I live in San Antonio and just outside of town sits a set of railroad tracks that have long been the focal point of a late night local legend. The tale is a tragic one, although those who suffered the tragedy seem to have returned to literally lend a hand.
People come from far and wide to drive onto the tracks and place their cars in neutral in the dead of the night. After a short period of time, the car will be miraculously pushed off the tracks without any explanation. Many years ago a gruesome event took place at the very crossing where this occurs, and people say that it is because of this that the phenomenon now exists.
A bus full of schoolchildren, who were on their way home from a class outing, had stalled out on the tracks. It was late, and the kids had fallen asleep, so their teacher, a nun, was trying to restart the bus without waking them. Suddenly, she heard a train was coming. Its light was off so she hadn’t noticed it from a farther distance. She knew she didn’t have time to wake the children to evacuate them, so she gave one last ditch effort towards starting the bus. She failed.
The bus was ripped in half by the speeding train. The driver’s area was thrown from the tracks, with only the nun inside. She was unhurt and witnessed the horror that followed. The train tore asunder the remaining section of the bus with the children entrusted to her care still inside. All of the kids died.
Weeks later, still wrought with immense grief, the nun decided to take her own life. She parked her car on the same tracks where the accident took place. As a train approached in the distance, the nun began hearing the voices of children. The voices grew louder and louder, and then she felt her car begin to move. Just before the train struck, her car was pushed from the tracks and out of harm’s way by some unseen force. She leapt out of the car in amazement only to see children’s handprints covering her vehicle. Her kids had returned and saved her.
Since that day, the mysterious moving of cars has taken place. Me and my friends have made more late night trips out to these tracks than I can even count, always with similar results—our car gets pushed off the tracks. I’ve heard that if you sprinkle baby powder on your car’s bumper you will see handprints appear on it after your car is pushed out of harm’s way, just as the nun did many years ago. (We’ve never tried this baby powder trick ourselves—it’s not something we usually travel around with.)
The children who died on these tracks return time and time again to make sure that no one suffers the same grisly fate that they did at this very spot. Still, it’s probably not the best idea to trust that these ghost kids will push your car from the tracks, especially if you happen to be staring down an oncoming locomotive!
–Travis T.
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