Moonville Tunnel

In 1856 landowner Samuel Coe gave the Marietta & Cincinnati Railroad permission to lay its line across his land in the hills of Vinton County, and the railroad bridged Raccoon Creek and cut a tunnel through the hillside. A small settlement grew up around the tracks: Moonville, probably named for a local storekeeper, with a depot, a post office, a school, a gristmill and two saloons, and perhaps a hundred residents at its peak, most of them coal miners. The line passed to the Baltimore & Ohio in 1883.

Moonville faded as the mines closed around the turn of the 20th century, and the last family left in 1947. The trains kept running until the line was abandoned and the rails pulled up in 1988. Today only the tunnel, a few foundations and a small cemetery remain in the Zaleski State Forest, on a stretch of the Moonville Rail-Trail. The isolation was dangerous: with trestles and a tunnel on a busy line through the woods, more than 20 people are reported to have been killed on or near the tracks, the last in 1978, when a 13-year-old girl fell from the trestle as a train passed.

Those deaths gave Moonville its ghosts. The best known is a figure with a lantern on the tracks, said to be engineer Theodore (some say Frank) Lawhead, killed when his train met another head-on near the tunnel in November 1880 after a dispatcher failed to warn him. Others say the lantern belongs to a young brakeman who fell under a train after drinking. Local lore adds “the Bully,” Baldie Keeton, found dead on the tracks after a saloon fight in 1886 and said to drop pebbles from the top of the tunnel, and a “Lavender Lady” announced by the scent of lavender and identified with one of several women struck by trains.

Today hikers, ghost hunters and the annual “Midnight at Moonville” festival keep the stories alive, and local author Jannette Quackenbush has gathered the legends together with the deaths recorded on the line.

A figure in white carrying a swinging lantern along the old railbed and through the tunnel, pebbles thrown from above the portal, the scent of lavender, footsteps and voices – reported by hikers, campers and ghost hunters since the late 19th century.

The tunnel and its portals, the old railbed toward the Raccoon Creek trestle and the Moonville cemetery; usually at night, which is when the trail is least safe.

Moonville is southeast Ohio’s most famous ghost spot, celebrated each autumn at the “Midnight at Moonville” festival and featured in books including Jannette Quackenbush’s Moonville: Its Past, Its Ghosts, Its Legends, as well as in student journalism and countless ghost-hunting videos.