually break through this barrier, and a mysterious spiral passageway was discovered underneath it that wound its way deep underground.

As the first squads of soldiers tentatively set off into the tunnels, the excavation site was suddenly plagued by unexplained phenomena.

Almost immediately, a number of the infantrymen guarding the compound reported seeing mysterious figures and creatures moving around just beyond the perimeter fences.

Sometimes these were described by witnesses as seven foot tall monsters.

On other occasions, the guards sighted tiny figures hiding in the undergrowth that were hardly more than a foot in height.

As well as the inexplicable failure of the site's vehicles and machinery, radio equipment also malfunctioned.

For the duration of the project, it proved impossible to transmit radio communications into and outside of the compound.

Eventually, A telephone landline was laid from the nearby village into the command post, but the operators who were assigned to use it complained that they could hear strange voices whispering in the background of their telephone calls.

As time passed and military personnel ventured deeper along the spiral corridors, the region around the site was consumed by reports of unidentified flying objects.

Although the individual descriptions of these craft varied somewhat in appearance, all were reported to be brightly illuminated.

and seeming to emit flames as they travelled across the sky.

In June 1992, a local resident named Elka Kirova was awoken by the sound of her dogs barking outside the property.

When she opened her front door, she observed three shadowy figures hurrying across the land from the direction of the excavation site.

They quickly disappeared into a nearby tree line, only for a brilliant white light to then rise up into the sky and disappear.

When Kirova reported the matter to Colonel Kernev, a team of his men located a circular patch of burned ground where she reported seeing the object.

In the days that followed, both Elka and the soldiers who had been sent to her address experienced feelings of utter exhaustion that would confine them to their beds.

Worryingly, this was one of the least bizarre incidents reported.

On the evening of the 27th of November 1991, A villager by the name of Grycho Korlev had been nearing his home when he had suddenly found himself bathed in a bright light, being projected down from the sky above him.

He blacked out, and when he awoke the following morning, he had no recollection of the previous few hours.

Stranger still, he now found himself in the village of Mishtitsa, 40 miles to the south of where he had been walking.

After two years of exploration, The riflemen exploring the tunnels beneath Sarichina found their path blocked by a huge slab of polished stone, shaped like a concave lens.

When they eventually broke through this entry point, they found themselves in a circular chamber, where the stone walls had been polished to a mirror-like sheen.

And at the far end of this room, the skeletal remains of a towering creature seemed to have been fused into the rock.

Colonel Kurnev himself was present as his men tried to traverse the chamber.

noting with interest that at certain points in the wall, strange symbols which resembled hieroglyphs were visible just underneath the stone surface.

When the soldiers reached the centre of the room, they were prevented from crossing by some form of invisible barrier, which severely injured some of them.

Whatever transpired in the aftermath of this event, the army rapidly withdrew from the tunnel network, destroying the entry point as they left, and then concreting over the entire site.

All records of the operation were later hidden from public record.

It was estimated that the whole endeavour had cost the Bulgarian government in excess of $20 million,

with nothing to show for it other than a legacy of confusion and misery.

With no official records to explain what took place deep in the ground beneath Tsaricina, commentators have been forced to piece together the events from the testimony of some of the surviving members of the excavation.

One of those interviewed was Colonel Kurnev himself, from whom the descriptions of both the spiralling tunnel network and the central chamber that housed the unknown being have been obtained.

Kurnev conceded that the tale of Emperor Samuel's lost treasure had always been a cover story.

In reality, he and his men had been guided to the location by a group of psychics and remote viewers, who described something buried just underneath the surface there, which was designated by the military as Object Number 1.

He went on to relate how a number of his men had died following exposure to a mysterious bacterium, and how others had somehow been teleported around the site, their lifeless bodies subsequently found fused within the rock itself.

One of the aforementioned remote viewers, named Erli Loganova, spent years after the project trying to draw up support for a further expedition to the location.

She explained how the entity that dwelt within the buried object was one of mankind's oldest ancestors, and that it had been trying to guide people to its location for thousands of years.

She also claimed that Hitler had searched in vain for the entity for the duration of World War II, invading Russia in the hopes of securing it.

She also claimed the creature had somehow shown her visions of the future.

Loganova describes how she wrote down these visions in four journals, all of which were later confiscated by the Bulgarian army.

