REMASTERED — Episode 2: The Bloody Pit

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Most people are afraid of the dark. And while this is something that we expect from our children, adults hold on to that fear just as tightly.
We simply don't talk about it anymore.

But it's there, lurking in the backs of our minds. Science calls it nyctophobia, the fear of the dark.

Since the dawn of humanity, our ancestors have stared into the blackness of caves, tunnels, and basements with a feeling of rot and panic in our bellies.

H.P. Lovecraft, the patriarch of the horror genre, published an essay in 1927 entitled, Supernatural Horror in Literature, and it opens with this profoundly simple statement.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

People fear the unknown, the what-if, and the things they cannot see. We humans are afraid of the dark.

We're afraid that our frailness and weakness might become laid bare in the presence of whatever it is that lurks in the shadows. We're afraid of opening up places that should remain closed.

We fear what we cannot see.

And sometimes, for good reason.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

The Berkshire Mountain Range in western Massachusetts sits in the very top left corner of the state.

It's not the Rockies by any stretch of the imagination, but in 1851 those hills were in someone's way.

The Troy and Greenfield Railroad Company wanted to lay some track that would cut through the mountains, and so they began work on a tunnel.

On the western end sat the town of Florida, with North Adams holding up the eastern end. Between those towns was about five miles of solid rock.

This building project was no small undertaking, no matter how unimpressive the mountains might be. It ultimately took the work crew 24 years to wrap things up and had a total cost of $21.2 million.

That's over $400 million in today's money. See, it was a big deal.

Monetary costs aside, however, construction of the tunnel came with an even heavier price tag. At least 200 men lost their lives cutting that hole through the bones of the earth.

One of the first major tragedies occurred on March 20th of 1865.

A team of explosive experts, and I use that term loosely because nitroglycerin was incredibly new to just about everyone in America at the time, entered the tunnel to plant the charge.

The three men, Brinkman, Nash, and Kelly, whose first name was Ringo, which I think is just awesome, did their work and then ran back down the tunnel to the safety of the bunker.

Only Kelly made it to safety. It turns out that he set off the explosion a bit too early, burying the other two men.
Alive.

Naturally, Kelly felt horrible about it, but no one expected him to go missing, which he did just a short while later. Poor Ringo.

But as sad as it sounds, the accidents didn't end there.

Building a railway tunnel through a mountain is complex, and one of the features most tunnels have is a vent shaft.

Constant coal-powered train traffic could result in a lot of smoke and fumes, so engineers thought it would be a good idea to have a ventilation shaft that would extend to the surface above and allow fumes and groundwater to be pumped out.

The shaft would be roughly 30 feet in diameter and would eventually stretch over a thousand feet down and connect with the train tunnel below. By October of 1867, it was only 500 feet deep.

Essentially, it was a really, really deep hole in the ground.

To dig this hole, they built a small building at the top, which was used to raise and lower a hoist to get the debris out, as well as a pump system to remove groundwater.

Then, they lowered a dozen or more crazy Cornish miners, not underage kids, the other kind of miners, into the hole and set them to work. You see where this is going, right?

Please tell me you see where this is going. On October 17th, a leaky lantern filled the hoist house with naphtha, an explosive natural gas, and the place blew sky-high.

As a result, things started to fall down the shaft. What things?

A wall for starters, 300 freshly sharpened drill bits, then the hoist mechanism itself, and finally the burning wreckage of the building.

All of it fell five stories down the tunnel and onto the 13 men working away at the bottom. And because the water pump was destroyed in the explosion, the shaft also began to flood.

The workers on the surface tried to reach the men at the bottom, but failed. One man was lowered into the shaft in a basket, but he was pulled back up when the fumes became unbearable.

He managed to gasp the words, no hope, to the workers around him, before slipping into unconsciousness. In the end, they gave up, called it a loss, and covered the shaft.

But in the weeks that followed, the workers in the mine frequently reported hearing the anguishing voice of men crying out in pain.

