Dear Friends,
I will be posting the final chapter of my/Daphne’s train ride from Albany, NY to Malta, Montana in a few. I’ve gone back and made some adjustments in the timeline so as to make this diary a bit less confusing. I’ve never really written this way before; in installments and especially using multiple personalities in installments. Made it much harder to keep track of who was talking or who was in my head from one day to the next. But I also realized that except for my essays, I have never completed anything in my life. And discovering that I am an ENTP and that psychological type, indeed, does not complete much, I am relieved that there is some sort of explanation. But still, a bit unrewarding. So my goal was to get this thing done and out of the way before I forgot it. Although the surreal aspect of being alone on a train is not easy to forget. The details are. So it isn’t perfect because I hurried. But it did get done.
Thanks for reading,
The Montana Maven
aka Daphne
aka Grand Dutchess Olya
aka The Catskill Cassandra
It is Halloween Eve in Scobey Montana. Our office sits 20 feet from the abandoned train tracks that carried grain away from this small town that was once the busiest grain hub in the world. My coworkers and I are baffled by what we all just experienced together, the four of us here in this building. We heard the train whistle blow off in the distance. Then the rumbling of an approaching train vibrating the air with that familiar sound. Im new to Scobey so I asked, “Aren’t those track old?!” It was just one coworker and I in the office section of the building and two coworkers in the warehouse. Amber and I froze and she shouted for me to get away from the window as sound and the rumbling of the train grew increasingly louder. It was as though it were barreling towards the building on the tracks just 20 feet away. One young man working in the warehouse shouted, What the fuck!”
It was a ghost train. It never truly came. It never truly went. We all heard the sound. We all felt the shaking and the rumbling. We all heard the old whistle blow before it all began.
We started calling around to see if other heard it and the woman at the Sherriffs Office did. Yhe young man feom the warehouse who has lived here his whoke life says hes heard the train before. So Amver started to Google Ghost trains and found that, interestingly, there have been reports of ghost trains since the 1900s. They have been linked to the influenza pandemic of times past. And even more interestingly, Scobey Montana has just lost 3 oldtimers to Covid in the past two weeks.
We have to wonder on this Holloween Ever, as a full moon set in, in the year 2020, did those three old Mintanans who just died from Covid, ride away on on a ghost train??
Arron Grady
Scobey, Montana
October 30, 2020
Whoa Nelly, that’s one spooky story! Glad I got off the train! or did I?