Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On paper, the North Bend Rail Trail is a neatly measured thing. The official guides describe a nearly seventy two mile corridor along the old Baltimore and Ohio line from Interstate 77 near Parkersburg to Wolf Summit, with thirteen tunnels, ten of them still passable, and thirty six bridges crossing creeks and hollows between the small towns of Wood, Ritchie, Doddridge, and Harrison counties.
In practice, the trail feels less like infrastructure and more like a string of small, self contained worlds. There are open stretches of farmland, narrow rock cuts that hold their own shadows at noon, and tunnels where the light at the far portal looks like another country entirely.
One of those tunnels has a reputation that reaches far beyond Ritchie County.
Near the old railroad community of Silver Run, the trail dives into Tunnel Number Nineteen, a brick lined bore that state tourism materials and local guides consistently measure at about 1,376 feet in length.
The West Virginia Department of Tourism introduces it with a simple sentence: some tunnels, like the long Silver Run tunnel, are rumored to be haunted. The same article then goes straight to the heart of the story. A woman traveled on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from Grafton toward Parkersburg to be married, disappeared along the way, and now appears in the darkness of Tunnel Nineteen in a white wedding dress.
For at least a century, railroaders, local residents, travel writers, and now ghost hunters have repeated some version of that claim. They call her many things, but most often she is simply the Lady in White of Silver Run.
From Main Line to “Appalachian Subway”
To understand why a ghost story took root here, it helps to see what Silver Run once meant on a railroad map.
The corridor that is now the North Bend Rail Trail began in the 1850s as part of the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, soon absorbed into the Baltimore and Ohio system. In the years just before the Civil War, B&O crews blasted and bored a line west from Clarksburg toward Parkersburg, threading the low Appalachian plateaus with a series of tunnels, fills, and trestles. Guidebooks today summarize the result as a seventy two mile stretch with thirteen original tunnels, including a short “raw” rock bore numbered Ten at 337 feet and the longer Silver Run tunnel farther west.
Rail historians and rail trail advocates point out that this section was engineered as a crest crossing. At Silver Run the railroad reaches a modest summit, then drops along the creek toward Cairo and eventually the Ohio River. Tunnel Nineteen sits near that crest, in a place that nineteenth century operators described as remote even by Appalachian standards.
An industrial history blogger who collected maps, photographs, and old Facebook posts on the Parkersburg branch quotes one modern railfan’s description of the tunnel and its setting. Built between 1853 and 1855 for the B&O Railroad, the Silver Run Tunnel was a place where crews felt as though they were the last people on earth. In its day, there was no location as isolated as Silver Run.
The line carried freight and passengers through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As trains grew taller and heavier, the tunnels along what railroaders nicknamed the “bottleneck” between Grafton and Parkersburg became a problem. Some were daylighted into open rock cuts in mid twentieth century clearance projects, but Silver Run remained a fully enclosed tunnel that would later be folded into the North Bend Rail Trail.
Today the rails are gone. Hikers and cyclists pass through the same bore on crushed stone instead of ballast, often with a headlamp or phone light to cut the permanent dusk inside. The brick lining sweats. Fog curls in from the portals on cool evenings. It is not a hard place to imagine someone stepping out of the dark.
A Lady in White on the Line
The most widely known version of the Silver Run legend begins in 1910, at a time when the B&O was a familiar presence but still capable of inspiring a certain awe in isolated communities.
A recent feature in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel summarizes the story as locals tell it today. According to that article, in 1910 a young B&O engineer made a midnight westbound run from Grafton to Parkersburg. Near Silver Run, he saw a woman in a pale gown standing on the tracks. He threw his train into emergency, but by the time the locomotive ground to a stop there was no sign of the woman. Word of the encounter spread through railyards and section houses along the line.
A second engineer, remembered under the Irish sounding name O’Flannery, scoffed at the tale and vowed that he would not stop his train for any ghost. One foggy night he kept his word, drove straight through the apparition, and rolled on toward Parkersburg. Telegraphers up and down the branch supposedly wired ahead that they had seen “something white” riding the cowcatcher of his locomotive. When the engine arrived, a crowd gathered, curious to see the woman. They found only an empty pilot and a shaken engineer who looked, in the words of one retelling, like he had seen a ghost.