The books contained descriptions of vessels that travelled through space by harnessing the power of the sun, and clothing worn by soldiers that had the power to repel bullets, directing them back at the guns that had originally fired them.

A further source of information about Operation Sunray came from the writings of military professor Delchona Platinov, whose daughter Marina was attached to the expedition due to her latent psychic abilities.

He claims that prior to her departure for the mission, Marina was contacted by the famed seer, Babavanga, Vanga, who warned her not to disturb whatever creature dwelt beneath Sarichina.

Professor Naplitanov goes on to describe how Marina worked closely with Colonel Kurned throughout the project and accompanied him down into the tunnels.

When she returned from the site, she was never quite the same, and sadly chose to end her life by jumping from the roof of a tall building.

In the years following the closure of the Sarichina site, a team of researchers from the University of Sofia camped out near the town.

They intended to conduct scientific tests which might explain what the army had been searching for and why they had invested so many resources into the expedition.

They spent a total of 20 days out in the field, scanning for a variety of anomalies such as variations in electromagnetic radiation.

By the end of the first week, they had recorded multiple sightings of UFOs, and one mystifying incident where their equipment had been picked up and hurled around by an invisible poltergeist-like entity.

But it was when an unknown craft flew in low over their campsite, and projected a beam of light onto their campfire and caused it to burn wildly out of control, that they decided to abandon their tests and return to the safety of the capital.

What is it that remains hidden away under the rock and stone of this Bulgarian landscape?

What is the force that reached out to the military psychics and ordered them to bring soldiers and engineers to the place where it lay dormant?

Erly Loganova maintains that it is a creature from long before the time of mankind, a towering behemoth in possession of boundless psychic powers, determined to manipulate humanity into freeing it from its subterranean confinement.

Others believe that what the army located was in fact a downed spacecraft.

Their actions at the site had activated some form of distress beacon or transmission, which caused other extraterrestrial beings to come to its aid.

It is hardly surprising that given this hypothesis, Tsaricina had earned something of a reputation as the Bulgarian equivalent to Area 51.

The significant degree of variance reported in the shape and size of the entities and flying craft that were observed by witnesses also points to a third, more intriguing hypothesis.

Some believe that Tsaricina is yet another example of an interdimensional portal, where the fringes of our existence collide and merge with those of neighboring realities, allowing the inhabitants of those vast domains to enter and roam freely amongst us.

The most notorious of these alleged crossover sites is a place which we have already visited, Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.

Incidents reported there include mysterious beings, giant creatures and alien spacecraft all seeming to appear in our reality as if they had passed through some form of invisible gateway, only to then return from whatever plane of existence they came from.

The Bermuda Triangle and the US Air Force facility at Montauk in Long Island are cited as further examples of this phenomenon.

But the wide range of markedly different incidents that were reported during the course of the operation may also suggest a more rational explanation.

Over the two years that the project was underway, a large number of military staff would have found themselves temporarily stationed at the site.

Influenced and affected by the myths and rumours that had been circulated by their predecessors, new personnel would already have been on edge upon their arrival.

Working in such an isolated and stressful environment, it is hardly surprising that they experienced what their mind would go on to interpret as paranormal encounters.

Every equipment failure suddenly became the result of a mysterious and malevolent force.

Every curious trespasser near the base perimeter was suspected to be a marauding cryptid or alien interloper.

Despite all of the reported incidents and the large number of alleged witnesses, it is important to note that there is no photographic or video evidence of what took place.

This may well be the result of deliberate suppression on the part of the military, but could also signify that there was little in the way of truth to the sightings, other than the workings of overactive imaginations.

Operation Sunray remains buried, both internally and figuratively, underneath a veil of secrecy.

The result of this has been twofold.

Firstly, we may never ultimately learn the truth of what took place, but secondly, the mystery remains firmly lodged in the consciousness of both the Bulgarian people and the scientific community as a whole.

Whether a naive and foolhardy search for buried treasure, or a misguided attempt to open dialogue with a powerful and mysterious entity, it is clear that the operation was a failure.

But the rumours and stories that it has spawned, be they the result of paranoia or a deliberate attempt to deceive, mean that the legend of Saurichina is one that can now never, truly die.

Bedtime is glorious.