They said they saw lost miners carrying picks and shovels, only to watch them vanish moments later.

Even the people in the village nearby told tales of odd shapes and muffled cries near the covered pit. Highly educated people, upon visiting the construction site, recorded similar experiences.

Glenn Drowen, a correspondent for the local newspaper, wrote that The ghostly apparitions would appear briefly, then vanish, leaving no footprints in the snow, giving no answers to the miners' call.

Voices, lights, visions, and odd shapes in the dark. All the sorts of experiences we fear might happen to us when we step into a dark bedroom or basement.

A full year after the accident, they reopened the shaft and drained out all 500 feet of water. They wanted to get back to work, but when they did, they discovered something horrific.

Bodies.

And a raft.

Apparently, some of the men survived the falling drill bits and debris long enough that they managed to build a raft.

No one knows how long they stayed alive, but it's clear that they all died because they had been abandoned in a flooding hole in the ground.

After that, the workers began to call the tunnel by another name:

the Bloody Pit.

Catchy, isn't it?

About four years after the gas explosion, two men visited the tunnel. The one was James McKinstry, the drilling operations superintendent, and the other was Dr.
Clifford Owens.

While in the tunnel, the two men, both educated and respected among their peers, had an encounter that was beyond unusual.

Owens wrote, On the night of June 25th, 1872, James McKinstry and I entered the great excavation at precisely 11:30 p.m.

We had traveled about two full miles into the shaft when we finally halted to rest. Except for the dim, smoky light cast by our lamps, the place was as cold and dark as a tomb.

James and I stood there, talking for a minute or two, and were just about to turn back when I suddenly heard a strange, mournful sound. It was just as if someone or something was suffering great pain.

The next thing I saw was a dim light coming along the tunnel from a westerly direction.

At first, I believed it was probably a workman with a lantern, yet as the light grew closer, it took on a strange blue color and appeared to change shape almost into the form of a human being without a head.

The light seemed to be floating along about a foot or two above the tunnel floor.

In the next instant, it felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped and a cold, icy chill ran up and down my spine.

The headless form came so close that I could have reached out and touched it, but I was too terrified to move.

For what seemed like an eternity, McKinstry and I stood there, gaping at the headless thing like two wooden Indians.

The blue light remained motionless for a few seconds as if it were actually looking us over, then floated off toward the east end of the shaft and vanished into thin air.

I am, above all, a realist, nor am I prone to repeating gossip and wild tales that defy a reasonable explanation.

However, in all truth, I cannot deny what James McKinstry and I witnessed with our own eyes.

The Hussuck Tunnel played host to countless other spooky stories in the years that followed. In 1874, a local hunter named Frank Webster vanished.

When he finally stumbled up the banks of the Deerfield River three days later, he was found by a search party without his rifle and appearing to have been beaten bloody.

He claimed he had been ordered into the tunnel by voices and lights, and once he was inside, he saw ghostly figures that floated and wandered about in the dark.

His experience ended when something unseen reached out, took his rifle from him, and clubbed him with it. He had no memory of walking out of the tunnel.

In 1936, a railroad employee named Joe Impoco claimed that he was warned of danger in the tunnel by a mysterious voice. Not once, but twice.

I'm thinking it was Ringo, trying to make up for being an idiot. In 1973, for some unknown and god-awful reason, a man decided to walk through the full length of the tunnel.

This brilliant man, Bernard Hastaba, was never seen again.

One man who walked through the tunnel and did make it out, though, claims that while he was in the tunnel, he saw the figure of a man dressed in the old clothing of a 19th-century miner.

Again, not a kid.

He left in a hurry, from what I've read.

Stories about the Hussik tunnel persist to this day.

It's common for teams of paranormal investigators to walk the length of the tunnel, although it's still active with a dozen or so freight trains that pass through each day.

There are rumors of a secret room, or many rooms, deep inside the tunnel.

There's an old monitoring station built into the rock about halfway in, though few have been brave enough to venture all the way there and see it. Those who have report more of the same.

