Echoes of the Forgotten: Capturing Spirits on the Haunted Train Line
I recall a railway track, which is in the countryside with hills of pines that say hush forever; frozen in time it is. That was the rails, which slowly wore out and rusted, [were] stretching like for ages distancing the valleys and rising over the streams. No one tried to stop it, because many scary stories about the cave on its way quite frightened even the bravest people.
Something could be found – ‘between two crags that lay near the railways’ – here there was a cave and there were shadows there filled with ill-will and whispering could be heard from the dark. There were gory stories told about the spirits of the dead women who walked on the paved rails at night to haunt anybody who used the few unoccupied trains that puffed up the line.
Sarah was among the people who knew the secrets of the haunted cave; she was a beautiful lady who was in her early twenties, she was sexy and she had a hobby of taking photos of anything that fascinated her including items that were considered to be associated with the supernatural. She had heard the dummy from first hand and best of all right from the people’s lips, during the early autumn evenings huddled around the fire and listening to stories passed through generations. While other villagers felt such emotion during night and fled from the train track the girl could not help but get wold and curious about the mystery of a cave.
Able with her camera and with the determination as hard as the cliffs on the first fine morning of the October Sarah began the search for the truths of the tales. The train line ran through fields where hues smoothly merged with one another as in an artist’s portrayal of autumn; high above the tree line were long impressive and rather massive shadows. Thus, coming to a new position, a lonely, familiar whistle of a train coming from afar shivered and consoled her at the same time.
As soon as the sun began to set, Sarah arrived at the entrance to the cave, and at this point she stirred. The entrance to the cave looked as if it was a mouth of some gigantic monster; into the cave, it was pitch black, there was no hint of the evening sun, nor its remnants. Unfazed which she turned on her flash light and went in inside the house.
It became very sweaty as Sarah proceeded to navigate deeper into the caverns; all that could be heard was the crunching of her feet on the wet walls that cannot be perfectly seen because of the wetness. Complex designs and motifs engraved into the rock suggested about the elaborate system of beliefs of the civilization that remains unknown, the songs, and even the people killed to heal the gods. She filmed all this with her camera the flashlight limiting her view of the cave to short bursts of white light.
The author took time to depict how Sarah feels when exploring as if there is someone observing her, for example, when she felt this way, in the back of her neck, she felt a frog in her throat and the heartbeat accelerated. They brighten when it is dark; for he saw moving objects outside her line of vision as phantoms shifting from one big stone to the other. Still she went on, driven by something which can hardly be explained by today’s standards other than sick desire and morbid fascination as she continued filming with her camera that captured objects and phenomena which could not be seen by the naked eye.
Then she noticed something, a stream of water was farther seen to be stagnated in a small depression on the side of the cave. It was an amazing scene which somehow without noticing it Sarah was gradually walking closer and closer to it with her camera in hand. The water moved with an altriostic blue light illuminating the cave in an eerie manner. She continued to be interested and finding herself kneeling beside it now, with the camera within her hand she waited for the best picture.
As Sarah dropped her camera and peered through the viewfinder she couldn’t believe what she saw. Instead of the cave she saw a station of a train from some time back – the picture was monochrome and had a sepia hue to it. Old fashion dressed passengers moved briskly through the platform as their faces changed in emotion all within a split second.
Sarah stood rooted to the ground watching the events that were unveiling before her; the luminosity of the apparition evoked silhouettes of both males and females, and children, all with predestined gait. They got onto the ghostly train with a resolve that didn’t need to be spoken; they looked like fire in the process.
That is when Sarah comes to realization of the fact about the haunted cave and the spirits that inhabited it. They were not evil and did not wish to harm the living, but manifestations of spirits having their stories told, thus proving the strength of memory and the relationship that binds them to the earthly plane.
Sarah stretched her shaking hands and kept pushing the button of the camera and with every click she captured some of the spirits of the people who had walked through the cave over time. It was like watch a video of their lives, as if Marshall was a documentary of women, of their existence and their heritage.
As the morning found it’s way into the horizon, Sarah was the first to come out of the cave, featuring her camera that was holding shoots that could not be described. The train line was extended before her with the gleam of the morning; and it too knew all the secrets concealed in its heart.
This news spread in the village fast enough, and once again the topic of the haunted cave, the train line became hot issues in the village again. It became a mecca for tourists and historians, all who wanted to catch the reflection of the eternal which Sarah’s photos seemed to preserve.
And so the years went buy and the former abode of fear and superstition on the cave within the train line became a shrine and people’s memories live on within the frame of an courageous young photographer.