Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – Lanterns in the Raccoon Creek Valley: Moonville Tunnel and the Ghost Town in the Woods
On a map of Appalachian Ohio, Vinton County looks like one more patch of green among many. In person, it feels different. The roads slip down into narrow hollows and climb back out again, and the trees close in until even a bright afternoon can look like evening. Somewhere in that tangle of hills and second growth forest, at the edge of Zaleski State Forest, a brick arch opens in the hillside and swallows the trail ahead. The stones over the entrance still spell out a single word: MOONVILLE.
Today the Moonville Tunnel is a stop along a rail trail, a favorite backdrop for photographs, and the centerpiece of a popular ghost story. It is also one of the more vivid reminders that the Appalachian region stretches far beyond central Kentucky and West Virginia into the coal country and iron furnace towns of southeastern Ohio. Vinton County is part of what planners now call Appalachian Ohio, a band of counties formally recognized by the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Behind the graffiti and the ghost walks is a story about how a railroad cut through a remote valley, how a tiny company town grew up around it, and how danger on the tracks slowly turned into legend.
A railroad through the woods
Moonville did not begin as a town. It began as a route. In the 1850s the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad wanted a line across southeastern Ohio that would shorten the trip between the Ohio River and Cincinnati. The easiest way to do that on paper was not the easiest way on the ground. The tracks would have to cross rough country where roads were scarce and the hills hemmed in the creek bottoms.
A farmer named Samuel Coe provided part of the solution. He offered the railroad a right of way across his land along Raccoon Creek if they would build the line there and give him a way to ship out coal and clay. The company agreed. Engineers laid out a grade that included two trestles over the creek and a tunnel cut through a ridge east of Coe’s land. Around that crossing a community began to form.
The tunnel itself was completed around 1856. It was lined in brick and long enough that a person caught inside could not see daylight at both ends unless they stood near the exact center and waited for their eyes to adjust. Railroad workers later called this stretch of track one of the most lonesome and desolate pieces of line between Parkersburg and St. Louis.
Coal, clay, and a town called Moonville
Once the trains started running, the people followed. The same hills that made railroad construction difficult also held the resources that justified it. Coal seams and clay beds lay in the ridges above Raccoon Creek. To the west, at Hope Furnace, ironworkers needed both fuel and flux for their blast furnace. By the late 1850s and 1860s the combination of ore, coal, and a rail connection pulled workers into the valley.
Most accounts agree that Moonville never held more than roughly one hundred residents at its peak in the 1870s. It was less a town in the modern sense and more a cluster of houses, a store, a school, and a few outbuildings tied together by kinship and the railroad timetable. Many of the families were related to the Coes and Fergusons, who had been in the area before the tracks arrived.
The coal that gave Moonville its reason for being did not last forever. Mines near the village helped fuel Hope Furnace, which operated around the clock and turned out cast iron that found its way into stoves, kettles, and Civil War era weaponry. But by the 1870s and 1880s ore deposits and timber in the immediate area began to thin, and the furnace eventually shut down. As mining shifted to other areas, Moonville’s population slowly declined.
Even as the town shrank, the trains continued to pass through. The Marietta and Cincinnati line was eventually absorbed into the Baltimore and Ohio system, and freight traffic actually increased even while the company houses around the tunnel sagged and disappeared into the weeds.
Walking the tracks
For people who lived in or near Moonville, the railroad was not just a way to ship coal. It was also a path. In a landscape where roads were poor and bridges scarce, residents used the right of way as a footpath to reach neighbors, stores, and jobs at other furnaces or mines. The problem was that the trains used the same narrow corridor.
Around Moonville a single track carried both eastbound and westbound traffic. One trestle over Raccoon Creek stood within a short walk of the tunnel mouth. A person had to step onto the ties with water below on one side and timbers on the other, with little room to escape if a locomotive appeared suddenly around the curve. Walking through the tunnel itself could be just as dangerous, especially in the dark or in bad weather.
Contemporary newspapers confirm what the geography suggests. In March 1859 the McArthur Democrat reported that a brakeman on the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad fell from the cars near Cincinnati Furnace, not far from Moonville, after a night of drinking. The wheels mangled his leg so badly that doctors could not safely amputate, and the paper grimly concluded that he was likely dead by the time readers saw the story.
Two decades later the line saw a more spectacular accident. In early November 1880, two freight trains collided near Moonville after a dispatcher failed to warn one crew about the other’s movements. Accounts published at the time, including one relayed by the Chicago Tribune, stated that engineer Frank (often given as Theodore) Lawhead and fireman Charles Krick were killed and several other crew members injured.
