Appalachian History
On the north side of East Bernstadt, a single CSX main line slips into the side of the hill and vanishes. The bore is not long by modern standards, only a short black throat cut into sandstone and clay, but it carries a heavy railroad. Grain trains, manifests, and occasional coal still grind upgrade here, throttles open as they climb the notorious stretch of track that railroaders have called Crooked Hill for more than a century.
The U.S. Geological Survey and the federal Geographic Names Information System treat this bore as an official landform. Their data set lists it simply as Tunnel Number 9, a railroad tunnel in Laurel County, Kentucky, tied to the Bernstadt, Kentucky, 7.5 minute quadrangle and plotted just north of East Bernstadt along the CC Subdivision. AnyPlaceAmerica, which republishes that federal mapping, gives modern GPS coordinates of roughly 37.2137 north, 84.138 west and notes that the feature sits amid a cluster of other numbered tunnels between Livingston and East Bernstadt.
To railroaders, the name on the map is only part of the story. The line here climbs sharply out of the Rockcastle River valley toward London with grades and curvature that forced the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and later CSX, to use helper engines, special operating rules, and a good deal of caution. The hill, not just the bore, gave Tunnel Number 9 its reputation.
To people in Laurel County and the surrounding country, the tunnel has another layer of meaning. Local newspapers and more recent videos call it Caleb’s Tunnel, after a ghost story that has clung to the place since the late twentieth century. In those stories, the hard operating realities of Crooked Hill mix with memory, rumor, and imagination until the railroad right of way becomes a haunted landscape.
What follows is an attempt to pull those layers apart and then lay them together again: the geography, the engineering, the wrecks and lawsuits, the helper engines, and finally the stories that people tell about Tunnel Number 9 when the trains are gone and the hill goes dark.
Building a railroad over Crooked Hill
The line that passes through Tunnel Number 9 began in the nineteenth century as part of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad’s route from Louisville toward Knoxville and the South. By the early twentieth century that line between Livingston and East Bernstadt had earned a reputation within the company as one of its hardest pieces of railroad. The section came to be known as Crooked Hill, a name that appears in employee timetables, court decisions, and later railfan accounts.
The geography explains why. South of the Rockcastle River, the railroad has to climb out of a narrow valley onto higher ground trending toward London. Rather than a single long straight pull, the grade twists and folds back along the slope in a series of curves and short tangents, with deep cuts and multiple tunnels. The CC Subdivision article that summarizes the line’s history notes that Crooked Hill lies specifically between Livingston and East Bernstadt and that it carries several tunnels on a steep ruling grade.
By the first decade of the twentieth century the L&N was trying to wring more capacity out of this tortuous stretch. According to railroad histories and the CC Subdivision summary, the hill was double tracked around 1908 so that heavy trains could meet and pass without tying up the line for hours. The project required new bores and widenings, and it seems to have been during this era that the modern Tunnel Number 9 was driven.
A railfan from the CSX Transportation Historical Society, who explored the hill in 2011 and shot a sequence of photographs, described standing “on a ledge at the mouth of Tunnel 9 (Davis Tunnel)” watching an ore train grind past the 150 milepost. In his caption he notes that Tunnel 9 “was built in the 1920s, I think, when the line was double tracked,” and that the second track was later taken up, leaving the old roadbed as the present access road. His wording is cautious, but it matches the broader pattern: a double track era followed by a mid twentieth century reversion to single track.
By 1964 the CC Subdivision’s Crooked Hill segment had indeed been rationalized. The summarized history notes that the original nineteenth century alignment was abandoned and the 1908 route retained as a single main track. The upshot on the ground is that today’s Tunnel Number 9 is a modern concrete and rock bore, carrying one main track, while remnants of older cuts and portals have been repurposed as access roads and shelf benches along the hillside.
