#lovecraft wrote some great essays on the connection between fear and safety

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 2: The Bloody Pit (Transcript) - 23rd March 2015

tw: death, claustrophobia, racism (H. P. Lovecraft), ghosts

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Most people are afraid of the dark, and while this is something that we expect from our children, adults hold onto that fear just as tightly; we simply don’t talk about it anymore. But it’s there, lurking in the back of our minds. Science calls it nyctophobia, the fear of the dark, and since the dawn of humanity our ancestors have stared into the blackness of caves, tunnels and basements with a feeling of rot and panic in their bellies. H. P. Lovecraft, the patriarch of the horror genre, published an essay in 1927, entitled “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and it opens with this profoundly simple statement. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”. You see, people fear the unknown, the what-if, and the things they cannot see. We humans are afraid of the dark. We’re afraid that our frailness and weakness might become laid bare in the presence of… whatever it is that lurks in the shadows. We’re afraid of opening up places that should remain closed. We fear what we can’t see, and sometimes, for good reason. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

The Berkshire Mountain Range in Western Massachusetts sits in the very top left corner of the state. It’s not the Rockies by any stretch of the imagination, but in 1851, those hills were in someone’s way. The Troy and Greenfield Railroad Company wanted to lay some track that would cut through the mountains, and so they begun work on a tunnel. On the western end sat the town of Florida, with North Adams holding up the eastern end. Between those towns was about 5 miles of solid rock. This building project was no small undertaking, no matter how unimpressive the mountains might be. It ultimately took the crew 24 years to wrap things up, and came at the cost of $21.2 million. In 2015 money, that’s $406, 493, 207. See? It was a big deal. Monetary costs aside however, construction of the tunnel came with an even heavier price tag. At least 200 men lost their lives cutting that hole through the bones of the earth.

One of the first major tragedies occurred on March 20th , 1865. A team of explosive “experts”, and I use that term loosely because nitro-glycerine had just been introduced to America about a year before, entered the tunnel to plant the charge. The three men, Brinkman, Nash and Kelley (who, by the way, his first name was Ringo, which I think is just awesome) did their work and then ran back down the tunnel to their safety bunker. Only Kelley made it to safety. It turns out that he set off the explosion just a bit too early, burying the other two men alive. Naturally, Kelley felt horrible about it, but no one expected him to go missing, which he did, just a short while later. But the accidents? They didn’t end there.

Building a railway tunnel through a mountain is complex, and one of the features most tunnels have is a vent shaft. Constant coal-powered train traffic could result in a lot of smoke and fumes, so engineers thought it would be a good idea to have a ventilation shaft that extended from the surface above and allowed fumes and water to be pumped out. This shaft for the Hoosac Tunnel, as it became known, would be roughly 30ft in diameter, and eventually would stretch over 1000ft down and connect with the train tunnel below. By October of 1867 it was only 500ft deep. Essentially it was a really, really deep hole in the ground. To dig this hole they built a small building at the top which was used to raise and lower hoists to get the debris out, as well as a pump system to remove ground water. Then, each day, they would lower a dozen or more crazy, Cornish miners (not underaged kids, by the way, the other kind of miner) into the hole, and set them to work. You see where this is going, right? Please tell me that you see where this is going.

On October 17th, a leaky lantern filled the hoist house with natural gas, a naphtha, an explosive gas found in nature, and the place blew sky-high. As a result, things started to fall down the shaft. What things? Well, for starters, 300 freshly sharpened drill bits. Then, the hoist mechanism itself, and finally, the burning wreckage of the building. All of it fell five stories down the tunnel and on top of the 13 men working away at the bottom. Oh, and because the water pump was destroyed in the explosion, the shaft also began to flood. The workers on the surface tried to reach the men at the bottom, but they failed. One man was even lowered into the shaft in a basket, but he had to be pulled back up when the fumes became unbearable. He managed to gasp the words “no hope” to the workers around him, before slipping into unconsciousness. In the end they gave up, called it a loss, and actually covered the shaft. But in the weeks that followed, the workers in the mine frequently reported hearing the anguishing voice of men crying out in pain. They said they saw lost miners carrying picks and shovels, only to watch them vanish, moments later. Even the people in the village nearby told the tales of odd shapes and muffled cries near the covered pit. Highly educated people, upon visiting the construction site, reported similar experiences. Glenn Drohan, a correspondent for the local newspaper wrote that “the ghastly apparitions would appear briefly, then vanish, leaving no footprints in the snow, giving no answers to the miners’ calls”. Voices, lights, visions, and odd shapes in the darkness, all the sorts of experiences that we fear might happen to us when we step into a dark bedroom or a basement.