Wonderful West Virginia, the state’s official outdoors magazine, adds another layer through the voice of Pendleton County storyteller Jason Burns. Burns calls Silver Run one of his favorite park ghosts and tells a version in which the lady in white repeatedly appears in front of the same engineer until, more annoyed than afraid, he simply runs his train at full speed through the tunnel. In that telling, the ghost clambers onto the cowcatcher and rides in front of the engine, waving and laughing at residents along the line all the way to town.
Behind the engineer tales sits the more basic frame of the story. A bride traveled somewhere along the B&O between Grafton and Parkersburg to meet her fiancé. Some versions place her on the train with him, others have her waiting at a small station near the tunnel in a white gown. In every case something goes wrong. She falls, she jumps, or she is pushed from the train, and she dies near Silver Run. After that, engineers see her standing on the tracks, always too late to stop, her figure vanishing at the last instant or shooting upward over the engine.
What makes Silver Run unusual is not just the story, but the fact that named informants and institutional voices continue to repeat it in print. In 2025 the Hur Herald, a small town West Virginia news site, quoted Cairo bike shop owner D. J. Allen at length about the tunnel. Allen describes customers, trail users, and ghost hunters who see orbs in photographs, dogs that balk at entering the tunnel, and a “tragic story” about a woman traveling from Grafton to Parkersburg for her wedding. In Allen’s words, “for many years as trains approached the tunnel engineers would see this image of a woman in a long, flowing white dress.”
These are not nineteenth century railroad reports. They are twenty first century voices looking backward. Yet they function as primary sources for how the legend lives in local memory today.
Bones in the Chimney
In ghost lore, a striking story rarely stays simple for long. Silver Run is no exception.
By the mid twentieth century, some tellers began to connect the railroad ghost to bones reportedly discovered under or inside a house near the tunnel. A long form blog entry titled “The Legend of Silver Run’s Lady in White,” posted in 2010, recounts a version in which railroad officials investigate the repeated sightings and discover that a woman in a white gown disappeared at Silver Run decades earlier. The story claims that in the 1940s the skeleton of a woman, still clothed in shredded white fabric, was found stuffed into the chimney of a long deserted house on the edge of town and that after she received a proper church burial, the haunting largely ceased.
D. J. Allen’s 2025 comments to the Hur Herald show that the “bones under the house” element still circulates in local rumor, although she is careful to label it speculation. One of the few specific details she offers is that some residents associate the childlike figure now seen near the tunnel with an old Irish cemetery on the ridge where railroad workers and victims of a mine explosion are supposed to be buried.
To date, no easily accessible death notice, coroner’s report, or mid century newspaper account confirms the discovery of a murdered bride near Silver Run or of bones in a chimney that can be linked to the railroad ghost. That silence does not disprove local memory, but it reminds historians to distinguish between what can be documented in archives and what appears first in oral tradition and later in ghost story collections.
Writers like Jannette Quackenbush, whose West Virginia ghost lore books and associated websites helped popularize Silver Run among regional paranormal enthusiasts, have done important work in collecting these variants. At the same time, as Quackenbush herself notes, many of the stories come from informants who do not give dates, full names, or precise sources. The bones and chimney details may reflect older, now lost local knowledge, or they may represent the familiar folkloric desire to give a ghost a discovered body and a proper grave.
A Ghost in the Guidebooks
Whatever their origin, the stories around Tunnel Nineteen have long since spilled out of local conversations into official brochures and tourism campaigns.
The West Virginia Department of Tourism’s article on biking the North Bend Rail Trail introduces the “haunted” Silver Run tunnel in the same breath as its length and its place among the trail’s thirteen tunnels and dozens of bridges. That piece tells readers to keep an eye out for either a child or a woman in a white wedding dress haunting the dark brick tube.
Ritchie County’s tourism bureau describes the rail trail in similar terms. Its North Bend page lists the standard figures for trail mileage, tunnel count, and bridge count, then singles out Tunnel Nineteen as “far more fanciful.” Silver Run, it notes, is said to show visitors the image of a young woman in white, a story it calls “The Silver Run Tunnel.”
The West Virginia Rails to Trails Council, a nonprofit that maintains a detailed profile of the North Bend Rail Trail, devotes part of its overview not just to nineteenth century construction dates and modern trail statistics, but to “the legend of the ghost of tunnel 19, the Silver Run tunnel.”
