Ghost at Train Crossing

Recently a homeless man was struck by one of the many daily trains that pass through Ocean Springs, MS. He was part of the large homeless community that lives in a wooded area near the tracks. This man was in his twenties and did not take drugs or drink. On the day he died, he was walking down the tracks when a train approached from behind him. Witnesses said that despite the nearly continuous sounding of the train horn the man never looked back or move off of the tracks. Was it suicide? No one knows. Since his death there have been reports of a young man who seems to step through of a moving train and appears between the guard rail and the train as it passes. One of our SAPS members recently witnessed this phenomena.

While stopped at the tracks by the lights and guard rails she saw a man suddenly appear between the tracks and the guardrail. He walked calmly around the guard rail, past her car, he looked directly at her and nodded his head in greeting. When she turned and looked behind her to see where he was going he was nowhere to be seen. He did not have time to disappear in the open area where she was stopped. The SAPS member said that the man appeared to be moving very fast; much faster that a human man could have moved.


When SAPS members went to the site to check it out we found that there is only about three feet between the tracks and the guard rail, which would be a very scary place for a living person to be when a train is passing. There is no place for the man to have come from when the train was passing since the area is open. Had he been a live person who was walking down the track beside the train he would have been easily seen. So SAPS concluded that he was indeed a ghost. A ghost of a man who died on those tracks and now walks between and through the trains. Research of the accident from news accounts indicates that the man was killed about twenty feet from the crossing where the ghost was seen. Since that time there have been other reports of this apparition by non SAPS members as well.

NOTE* The Methodist Church in Ocean Springs held a memorial service for this young man that was attended by many of his homeless friends and others. Perhaps this service will lay to rest this ghost. At the very least it recognized his life and his passing and the fact that though homeless he was not alone and was loved by his friends.