A full year after accident, they reopened the shaft, drained out all 500ft of water. They wanted to get back to work, but when they did, they discovered something horrific. Bodies… in a raft. You see, apparently some of the men survived the falling drill bits and debris long enough that they managed to build a raft. No one knows how long they stayed alive, but it’s pretty clear they died because they had been abandoned in a flooding hole in the ground. After that the workers began to call the tunnel by another name: the “Bloody Pit”. Catchy, right?

About 4 years after the gas explosion, two men visited the tunnel. One was James McKinstrey, the drilling operations superintendent for the project, and the other was Dr. Clifford Owens. While in the tunnel, the two men, both educated and respected among their peers, had an encounter that was beyond unusual. Owens wrote: “On the night of June 25th, 1872, James McKinstrey and I entered the great excavation at precisely 11:30pm. We had travelled about 2 miles into the shaft when we finally halted to rest. Except for the dim smoky light from our lamps, the place was as cold and dark as a tomb. James and I stood there talking for a minute or two and were just about to turn back when I suddenly heard a strange, mournful sound. It was as if someone, or something, was suffering great pain. The next thing I saw was a dim light coming along the tunnel from a westerly direction. At first I believed it was probably a workman with a lantern; yet, as the light grew closer, it took on strange, blue colour, and appeared to change shape, almost into the form of a human being without a head. The light seemed to be floating along, about a foot or two above the tunnel floor. In the next instant it felt as if the temperature had suddenly dropped and a cold, icy chill ripped up and down my spine. The headless from came so close that I could have reached out and touched it, but I was too terrified to move. For what seemed like an eternity, McKinstrey and I stood their gaping at the headless thing like two wooden Indians. The blue light remained motionless for a few seconds, as if it was actually looking us over, then floated off towards the east end of the shaft, and vanished into thin air. I am, above all, a realist. Nor am I prone to repeating gossip and wild tales that defy a reasonable explanation. However, in all truth, I cannot deny what James McKinstrey and I witnessed with our own eyes”.

The Hoosac tunnel played host to countless other spooky stories in the years that followed. In 1874, a local hunter named Frank Webster simply vanished, and when he finally stumbled up the banks of the Deerfield River three days later, he was found by a search party without his rifle and appearing to have been beaten bloody. He claimed he’d been ordered into the tunnel by voices and lights, and once he was inside, he saw ghostly figures that floated and wandered about in the dark. His experience ended when something unseen reached out, took his rifle from him, and clubbed him with it. He had no memory of walking out of the tunnel. In 1936 a railroad employee named James Impoco, claims that he was warned of danger in the tunnel by a mysterious voice, not once, but twice. I’m thinking it was Ringo, trying to make up for being an idiot. In 1973, for some unknown and god-awful reason, a man decided to walk through the full length of the tunnel. This brilliant man, Bernard Hastaba, was never seen again. One man, who walked through and did make it out though, claims that when he was in the tunnel, he saw the figure of a man dressed in old clothing of a 19th century miner. Again, not a kid. He left in a hurry, from what I’ve read.

Stories about the tunnel persist to this day. It’s common for teams of paranormal investigators to walk the length of the tunnel, although it’s still active with a dozen or so freight trains that pass through each day. There are rumours of a secret room, or many rooms, deep inside the tunnel. There’s even an old monitoring station built into the rock about half way through, though few have been brave enough to venture all the way there and see it. Those that have report more of the same: unexplained sounds and lights. Oh, and remember Ringo Kelley, our sloppy demolition expert who got his co-workers killed in 1865? Well, he showed up again. In March of 1866, one full year after the explosion, his body was found 2 miles inside the tunnel, in the exact same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died. He had been strangled to death.

Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find a transcript of this show, including links to source materials, at lorepodcast.com. Lore is a biweekly podcast, so be sure to check back in for a new episode every two weeks. If you enjoy scary stories, I happen to write them. You can find a full list of my supernatural novels, available in paperback and ebook formats, at aaronmahnke.com/novels. Thanks for listening.

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