Other fatal accidents followed. Modern summaries of the line’s history, drawing on railroad records and local newspapers, suggest that more than twenty people were killed on or near the tracks at Moonville over the years, including pedestrians struck near the tunnel and on the nearby trestles well into the twentieth century.
Out of those very real deaths grew a set of stories that blurred the line between history and haunting.
The engineer, the brakeman, and the Lavender Lady
By the early twentieth century, railroaders and nearby residents were already talking about strange sights along the tracks near Moonville. Later collectors of folklore, such as Jannette Quackenbush, recorded tales told by engineers, section hands, and families in the surrounding communities.
One of the most enduring figures is the ghost of the engineer. According to stories that circulated in railroad camps and in the pages of the Athens Messenger, crews began to report a figure carrying a lantern near the tunnel in the years after the 1880 collision. Some said he appeared on the embankment above the right of way and drifted down toward the tracks as if trying to flag down an oncoming train. Others swore that they saw a light inside the tunnel where no crewman should have been. In either case the apparition was identified with the dead engineer Lawhead, replaying his last moments in an effort to prevent another wreck.
Another story reaches farther back. Local tradition remembers a brakeman, sometimes described as young and sometimes as middle aged, who fell asleep on or near the track around 1859 after drinking heavily. When the train came through he never woke up. The McArthur Democrat’s account of a brakeman crushed near Cincinnati Furnace that year fits the outline closely, and later storytellers turned him into a kind of wandering warning. His ghost, they said, walked the line in dirty work clothes, still swinging a lantern and trying to keep others from sharing his fate.
The tunnel also has a more delicate presence. Hikers and ghost hunters sometimes tell of an elderly woman walking along the trail or just inside the tunnel, dressed in old fashioned clothes. When she disappears, a faint smell of perfume or crushed flowers lingers in the air. She is usually called the Lavender Lady and is often identified with Mary Shea, a member of a family that lived near Hope Furnace and used the tracks as a path. One version of the story has her gathering wildflowers near the line when a train struck her. Another has her searching for a loved one working on the railroad.
There is also the Bully, sometimes named as David “Baldie” Keeton, a local man with a reputation for hard drinking and harder fighting. After a saloon brawl, he was found dead on or near the tracks above the tunnel. In legend, his ghost stands on the bluff looking down at hikers and sometimes tosses small stones in their direction. Mothers in nearby communities turned that story into a warning about staying out too late.
Even official maps nod to these stories. A brochure for Zaleski State Forest produced by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources notes that the abandoned railroad right of way is “said to be haunted around the Moonville Tunnel” and briefly retells the brakeman legend among its descriptions of shooting ranges and hiking loops.
From ghost town to rail trail
By the middle of the twentieth century, the economic tide that had once made Moonville possible had moved on. The coal seams close to the village were largely worked out, and new mines opened farther away where the geology was more favorable. Small farms that had provided food and extra income for families shrank as younger generations left for jobs in larger towns.
The last family moved away from Moonville in 1947. Within a decade or two the houses had collapsed or been salvaged for lumber. By the 1960s little remained of the town other than stone foundations hidden in the undergrowth, the cemetery on the hillside, and the tunnel itself.
The railroad held on a bit longer. Freight still moved along the line through the 1970s and early 1980s, even as the route became notorious among crews for its isolation and lack of signals. In 1988 the tracks were finally removed. The grade and tunnel were left to the forest, the local kids, and the occasional folklore collector.
In the twenty first century that abandonment has been partly reversed, not by trains but by hikers. The Vinton County Park District and the Moonville Rail Trail Association have worked to reclaim about ten miles of the old right of way as a multi use trail that links Moonville to other former rail stops like Ingham Station and King Hollow. New bridges now span Raccoon Creek where trestles once stood, and the tunnel has been stabilized and reopened as a centerpiece of the route.
The trail sits within a landscape of public land. Zaleski State Forest surrounds Moonville, and Lake Hope State Park lies a short drive away. On autumn weekends, when the trees turn and mist hangs in the hollows, the area draws a mix of day hikers, birders, photographers, and people who have come specifically to see whether the stories about the tunnel’s ghosts are true. The county tourism office and local volunteers host events like the Midnight at Moonville festival, which pairs historical programs with guided lantern walks and paranormal investigations.
Moonville’s place in Appalachian memory
Moonville’s story is small in scale. It was never a county seat, an industrial center, or the site of a famous battle. At its height it could barely fill a one room schoolhouse. Yet in many ways it looks like a miniature of Appalachian history.
