We never lived here in Sheridan, my wife and I. We worked here, though, all our lives — well, my wife did, over at the hospital. I was on the train, of course. We actually met on the Boonton line, and then when we got serious I put in for a transfer to the Morris and Essex, that way I could run over and see her while the engine crew was working. We had lunch together almost every day, and when it was nice, we would walk over here to eat. Back in the twenties, they really made the plots a nice place to spend some time, you know — like little parks. This one family, the Baileys, had a plot set into a kind of hollow in the land, with benches and a little border of flowers, so we would always sit there. Now and then Teresa would bring some flowers, just as a hostess gift, she said. And we’d have our lunch and talk about work, or things we needed to do around the house, or the kids. Just whatever you talk about at lunchtime. We always liked it here, so here’s where we got our plot — like I said, we didn’t live here, but the cemetery in Elm Ridge looked like a car dealership, it didn’t have any character, and besides, we spent so much time in Sheridan. I lobbied for a bench, too, but I guess we couldn’t afford it, because it’s just an inset stone there now with our names on it.

Teresa comes out once a week, just to talk like we used to and keep me up to date on what’s going on with the kids. I think she knows I’m listening, knows I’m there, but she can’t see me, I can’t speak to her — I don’t know why. It’s frustrating, but what can you do, it works different for everybody and the way it works for me is that nobody sees me except the others here. When the weather’s good, I go up to the little bridge on Evergreen that goes over the tracks, there’s a little pedestrian walkway on the southern side of the street — we used to see kids up there every day on the 2:44 out of Hoboken, all lined up like birds on a wire, waiting to drop stuff on the train. Gum, mostly, and mostly it was boys, and about once a month you could look out the window of the last car and see one of ’em having a canary because he just shot his retainer onto the tracks and what’s he gonna tell his parents? The girls would jump around like monkeys to get Halligan to sound the whistle, which he almost always did. Why else drive a train for a living if you can’t give the kids a thrill, he said.

Anyway, it’s quiet over there at night, no foot traffic at all, really, so I go over and watch the trains coming into town. When I was alive, the story we used to hear was that there was already a ghost on that bridge, a jumper — once a year, on the day he died, if you happened by at the right time and it was a clear night, you could see him standing on the bridge, and then you could see him jump off, do a swan dive right in front of the train. Supposedly it looked so real that the engine crew would think they’d hit the guy, so they’d stop the train and send a guy to the callbox, and there’s the whole crew out on the skirt of the track, creeeeeeping up towards the engine because they’re scared what they’re gonna find up there, God forbid it’s an arm or a leg or something, but then of course there’s nothing there. So everybody gets back in and they start up again, and when Central wanted to know how they got behind, the crew chief would say, “Thought we hit a dog, boss.”

It never happened on one of my runs, the jumper going over, but I knew a guy who said he saw it, back in the sixties — Rourke. Rourke didn’t talk much, when he did it was about college football, he wasn’t one of the guys who packed a flask — I believed him, personally. I worked a haunted train, one of the shore lines, and it’s not that I didn’t believe in that stuff before that, exactly. I just didn’t think I’d ever come across it myself. I wasn’t the kind of person ghosts happen to.

I knew it when I did come across it, though. The A.C.-Philly connector in those days, it was like the Wild West, especially on the nighttime runs — passengers getting in fights, puking in the aisle, and that was on a good night, and you didn’t exactly have the cream of the crop working the line, either. All the guys with complaints in their files got kicked to A.C.-Philly, along with a handful of rookies — it’s basically a punishment. So the crew is a couple drunks, which should be four or five drunks, but they’re drunks, so they don’t show up half the time, which is how they got stuck on this run in the first place, so you only get two but you’re probably better off that way. You got a couple of eighty-year-old guys who can’t hear anything, the guy who talks your ear off, and the guy with the short temper that carries a pistol. The guy driving the train is usually one of those “the moon landing was faked” types, and then there’s the new kids that can’t even make change yet, and there’s me, their probation supervisor, hoping we can get to Absecon without somebody quitting. Or dying. Or getting sat on by the fat guy — yeah, I forgot to mention the fat guy.

I got lumped with A.C.-Philly because Walters broke his back and they needed a babysitter for a few months, so like an idiot I volunteered to cover him — a piece of advice for you, never say “how bad could it be” out loud. Anyway, one night during my first week, I’m walking to the back to get a first aid kit — one of the probies tagged himself with a ticket punch, I don’t know how they do it but there’s a bleeder every year — and towards the back there’s a car that’s completely empty, nobody sleeping it off, even. I’m passing through there to the next car to get some gauze and tape, and I hear what sounds like crying, coming from the front of the car. I look around again, but there’s nobody. Well, like the man says, the rails sing strange sometimes, so I figure it’s the wind, or maybe we’re dragging something, it happens. I keep going to the next car, get the kit, and I’m coming back through the empty car and I hear it again — it’s definitely the sound of crying, of a woman crying, but this time, as I’m walking down the car, the sound is coming towards me, and then I feel this unbelievable cold, and the sound is behind me now. I’m still thinking it’s the wind, and I’m looking around for an open window when the door I just came through at the back end of the car opens and closes on its own.

Not unusual in the older cars, but it was a little strange, the timing of it, and after a few runs, I notice that it’s always empty, that car — it would start out with passengers in Philly, say, but then by the time we got to Cherry Hill they’d have all moved, and the crew didn’t talk about it, but we knew why. It wasn’t the crying; you didn’t always hear that. I can’t really describe it — if you’ve been in a situation like that, you know what I mean, but the car, it didn’t want people. And it made people leave. Leave it alone. I hated going through it, myself. I had to, to get to the radio in back, because Egg Harbor had a short platform and someone had to tell the engine when to stop, but I made it as quick as possible. The air felt funny in there, like you walked in on something you shouldn’t have seen, even though there wasn’t anything to see. Eventually Control pulled the car and moved it to another line, and then another one, and then finally they sent it to some train museum — in Netcong, maybe? I think it’s on a Haunted New Jersey tour someplace.

After that I thought, ghosts, sure, why not, and when I came here, I thought I’d go up to the bridge on Evergreen and see about the jumper, see if I ran into him. I came up every night, and some days too, to watch the trains. Sometimes when the weather’s good, I see a guy I trained hanging off one of the doors like I told them not to do but everybody does it anyway, because the wind on your face — why else work on a train if you can’t give yourself a thrill. Sometimes I see them look up, and I can’t tell if they see me or not. I don’t think they do. But if they see anything, it’s me. I’ve never seen the jumper — not once.

My name is Mike Crean. I died of pneumonia January 23, 1988.

October 13, 2003

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