The Haunted Railroad Tracks of San Antonio

It's the day after Thanksgiving and I'm sitting in my living room at the beach looking out over the Atlantic Ocean. If my iSight camera worked I'd take a picture of my view so you could enjoy it with me. But it isn't. So I can't.

Kelly is coming down with some kind of sickness. I think I'm getting it too. We had planned on doing quite a bit today but now it looks like not much is going to happen so I figured, heck, why not investigate another ghost picture.

And here is that picture:



This picture was taken in San Antonio, Texas at the locally famous intersection of Shane and Villimain Streets. What makes this intersection so well-known to locals? The legend goes a school bus managed to get itself high-centered on the railroad tracks after school. As the bus driver tried to free the bus a train horn from a high-speed fright train sounded in the distance. Pandemonium ensued. Some children fled the bus through the back door while other were trampled in their seats while even more simply sat stunned not knowing what to do. The bus driver, rather than save himself valiantly tried to free the bus to no avail. The fright train, having now seen the bus, locked up its brakes and blared the horn but it was all for naught. The train slammed into the bus slicing it in two pieces as easily as a hot knife through butter. Many children died instantly while others, who were still in the bus and had survived the initial impact, died in the ensuing fire.

Years later a neighborhood was developed close to the crash sight and the names of the streets were taken from victims of the crash. Later the residents of this neighborhood noticed something supernatural about the railroad intersection. It seemed if you parked your car facing Villimain St on Shane Street just in front of railroad intersection, turned off your engine, and then placed your car in neutral your car, as if by magic, would start to roll - UPHILL and over the railroad tracks until you were safely across the tracks. Now, get this, if you dusted your trunk with flour before you put your car in neutral you could see the hand prints of the little ghost children who pushed you over the tracks to safety.

Pretty freaky, huh? Turns out, it's all B.S. There was never an accident at the railroad tracks involving a bus and a train. In fact a train had never hit anything, bus or otherwise, at this particular intersection. How do I know this? I checked with the city. Why? Here's where things get weird.

I used to travel extensively for work, mostly in the United States. Gravity hills became something I would investigate when I traveled to a new city simply because I wanted something to do that would get me out of a hotel and doing something (when you travel a lot the act simply doing anything can be exciting). A friend suggested that I document all my gravity hill investigations and to write a travel book about them (which I never did). But I did keep a very detailed database and the whole "school bus load of dead children pushing your car" was simply too incredible to pass up. So when work to me to Fort Sam Houston I seized the chance and tested the hill.

Why are the street names in the near-by development named after children? The co-developers named the streets after family members and their own children. Nothing supernatural or paranormal about that.

What about the gravity hill, is it legit? No, and they never are. I tested the hill and the visual effect is pretty good - it does indeed look like you're rolling uphill but it's far from the most dramatic hill I've never tested. The hand prints? Lots of gravity hills claim to leave behind hand prints and very few really do and when they do it is the flour not sticking to the truck due to residual oils left by regular old humans who have closed the trunk, not ghosts. Hand prints almost never appear on rented cars. Why? Rental cars are washed before a new renter gets in them and the trunk is usually residual oil free. Gravity hills aren't even rare, in fact there are hundreds of documented hills. Heck, one road in western Pennsylvania has not one but two gravity hills on the same road with the added bonus of water appearing to flow uphill next to the same road.



See that dot way down there? That's my rented minivan at the bottom of the New Paris, PA hill. I'm standing where the "rollback" ends on this particular gravity hill. It sure looks like we're looking downhill towards the van, doesn't? It's just a trick of angles and the brain thinking it's seeing one thing when it's really not. By the way, the valley next to me is where the water flows "uphill" or, at least, it appears so. Oddly enough when you're at the bottom of this particular hill looking up the effect is not nearly as dramatic as looking "down" the hill from where I took the picture.

So, back to San Antonio. There was no bus crash, the street names are not of victims and the gravity hill is just a visual trick. Yet there exists a picture with a ghost at this intersection taken by a local ghost hunter out investigating the "haunted tracks" that was deemed so legit that one paranormal site named it one of the top best ghost pictures ever.

What, if anything, can we gather from the picture itself?



Reversing the color in Photoshop reveals not a whole lot. I don't like how "sharp" the lines are on this particular apparition. Normally with abstract ghosts captured in pictures you have a part of the image show great detail (usually the part of the claimed ghost that is interacting with an object in the real world - see the ghostly hand from last week). This picture, though, has very sharp lines on all sides but a totally indistinguishable shape. This could, for all we know, be a ghost monkey or more likely a hoax of some kind.



Removing the color (and later reversing the black and white) does not help us discern the shape of a physical being of any kind. Given the location where this picture was taken and the fact that it was taken by someone well aware of the legend of the tracks but not the real history I'm going to say this is either a straight-up hoax or simply a picture of something, mist perhaps, but not a ghost.