State park messaging follows the same pattern. In Wonderful West Virginia’s “Lore of the Land” feature, Silver Run appears in a section on myths and legends associated with parks. Burns introduces the lady in white as a kind of prankster ghost, one who frightens engineers and then gleefully rides the front of their trains like a child at an amusement park, an image as playful as it is unsettling.
Regional convention and visitors bureaus amplify this framing. The Greater Parkersburg CVB’s haunted history materials and seasonal blog posts include Silver Run among their “spooky adventures,” describing the tunnel as an “unsettling stretch” of trail notorious for a spectral woman in white and providing turn by turn directions for visitors who want to see it after dark.
Taken together, these brochures and websites form a kind of institutional folklore. They rarely claim that the ghost is real, but they repeat the same core details and treat the story as an accepted part of what makes the tunnel worth visiting.
Walking Into the Story
For hikers and cyclists, the first impression of Silver Run is physical rather than supernatural. Approach from the Cairo side and the rail trail slips into the hills, the old right of way edged with second growth timber and the crumbling foundations of railroad and farm buildings. The brick portal appears suddenly around a bend, framed by rock and dripping vegetation.
State and local guides warn visitors that Silver Run is one of the darker tunnels on the North Bend Rail Trail. Even on a sunny day, the midpoint can feel like night. The floor is often damp or muddy, a reminder that the tunnel cuts through a hillside with seeping groundwater.
Modern writers and storytellers describe a similar sensory mix. Blogger and storyteller Susanna Holstein, who has written and spoken about the tunnel for decades, notes that engineers in her sources often describe seeing the woman in white in conditions of fog, rain, or partial moonlight, the sort of shifting light that makes it easy to misjudge distance or mistake a patch of mist for a human form.
The Hur Herald article adds contemporary accounts from hikers and campers. One group reportedly heard voices inside the tunnel when no one else was there. A family camping nearby felt something push them in the night. Dogs bark and refuse to go further. Ghost hunters bring thermal cameras and digital recorders, hoping for orbs or electronic voice phenomena.
In recent years, Silver Run has also become a staple of social media feeds devoted to Appalachian hauntings. Short videos, reels, and TikToks present the tunnel as “one of the most legendary haunted sites in West Virginia,” repeating the bride, bones, and 1910 train story in rapid fire narration over shots of the glistening brick walls and shrinking circle of daylight ahead.
Whether a visitor believes any of this or not, the combination of long darkness, echoing footsteps, and the knowledge that generations of railroaders once passed through this same space in the middle of the night does its work. Many people emerge from the western portal with the feeling that something in the tunnel was watching them.
Women in White and Appalachian Memory
Viewed in isolation, the Lady of Silver Run might seem like a unique mountain curiosity. In a broader context, she belongs to a widespread family of ghost stories.
Folklorists have long noted that tales of “white ladies” or women in white appear across Europe and the Americas. The Wikipedia summary of the motif, drawing on standard reference works, describes a typical pattern. A young woman dies violently, often through murder, betrayal, or suicide involving a lover or husband. Her ghost then appears in rural locations, at bridges, tunnels, graveyards, or along lonely roads, dressed in a white gown and associated with themes of loss and unrequited love.
Appalachia has its own versions, from road ghosts like Mamie Thurman in Logan County to railroad specters elsewhere along the B&O system. In that landscape, Silver Run stands out because the story attaches itself to a specific piece of infrastructure and because the legend has been actively cultivated by both local storytellers and official tourism agencies.
The gendered elements of the Silver Run legend are typical. The heroine is often described as beautiful, raven haired, and heartbroken, a young woman who trusted a man who never appeared or who found danger in the industrial world of trains and tunnels. Her death is almost always framed as an accident or as the result of betrayal, not as a crime that could be traced to a named perpetrator.
At the same time, modern storytellers like Jason Burns emphasize her playfulness, her sense of humor, and her apparent enjoyment in startling engineers and waving at onlookers along the line. That combination of sadness and mischief gives the Silver Run ghost a complexity that goes beyond a simple warning tale.