The tunnel’s name, at least in operational practice, reflects this evolution. The federal datasets and Kentucky Landforms site simply call it Tunnel Number 9, which fits the L&N practice of numbering tunnels sequentially along a line. Railfans and some local railroaders, following the CSXTHS trip account, sometimes add that older crews know it as Davis Tunnel, a secondary name that reflects internal railroad usage rather than any federal label.
Operating over the hill: helpers, tonnage, and rules
From the beginning, what made Tunnel Number 9 important was not its masonry or length but the grade wrapped around it. Crooked Hill demanded special operating rules.
Early in the twentieth century, those rules show up in employee timetables that discuss helper service and brake handling between Ford and Patio on the L&N’s Cincinnati Division. These instructions spell out how engines are assigned to shove trains over difficult grades and include specific language about Crooked Hill. In one such timetable, preserved in a 1949 or 1962 Cincinnati Division book, the railroad reassured enginemen by noting bluntly that “retainers on Crooked Hill will not be required” and then went on to outline how helpers were to be used, how speeds had to be controlled, and how trains were to be protected while descending the grade.
Those older L&N rules treated Crooked Hill as one leg of a larger operating problem stretching between Ford on the Kentucky River and the coal and manufacturing centers farther south. They also codified what every engineer already knew. The hill was steep enough and crooked enough that train handling had to be precise. A misjudged air brake set or an overcharged brake pipe might not leave much room to recover before a train slid into a curve or a tunnel.
Modern CSX documents show that, even with dynamic brakes and high adhesion locomotives, Crooked Hill still requires extra help. The Huntington Division West employee timetable effective January 1, 2005 contains a special section titled Helper Service. In that section, the company lays down instructions that apply specifically to the CC Subdivision and its steep grades. On Crooked Hill, the timetable tells crews that trains other than solid loaded bulk commodity trains which are longer than 7,000 feet or heavier than 7,800 tons must be assisted from the rear by a helper. The same paragraph instructs that any southbound train needing help “will pull the head end of their train to Hazel Patch road crossing, MP C 146.1, before helper locomotive is attached.”
Those few lines capture what Tunnel Number 9’s landscape looks like in practice. Trains climbing south leave Livingston, pass through the string of tunnels, and, if they need help, ease up to the Hazel Patch crossing so that a helper engine cut in behind them can shove through the steepest part of the hill. Coming north, heavy trains grind past the mile 150 signals and disappear into Tunnel Number 9 with helpers either on the rear or tied on somewhere behind the head end.
A contemporary railfan driving guide helps tie those operating instructions to the public roads. Frograil’s tour of CSX between Winchester and Corbin tells readers to reach Hazel Patch by leaving U.S. 25 and following Hazel Patch Road toward the Camp Wildcat battlefield, where a grade crossing offers a good vantage point on trains working the hill. Later in the tour, the author notes that at East Bernstadt a small yard and loadout along Kentucky 490 serve as the home base for “pushers for Crooked Hill,” confirming that CSX continues to base helper sets in the community nearest Tunnel Number 9.
Taken together, the timetables and guides show that Crooked Hill today is not a relic but an active, carefully managed operating challenge. Tunnel Number 9 is one bore in a chain that still dictates train size, power assignments, and dispatching decisions across central and eastern Kentucky.
Wrecks, lawsuits, and a reputation for danger
Railroads do not name a piece of railroad Crooked Hill unless they have a reason. That reason appears clearly in the legal and photographic record.
In the early twentieth century, the Louisville and Nashville found itself in court more than once over accidents and injuries near East Bernstadt. One landmark case, Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Winkler, reached the Kentucky Court of Appeals and involved a conductor hurt in 1913 “on crooked hill, on the Knoxville branch of appellant’s road, near East Bernstadt, in Laurel County.” The opinion explains that the hill was “crooked” not in a metaphorical sense but in a very literal one. It describes curves and counter curves, helper engines, and the way slack would run in and out of a freight train as power was applied or released on the grade. In that environment, a misstep while walking the train or a misjudged movement could be costly.
