Haunted Rails

Winter 2000

I'd left the journal on the shelf after finding it. I came back to it because I was stuck on a job in January and it was sitting there. I got a surveying manual through interlibrary loan and spent three evenings working out the abbreviations. By the end of the week I could follow what Foote was doing: he was staking a railroad right-of-way through Lake County, recording each measurement station as he went.

The journal covers an 1884 survey of the Wisconsin Central route through Avon Township. Most of it is exactly what you'd expect: compass bearings, distances, elevations. Foote's route went through a parcel owned by a woman named Bridget Connell. The railroad took the parcel by condemnation; the Lake County Sheriff carried out the removal in August 1884. Foote's entry for that day is brief and professional. He was not there; he's relaying what was reported to him.

What he wrote three days later, when he was back on the parcel finishing his work, is the reason I've been thinking about this for ten years.

2001: The bearing pages

I worked out the compass anomaly this year with help from a surveying reference and a conversation with a coworker whose wife teaches geology. During Foote's survey of the Connell parcel, his compass readings deviate from what his reference points would predict. He notes it in the margin, re-observes two days later, gets the same result, applies a correction, and continues without further comment.

The geology explanation is plausible: glacial till in Lake County can carry enough dispersed iron to deflect a compass. I can't confirm or rule that out without a subsurface survey. But the anomaly runs through the same section of the right-of-way where, three days after the removal, Foote wrote that his workers wouldn't stay past four in the afternoon.

I'm an electrician, not a surveyor or a geologist. But I know when something in a technical record doesn't add up, and this one doesn't add up neatly.

Spring 2002: Chicago Historical Society

I brought the journal to the Chicago Historical Society in the spring of 2002. A staff archivist spent about an hour with it. She confirmed the paper, binding, and ink were consistent with an 1880s field journal. She wasn't offering a formal authentication; it was an informal look, and I've never represented it as more than that.

While I was there, photographing pages for my own records, I noticed something I'd missed in the two years I'd had the journal. On a page from early September 1884, after the Connell section entries, two words were written at the bottom of the page in darker ink. The surrounding text had faded to pale brown. These words hadn't.

The archivist confirmed the ink concentration was different from the surrounding text. Applied later, she said. She couldn't estimate how much later. The words look like Foote's hand.

The words are: She said so.

I've thought about what Connell said when she was removed. The journal's account is that she "spoke at some length, appearing to address the ground rather than those present." Whatever she said, whether it was a prediction, a warning, or something else entirely, Foote apparently came to believe she'd been right about something. He wrote those words on a later page and never mentioned her again in the journal.

2003: Starting the site

I put together a basic site on Tripod in 2003. At that point I had the journal, the compass anomaly, and the margin note. I also had a file drawer of photocopies from the Waukegan newspaper archive and the Grayslake Historical Society: incident records, a partial newspaper item about the Connell removal, and whatever local history I could find. I built the site partly to organize the material and partly in the hope that someone who knew more than I did would find it.

For a while, nothing much happened. I got a few emails. I went back to the newspaper archive a couple more times. The site sat mostly unchanged.

2004: Rollins Savanna

The Rollins Savanna forest preserve trail opened fully in 2004, after the restoration work was completed. Parts of the trail run within sight of the Metra NCS tracks. I started going out there with an EMF meter (I have one from work) to see if the compass anomaly Foote had recorded corresponded to anything I could measure.

I got elevated EMF readings in the area near the tracks. Elevated compared to the background elsewhere in the preserve. Whether this is connected to the compass anomaly or to some buried infrastructure I haven't identified, I don't know. An EMF meter and a surveying compass are measuring different things. I've noted this in the Corrections log because I initially overstated the connection.

What I can say is that the readings were consistent, and that the area where they were highest corresponded roughly to the section of the right-of-way I'd mapped from Foote's anomalous pages.

2005: Looking for her

I drove up to the Waukegan Public Library to look at the 1880 federal census on microfilm. Bridget Connell was working her parcel in August 1884, which means she would have been living there in 1880. If she appears in the census, she'd be listed under Avon Township.

She's not there. I went through the Avon Township pages twice. No Bridget Connell, no Patrick Connell. I checked Connel, O'Connell, and Connolly while I was at it. Nothing. The 1870 reel was another matter: the pages for the township have a gap, several folios missing entirely, so 1870 doesn't settle anything.

I don't know what to do with the absence. It might mean she arrived between 1880 and 1884. It might mean the enumerator missed her or recorded her name in a form I can't recognize. It might mean the name "Bridget Connell" as it appears in Foote's journal is not how she would have been recorded elsewhere. It argues against me; I'm including it because it argues against me.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006: Washington Street

The Washington Street station opened in 2006. I went to look at it on October 31st, in the late afternoon. I'd been to this crossing many times but never to the platform specifically, and I wanted to see what the approach to the tracks looked like from a commuter's position rather than from the road. The clocks had changed two days earlier. It was getting dark toward four-thirty.

There were four or five people on the platform. I was standing at the north end, looking up the track, thinking about the journal entry. The light was going. The two people nearest me had stepped back from the edge, toward the shelter. I noticed they'd both moved at approximately the same moment, without talking to each other.

Then the air changed.

I don't know how else to put it. The temperature dropped, sharply, more than the evening should account for. There was a smell, or the suggestion of one, something damp and old, like soil after rain but colder. It lasted maybe fifteen seconds. Then the train came in from the south and it was gone.

I got on the train because it was there and I wanted to think. I rode it to the next stop, Libertyville, and took the return train back. Nobody else on the platform afterward seemed to have noticed anything.

I came home, found the journal, and looked at the entry again. They say the air changes. Written in 1884. I had attributed that to superstition, or to workers who were already uneasy about working on a property they'd just helped seize from a woman who'd lived there for twenty years.

I don't think it's only that. I think Foote's crew experienced something specific, and I think I experienced the same thing 122 years later. I can't find the ordinary explanation that I kept expecting to find, and I've stopped looking as hard as I was.

That's when I rebuilt the site into the current version.

2007-2008: Where I am now

I keep coming back to three things.

First: Foote's crew would not work on that parcel after four in the afternoon in 1884. They're professional railroad men. Something changed for them at that time of day in that specific place.

Second: Foote wrote "She said so" on a later page in darker ink, at some point after the surrounding text had already aged. Whatever Connell said when they removed her, he eventually came to believe she'd been right.

Third: I was on the Washington Street platform in October 2006, approaching four-thirty, and the air changed.

Those three things belong together. What they mean, I'm still working out. If you have local knowledge about the land, the history, the railroad, and any of this looks familiar from a different angle, I'd like to hear from you.