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 back of our minds.

Science calls it nyctophobia, the fear of the dark.

And 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 their 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.

You see, 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 can't see.

And sometimes, for good reason.

I'm Erin 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 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 crew 24 years to wrap things up and came at the cost of $21.2 million.

In 2015 money, that's $406,493,207.

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, 1865.

A team of explosive experts, and I use that term loosely because nitroglycerin had just been introduced to America about a year before, entered the tunnel to plant a charge.

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

Only Kelly made it to safety.

It turns out that he set off the explosion just 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.

But the accidents, they 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 extended from the surface above and allowed fumes and water to be pumped out.

This shaft for the Pussik tunnel, as it became known, would be roughly 30 feet in diameter and eventually would 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 hoists to get the debris out, as well as a pump system to remove groundwater.

Then, each day, they would lower a dozen or more crazy Cornish miners, not underage kids, by the way, the other kind of miner, into the hole and set them to work.

You see where this is going, right?

Please tell me that you see where this is going.

On October 17th, a leaky lantern filled the hoist house with natural gas.

Naphtha, an explosive gas that's found in nature.

And the place blew sky high.

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

What things?

Well, first starters, 300 freshly sharpened drill bits.

Then, the hoist mechanism itself.

And then finally, the burning wreckage of the building.

All of it fell five stories down the tunnel and on top of the 13 men working away at the bottom.

Oh, 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 they failed.

One man was even lowered into the shaft in a basket, but he had to be 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 actually 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 ghastly apparitions would appear briefly, then vanish, leaving no footprints in the snow, giving no answers to the miners' calls.

Voices, lights, visions and odd shapes in the darkness.

All the sorts of experiences that 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.

You see, 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 pretty clear they 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, right?

About four years after the gas explosion, two men visited the tunnel.

One was James McKinstry, the drilling operations superintendent for the project, 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 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 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 simply vanished.

And 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'd 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 James Impoko claims 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 Hastebaug, was never seen again.

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

Again, not a kid.

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

Stories about the 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 even an old monitoring station built into the rock about halfway through, though few have been brave enough to venture all the way there and see it.

Those that have report more of the same.

Unexplained sounds and lights.

Oh,

and remember Ringo Kelly, our sloppy demolition expert who got his coworkers killed in 1865?

Well,

he showed up again in March of 1866.

one full year after the explosion.

His body was found two two miles inside the tunnel in the exact same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died.

He had been strangled to death.

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This episode of lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.