Another appellate decision, Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Hyatt’s Adm’x, involves a fatal collision on the same stretch. The court describes a situation where an engineer, operating on Crooked Hill, could not see far ahead because of the combination of boiler length and curvature. A helper engine that had just assisted a southbound heavy train was returning downgrade and struck a track worker or pedestrian near a private crossing. The testimony and judicial narrative in that case give a rare window into how crews experienced the hill. They speak of blind curves near the tunnels, of the challenges in controlling slack going downgrade, and of the difficulty in seeing trespassers or vehicles at unsignaled road crossings.
The photographic record reinforces that sense of difficulty. A historic image in the Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection at Morehead State University, labeled “Double tunnels near London, Laurel County, Kentucky,” shows twin stone portals jammed into a tight cut, with a steep hillside pushing in on the right-of-way. Though the catalog date is clearly off, the masonry and surroundings match other known views of the Crooked Hill tunnels. The scene helps explain why even a modest derailment or mechanical failure here could quickly become serious.
Local memory remembers at least one such disaster. Posts in the “London and Corbin Kentucky History” Facebook group circulate an image captioned “Crooked Hill Train Wreck, Laurel County, Kentucky, September 1882,” as well as a “Twin Tunnels” photo crediting a Pictorial History of Laurel County and noting that the Crooked Hill tunnels were completed in 1882. The 1882 wreck photograph almost certainly reflects contemporary newspaper coverage in London, Corbin, and perhaps Louisville. For now, that coverage remains on microfilm, but the surviving image and caption at least fix a date, place, and the fact that the line’s troubles began almost as soon as the tunnels opened.
Later accidents show up in more technical records. Federal Railroad Administration accident reports in the 1990s and 2000s document derailments on the CC Subdivision in Laurel County, including cases where loaded grain trains derailed on steep grades while being pushed by helpers. Those forms are terse and technical, but they mark Crooked Hill as a continuing point of risk in the modern safety database.
For crews, though, the hill’s reputation was shaped more by daily experience than by the rare worst case. The mere fact that L&N and later CSX devoted lines of special instruction to Crooked Hill, set tonnage limits keyed to it, and based helpers at East Bernstadt tells us that Tunnel Number 9 was never just another bore in the timetable. It was part of a problem that railroaders “dreaded” and respected at the same time.
Song, sound, and the hill in memory
The difficulty of Crooked Hill did not stay confined to timetables and court reporters. It spilled into song.
In March 1938, folklorists Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded banjo player Pete Steele performing a tune he called “Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill.” The Lomax Digital Archive catalog lists the recording under that title, with Steele on banjo, and notes its inclusion in later compilations of Anglo American songs and ballads. Twenty years later the same piece appeared as “Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill” on Steele’s Folkways album Banjo Tunes and Songs, where Smithsonian Folkways identifies it as a 1958 commercial release.
The liner notes emphasize Steele’s ties to Appalachian coal mining and railroad work. While the song itself is an instrumental banjo tune and not a narrative ballad, the very title suggests that by the mid twentieth century “Crooked Hill” was not just a local operational term. It had entered the broader vocabulary of Appalachian working life as a place where coal trains strained up a stiff grade.
When you stand near Tunnel Number 9 today and listen to a train working upgrade, it is not hard to hear how such a tune came about. The sound is a kind of mechanical music: the rise and fall of exhaust beats, the grind of flanges on curves, the echo in the bore, and, when helpers are on the rear, the distinct push from behind. Steele’s banjo line, built around a pulsing rhythm and a sense of lift and fall, translates that feeling into music.
Together with the court cases and photographs, the song helps fix Crooked Hill in a particular cultural moment. This was a railroad that miners and timber workers knew well. It was where train crews earned their pay and where a misstep could send a car over an embankment. It was also something you might brag or joke about on a front porch thirty or forty miles away.