Unexplained sounds and lights. Oh, and remember Ringo Kelly, the sloppy demolition expert who got his two co-workers killed in 1865?

Well, he showed up again in March of 1866, a full year after the explosion. His body was found two miles inside the tunnel, in the exact same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died.

He had been strangled to death.

It's difficult to ignore the pain and tragedy that the miners endured as they carved out the Husik tunnel.

In fact, it's one of those locations where all of that suffering seems to have lingered, becoming part of the atmosphere. Even today, many visitors can still feel it.
But it's not the only one.

I have one more story to tell you from the depths of the earth, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll let you hear all about it.

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Anytime we dig, we take on a bit of risk. I can remember countless times during my childhood when I tried to carve a tunnel out of a tall snowpile, only to have it collapse from its own weight.

So it shouldn't be difficult to admit that mining is a dangerous occupation.

One of the things that amplifies that danger, though, is rushing the work.

For a very long time, tools and technology limited just how fast people could dig into the earth in search of the resources there.

But during the 1800s, a massive boom in industrialization gave miners a whole new set of tools, and they used them to dig deep and dig fast. The results, though, weren't always productive or safe.

At the Morpha Colliery on the southwest coast of Wales, the 1800s was a brutal century for everyone involved.

In fact, in the 12 years between 1858 and 1870, over 70 men lost their lives in explosions while digging for coal. But the worst was yet to come.

On the morning of Tuesday, March 10th of 1890, it probably started out like any other day. Workers arrived at the mine dressed in their worn-out, filthy uniforms.

Despite their best efforts to clean off the previous day's black dust, their faces would probably have looked like shadows.

And despite their tired bodies, they they would have all climbed back inside down to the farthest reaches of their tunnels and tools when the explosion went off the earth trembled mine shafts deep inside collapsed and the force pushed air out of the tunnels toward the surface where people standing beneath the bright blue sky were knocked off their feet and that subterranean wind brought something else a sulfuric gas they referred to as after damp causing their lips and tongues to swell.

The miners who weren't trapped quickly began trying to reach the ones who were. Some bodies were recovered but most were trapped behind tons of debris.

But they kept at it, even to the point that some of the rescuers lost their lives and brought more and more bodies to the surface. When it was over, close to 90 men were dead.

There's an old bit of superstition that still hangs around mining operations today.

It's this belief that the spirits of dead miners tend to stick around the places they died until their bodies are properly buried.

We saw this in the Hussuck Tunnel stories, and even for those men in 1890 across the Atlantic in Wales, it was just as real and true.

Workers there at the Morpha mine claimed to hear strange knocking sounds, as if something were still alive deep inside the earth.

Some of them viewed it as an ill omen, a harbinger of bad things to come. Others felt it was the spirits of the dead, making their presence known.

One man returned to the surface in the middle of the day refusing to go back inside.

When pressed for a reason, he reported seeing the ghostly figure of a man dressed in mining gear slowly walking down the tunnel.

In fact, those reports became so common that most of the workers started referring to the mine by a different name, the Pit of Ghosts.

Not long after the explosion, a Welsh journalist visited the site to speak with some of the miners and hear their stories. What he published is a vivid glimpse into the power of fear and superstition.

Strange as it may appear, he later wrote, it is beyond a doubt that the belief has for a long time been entertained by the Morpha workmen that the pit was haunted.

It has been said by reliable men that there were strange noises heard like thunder in a distance and the slamming of air doors during the last week and strange visions alleged to have been seen in the colliery.

The Morpha Colliery shut down over a century ago in 1913, but it's not that easy to close the book on folklore.

To this day, there is still the occasional report by visitors to the site of unusual experiences.

Maybe it's nothing more than the weight of history, or the heavy price paid by so many miners for something as mundane and temporary as coal.

Or perhaps it's the eternal residence of the pit of ghosts.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life.

I also make an executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, GrimandMild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.
I like it when when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.