Reading Silver Run as History
From a historian’s perspective, Silver Run offers two interlocking stories. One is the strictly documentable history of the B&O’s Parkersburg branch, built in the 1850s as part of a broader effort to give Baltimore a competitive route to the Ohio River. That history is well supported by railroad records, engineering maps, and modern rail trail documentation, all of which agree on dates, tunnel counts, and the basic geography of the line.
The other story belongs to folklore. So far, no archived newspaper accounts from the early twentieth century have surfaced that document a specific bride killed at Silver Run or name the original engineer who claimed to have seen her. Instead, the earliest detailed versions appear in oral tradition and in late twentieth and early twenty first century ghost story collections, blogs, and features like Dave Tabler’s AppalachianHistory.net article or Holstein’s own blog posts.
That does not make the legend unimportant. It simply means that its primary sources are storytellers like Holstein and informants like D. J. Allen or Betty Jackson of the Parkersburg News and Sentinel article, whose quotations provide a clear, time stamped record of how people in the 2000s and 2020s understood the tale.
Silver Run also illustrates how folklore and tourism can feed each other. Once state and local tourism agencies began to highlight the lady in white in brochures and on blogs, they gave the story a new kind of authority. Visitors who might never have heard of the tunnel now arrive already primed to see a white figure in the fog. Ghost hunters arrive with infrared cameras. Social media posts multiply. Each new retelling fixes certain details the way a repeated chorus fixes the words of a ballad.
At the same time, the story gives the place a kind of protection. A haunted tunnel that features in state magazines and local tourism campaigns is less likely to be neglected or quietly destroyed. The ghost helps keep the bricks standing.
For Appalachian historians, Silver Run is a reminder that industrial sites are not just about economics or technology. They are also about memory, fear, and the way communities try to make sense of risk and loss. Even if the original bride can never be identified in a census or a death certificate, her story has become part of how West Virginians talk about the transition from steam era railroading to modern recreation, about the loneliness of night shifts in remote outposts, and about the thin line between safety and disaster in the Appalachian landscape.
Anyone who walks or pedals through Tunnel Nineteen today moves through both histories at once. The bricks and the alignment belong to the B&O engineers of the 1850s. The shiver that comes when the light behind you disappears and the wind picks up from the far portal belongs to the Lady in White.
Whether she is there or not, Silver Run has become one more place in the hills where past and present share the same narrow track.
Sources & Further Reading
Parkersburg News and Sentinel, “Rails, Trails & Wails: Ghostly tales linger for Silver Run Tunnel,” October 18, 2025. newsandsentinel.com/
D. J. Allen, quoted in “Ritchie’s Silver Run Railroad Tunnel Ghost – Apparitions Draw Ghost Hunters,” Hur Herald, June 10, 2025. hurherald.com
Laney Eichelberger and Pam Kasey, “The Lore of the Land,” Wonderful West Virginia, October 2025, section on Silver Run Tunnel. wonderfulwv.com
“Bike 36 bridges, 13 tunnels and a whole lot of history,” West Virginia Department of Tourism, trail overview and Silver Run description. Almost Heaven – West Virginia
“North Bend Rail-Trail,” West Virginia Rails to Trails Council, trail history and mention of “the legend of the ghost of tunnel 19, the Silver Run tunnel.” wvrailtrails.org
“North Bend Rail Trail,” Visit Ritchie County, tourism page noting Tunnel Nineteen, the “young woman in white,” and construction dates for the B&O corridor. visitritchiecounty.com
Dennis DeBruler, “1857–1963 B&O #18, #19 (Silver Run) and #20 Tunnels west of Cairo, WV,” Industrial Scenery blog, November 2025, with historical notes and a modern description of Silver Run’s remoteness. industrialscenery.blogspot.com
Susanna Holstein, “The Silver Run Tunnel,” Granny Sue’s News and Reviews, November 6, 2019, and her guest article “Haunted Tunnels: The Silver Run Ghost, and the Lost Tunnel” on AppalachianHistory.net, October 1, 2020. Appalachian History
“The Legend of Silver Run’s Lady in White,” Haunts and History blog, June 11, 2010, and related retellings summarized in Haunts of Missouri’s “Silver Run Tunnel.” hauntsandhistory.blogspot.com+1
“White Lady,” Wikipedia, summary of the woman in white motif in global folklore and its emphasis on tragic female figures in rural settings. Wikipedia