Caleb’s Tunnel: ghost stories at Number 9
By the early twenty first century, another layer had been added to Tunnel Number 9’s story. Local newspapers in Corbin and London began running features on a ghost legend that people applied to the bore. The Times Tribune in Corbin, in a 2008 piece titled “Caleb: Fact or Fiction,” situated the story at the tunnel near East Bernstadt and tried to separate fact from embellishment. The article drew on train wreck reports, oral memory, and the broader pattern of accidents along Crooked Hill. Although the full text sits behind a paywall, its existence shows that by that date the phrase “Caleb’s Tunnel” had taken firm hold in the local press.
A few years later, YouTube creators picked up the story. A 2017 video titled “Caleb’s Tunnel” features locals and ghost hunters walking the right of way near Tunnel Number 9 at night. They speak of more than a century of strange happenings around East Bernstadt and the tunnel, of a railroad watchman or worker named Caleb who was killed while trying to flag down a train, of lights and whistles heard when no trains are scheduled. The video sometimes names specific dates and train numbers, which can be checked against FRA records and newspapers, but it also reflects the way legend-making works. A hill that already had a reputation among railroaders for being “crooked” and dangerous becomes a stage for hauntings once the number of trains drops and more people come to the site at night seeking stories rather than work.
Social media posts about East Bernstadt and Tunnel 9 underscore that pattern. A widely shared photograph captioned “Early days of East Bernstadt, Tunnel 9 shortly after construction” appears in local history Facebook groups, where commenters mention “numerous tragedies” in the tunnels and along the tracks. Even if the underlying image dates from the early to mid twentieth century and the tragedies are not individually named, the conversation demonstrates that people in Laurel County have long associated the tunnel with both opportunity and loss.
For a historian, the Caleb legend is not primarily a question of proving or disproving ghosts. Instead, it is a window into how a community remembers dangerous work in a landscape reshaped by industrial power. A hill that once echoed constantly with helper engines and freight cars now sees fewer trains, especially at night. Into that relative quiet, people project stories that explain why a place feels unsettling or charged.
The legend also echoes other Appalachian “white thing” and railroad ghost stories, in which a named worker killed on the job continues to appear at a specific spot on the line. Even if the details vary, what remains constant is the willingness to see railroad accidents not just as items on a FRA form but as events that leave a mark on the land and on the people who live nearby.
Mapping the tunnel: landforms, roads, and access
One of the most useful ways to understand Tunnel Number 9 is to look at how various mapping projects capture it.
Kentucky Landforms, which repackages the federal GNIS database in a state focused interface, lists Tunnel Number 9 in its inventory of railroad related landforms. The entry classifies it as a railroad tunnel in Laurel County and ties it to the Louisville and Nashville, the original owner of the line. Although the site’s summary is brief, it confirms that the feature is recognized officially as part of Kentucky’s named geography.
AnyPlaceAmerica and similar mapping aggregators, drawing on USGS and GNIS, place Tunnel Number 9 just north of East Bernstadt and note that it appears on the Bernstadt US Topo quadrangle. They add nearby place names, including East Bernstadt itself and neighboring tunnels numbered 6, 7, and 8, painting a picture of a short but tunnel heavy district.
On the ground, county road maps from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet show how public roads approach the railroad around Crooked Hill. The Laurel County series map places the CC Subdivision on the hillside east of U.S. 25, with Kentucky 490 crossing near East Bernstadt and Hazel Patch Road climbing up toward the tracks near the Civil War battlefield and the helper attachment point at milepost C 146.1. Together with the topographic sheets, these maps make it clear that Tunnel Number 9 is not an isolated landmark but part of a web that ties older wagon roads, the interstate highway, and the railroad together.
For the modern reader, the most vivid mapping sometimes comes from railfan photography. The Crooked Hill railfan report from November 2011, mentioned earlier, includes photos taken from a ledge at the mouth of Tunnel 9. One shows ore train K538 emerging from the bore at milepost 150. Another, taken later in the day, shows a phosphate train on the same grade. The photographer notes that to reach these spots he drove from Altamont down the old roadbed through what he calls “old Tunnel 9” and Tunnel 8 to the north end of Tunnel 7, a reminder that more than one generation of tunneling and track work has left its mark on the hillside.
Other images, such as the RailPictures.net shot of train Q539 emerging from Tunnel 9 in 2016 with the caption “emerges from Tunnel 9 on Crooked Hill near East Bernstadt, Kentucky,” give a more polished but equally concrete record of the tunnel’s modern appearance and traffic. They show a concrete lined portal framed by trees and sandstone, signals close by, and modern GE wide cab locomotives working on the grade, proof that the bore remains in daily use.
Tunnel Number 9 today
If you visit Crooked Hill now and stand where the public road crosses near Hazel Patch or where legal access allows a view toward the tunnel, the scene is at once modern and layered with history.
You still hear helpers. CSX’s Huntington Division West timetable makes clear that trains longer than 7,000 feet or heavier than 7,800 tons will not be left to fight the hill alone. The Frograil guide confirms that pushers are still based at East Bernstadt, tied to the little yard along Kentucky 490. Some of those engines carry CSX’s latest paint schemes and electronics, but their basic job would be familiar to a L&N crewman from 1913.
You still see the tight curves and limited sightlines that worried railroad lawyers in Winkler and Hyatt’s Adm’x. New signals, solar panels, and radio traffic help mitigate the risk, yet the geometry of the hill has not changed. The track still coils along the slope and ducks in and out of rock cuts, leaving only short straight stretches where a crew can see more than a few hundred yards ahead.
You still encounter the stories. Young people from Laurel County and neighboring counties drive the back roads to “Caleb’s Tunnel” to see if the ghost stories are true. Railfans from farther away plan trips around Crooked Hill, using online guides and old L&N books to hunt down the best vantage points. Historians and genealogists visit to connect family stories of railroad work and accidents with physical places.
At the same time, the wider railroad around Tunnel Number 9 has changed. The L&N is gone, folded through mergers into CSX Transportation. Coal traffic has declined sharply on some parts of the CC Subdivision, replaced by grain, automotive, and intermodal trains. The I 75 corridor has taken over much of the long distance passenger and freight business that once moved on rails. For many people driving past London and East Bernstadt today, the railroad on the hillside is only a distant streak of track, glimpsed from the interstate.
Yet the tunnel remains fixed in place, an engineering response to a very specific Appalachian problem. The hillside cannot be graded away without enormous cost. The Rockcastle valley still lies where it did in the nineteenth century. The only way to move trains between the Bluegrass and the coal country by rail is to climb a hill somewhere. L&N chose to climb it here.
Why Tunnel Number 9 matters
For an Appalachian historian, Tunnel Number 9 at East Bernstadt is important for several reasons.
It is a concrete example of how railroads reshaped difficult terrain and then lived with the consequences. The mapping and engineering record shows L&N revisiting Crooked Hill repeatedly, double tracking, adding tunnels, and later trimming back to single track, always trying to balance capacity, safety, and cost.
It is a place where the lives and bodies of railroad workers intersected with that infrastructure. Court cases like Winkler and Hyatt’s Adm’x preserve first hand testimony about what it meant to work freight trains on a crooked mountain grade in the era before radios and dynamic brakes. Those cases can be read alongside the coal camp histories and labor struggles you have already documented elsewhere on AppalachianHistorian.org.
It is a site where official records and local memory collide. FRA accident forms, GNIS entries, and employee timetables give one view of the hill. Ghost stories, Facebook posts, and YouTube videos give another. Neither is complete by itself. Put together, they show how communities process industrial danger over time, turning wreck photographs and legal language into legends like Caleb’s Tunnel.
It is also, thanks to Pete Steele’s “Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill,” a rare example of an Appalachian railroad grade that made its way into the national folk music archive. That alone makes Crooked Hill and its tunnels worth attention in any broader study of Appalachian song, work, and place.
For Laurel County and East Bernstadt, Tunnel Number 9 is not a separate tourist site with a gate and a gift shop. It is part of the working landscape, threaded between coal tipples, rural churches, I 75 exits, and Civil War battlefields. To tell its story well is to tie together federal mapping, corporate operating rules, local anecdotes, and the lived experience of railroad families who have spent generations listening to trains pull the crooked hill in the dark.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Landforms. “Tunnel Number 9.” Kentucky Landforms. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://kylandforms.com/index.php/railroad/183-tunnel-number-9
Kentucky Landforms. “Railroad.” Kentucky Landforms. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://kylandforms.com/index.php/railroad
“Tunnel Number 9 Topo Map in Laurel County, Kentucky.” AnyPlaceAmerica. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.anyplaceamerica.com/directory/ky/laurel-county-21125/tunnels/tunnel-number-9-517301/
“Tunnel Number 9, KY.” TopoQuest. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://topoquest.com/place-detail.php?id=517301
“Top Tunnels in Laurel County, KY.” AnyPlaceAmerica. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.anyplaceamerica.com/directory/ky/laurel-county-21125/tunnels/
“East Bernstadt, KY.” TopoQuest. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://topoquest.com/place-detail.php?id=511986
“Johnson Ridge Topo Map in Laurel County, Kentucky.” AnyPlaceAmerica. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.anyplaceamerica.com/directory/ky/laurel-county-21125/ridges/johnson-ridge-513054/
U.S. Geological Survey. “Bernstadt, Kentucky, 7.5-Minute Topographic Quadrangle (US Topo).” 2016 ed. USGS Topographic Map Series. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://apps.nationalmap.gov/viewer/
Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Division of Planning. “Laurel County: Official Highway Map / County Road Series.” Map, c. 2005. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://transportation.ky.gov/Planning/Pages/County-Maps.aspx
CSX Transportation. Huntington Division West, Timetable No. 1: Effective January 1, 2005. Employee timetable. Jacksonville, FL: CSX Transportation, 2005. https://www.multimodalways.org/docs/railroads/companies/CSX/CSX%20ETTs.html
Federal Railroad Administration, Office of Safety. Rail Equipment Accident/Incident Report, CSX03960702019960308 (Laurel County, Kentucky, 1996). FRA Form F 6180.54. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Transportation. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/Query/invdetl.aspx?accidentno=CSX03960702019960308
CSX Transportation Historical Society. “CSX/L&N – Crooked Hill #1, 11-6-11.” CSXTHS Railfanning. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.csxthsociety.org/railfanning/csxlncrookedhill120111106.html
CSX Transportation Historical Society. “L&N – Crooked Hill, 1944.” CSXTHS Railfanning. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.csxthsociety.org/railfanning/lncrookedhill1944.html
Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. v. Winkler. Kentucky Court of Appeals. Case summary via vLex United States. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://case-law.vlex.com/vid/louisville-n-r-co-901849789
Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. v. Hyatt’s Administratrix. Kentucky Court of Appeals, 1921. Opinion text via Papershake. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://papershake.blogspot.com/2012/10/louisville-nashville-r-co-v-hyatts-admx.html
Stuart S. Sprague Photograph Collection. “Laurel County – Double Tunnel.” ScholarWorks @ Morehead State University. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/sprague_photo_collection/249/
“Calebs tunnel in East Bernstadt Ky … tunnel number 9.” Haunted History of Kentucky Facebook group. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/groups/hauntedhistoryofkentucky/posts/3148165278562687/
“Been awhile since this tunnel saw a train… Laurel County ky.” Abandoned Kentucky Facebook group. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/groups/AbandonedKentucky/posts/2268163376600305/
“Kentucky Unknown: Tunnel No. 9, located near East Bernstadt in Laurel County, Kentucky.” Kentucky Unknown Facebook page, February 22, 2025. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/100064319844430/posts/1047086467445338/
Pete Steele. “Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill.” In Banjo Tunes and Songs. Folkways Records, 1958. Track info via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://folkways.si.edu/pete-steele/train-a-pullin-the-crooked-hill/american-folk-old-time/music/track/smithsonian
Pete Steele. Banjo Tunes and Songs. Folkways Records, 1958. Album notes via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://folkways.si.edu/pete-steele/banjo-tunes-and-songs/american-folk-old-time/music/album/smithsonian
Lomax, Alan, and Elizabeth Lyttleton Lomax. “Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill.” In Anglo-American Songs and Ballads, AFS L21 (1959). Lomax Kentucky Recordings, Lomax Digital Archive. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://lomaxky.omeka.net/recordings5
Lomax, Alan. “Pete Steele.” Lomax Digital Archive. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://archive.culturalequity.org/person/steele-pete
“YouTube Audio – ‘Train A-Pullin’ the Crooked Hill’, Pete Steele.” YouTube video, 2:17. Uploaded by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QA8M_j3q_0
Hicks, B. “Caleb: Fact or Fiction.” Times-Tribune (Corbin, KY), May 5, 2008. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.thetimestribune.com/community/caleb-fact-for-fiction/article_20b4140b-f195-5270-b8d7-1b0124e6d88e.html
Rouhier-Willoughby, Jeanne. “The Narrative Tradition of Kentucky’s Mysterious Beasts.” Traditional Culture Research (Russia), 2021. PDF. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.trad-culture.ru/sites/default/files/files_pdf/TK2_2021_Rouhier-Willoughby_0.pdf
Rouhier-Willoughby, Jeanne. “The Narrative Tradition of Kentucky’s Mysterious Beasts.” Traditional Culture Research (online version). Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.trad-culture.ru/article/narrative-tradition-kentuckys-mysterious-beasts
“Haunted Places in Kentucky.” Shadowlands Haunted Places Index. Accessed December 30, 2025. http://www.theshadowlands.net/places/kentucky.htm
“Laurel County’s Resident Demon: Caleb.” The Course of Horror (blog), September 23, 2020. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://courseofhorror.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/laurel-countys-resident-demon-caleb/
“The tale of Caleb, East Bernstadt near London, Kentucky.” Facebook post (public page). Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/100045063786746/posts/145258614010738/
“Caleb’s origin is uncertain…” Haunted History of Kentucky Facebook group (follow-up thread). Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.facebook.com/groups/hauntedhistoryofkentucky/posts/3378332408879305/
“CC Subdivision.” Wikipedia. Last modified 2024. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC_Subdivision
“Guide to Appalachian Coal Hauling Railroads, Volume 6: CSX CC Subdivision and Crooked Hill.” W&H Main Yards / SpikeSys. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.spikesys.com/Trains/App_coal/apcl_5a.html
Rockcastle County Public Library. “Minutes, March 9, 1999.” Local history document referencing “Crooked Hill region so much dreaded by railroad men.” Rockcastle County Public Library, Mount Vernon, KY. (Cited in Rouhier-Willoughby, “The Narrative Tradition of Kentucky’s Mysterious Beasts.”) https://www.rockcastlecountypubliclibrary.org
“Canadian National Locomotives through Kentucky: My Journeys on the CSX CC Subdivision.” YouTube video. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbCtKX6hmyQ
“Returning to the CSX CC Subdivision.” YouTube video. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oOb7_5_4YI
Louisville & Nashville Railroad Historical Society. “L&N Magazine Index.” PDF index of L&N Magazine, including multi-part feature on Crooked Hill. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://www.lnrr.org/pdf/MagazineIndexCombined.pdf