The town existed because of a particular combination of resources and transportation. Coal, iron ore, clay, timber, and a new railroad met in a single valley and briefly created jobs and community life where none had been before. When those conditions changed, the people left. The land reverted to forest, and the built environment was reduced to a handful of foundations and a brick arch in the woods.
Vinton County’s status as part of Appalachian Ohio reminds us that this pattern was not limited to central Appalachia’s coalfields in eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia. Communities from Pennsylvania to Alabama grew up around extractive industries and transportation corridors, then struggled or disappeared when markets shifted.
What makes Moonville unusual is the way its story has survived. Census schedules, railroad reports, and old newspaper clippings provide the outline of a place that rose and fell in step with the fortunes of the Marietta and Cincinnati line. The ghost stories layered on top of that history kept the name alive during decades when the town itself was disappearing under vines and saplings.
When hikers today walk through the tunnel, they pass through more than a dark hole in a hill. They move along the same path that carried coal to Hope Furnace, miners to work, children to school, and occasional travelers who never made it home. Whether or not anyone sees a lantern swinging in the distance, Moonville still has something to say about the risks that came with industrial change and about the way people in the Appalachian region remember places after the trains have gone and the town has turned back into forest.
Sources & Further Reading
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Appalachian Regional Commission. County Economic Status and Distressed Areas in Appalachian Ohio, Fiscal Year 2024. PDF. June 2023. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/CountyEconomicStatusandDistressAreasFY2024Ohio.pdf
Athens County Visitors Bureau. “Moonville Rail Trail.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://athensohio.com/things-to-do/moonville-rail-trail/
Clio. “Moonville Tunnel.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://theclio.com/entry/16768
“Freight Train Collision at Moonville, Ohio.” The Lapeer Democrat (Lapeer, MI), November 13, 1880, 2. https://digmichnews.cmich.edu/?a=d&d=LDE18801113.1.2
Marietta Times. “Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad Once Provided Vital Link.” November 12, 2022. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.mariettatimes.com/news/local-news/2022/11/marietta-and-cincinnati-railroad-once-provided-vital-link/
Moonvilletunnel.net. “Moonville Tunnel: Zaleski, Ohio.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.moonvilletunnel.net/
Moonvilletunnel.net. Key and Map to Moonville Rail Trail 2018. PDF. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.moonvilletunnel.net/MoonvilleMapandKey2018.pdf
National Park Service. “Pending List 2021 02 06.” National Register of Historic Places. February 6, 2021. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/pending-list-2021-02-06.htm
National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Weekly Lists 2021 (revised 2024-05-23). PDF. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/upload/Weekly-List-2021_revised20240523-508.pdf
Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Moonville Tunnel.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://ohiodnr.gov/go-and-do/plan-a-visit/find-a-property/moonville-tunnel
Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry. Zaleski State Forest. PDF. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/ohiodnr.gov/documents/forestry/maps/zaleski.pdf
Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Hope Furnace Ruins.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://ohiodnr.gov/go-and-do/plan-a-visit/find-a-property/hope-furnace-ruins
Ohio Department of Transportation. “Moonville Trail Part 2/3.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/odot/projects/projects/120373
Ohio History Connection. “1-82 Hope Furnace.” Remarkable Ohio. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://remarkableohio.org/marker/1-82-hope-furnace/
Quackenbush, Jannette. “Explore the Haunted World of Author Jannette Quackenbush.” 21 Crows American Folklore Archives. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://21crows.com/author-jannette-quackenbush-books/
Quackenbush, Jannette. Moonville Whispers: Unearthing Ghosts Along the Haunted Hocking Hills Rail Trail. Google Books record. 2025. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://books.google.com/books/about/Moonville_Whispers.html?id=S7GWEQAAQBAJ
TrekOhio. “Zaleski State Forest: Moonville Tunnel.” January 27, 2017. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://trekohio.com/2017/01/27/zaleski-state-forest-moonville-tunnel/
TrailLink (Rails-to-Trails Conservancy). “Moonville Rail Trail.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.traillink.com/trail/moonville-rail-trail/
Vinton County (Official Tourism/Information Site). “Moonville Rail Trail Association.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://vintoncounty.com/moonville-rail-trail-association/
National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions. Federal Register 86, no. 31 (February 17, 2021). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/17/2021-03123/national-register-of-historic-places-notification-of-pending-nominations-and-related-actions
National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions. PDF (Public Inspection). February 17, 2021. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-03123.pdf
Wikipedia contributors. “Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietta_and_Cincinnati_Railroad
Wikipedia contributors. “Moonville Tunnel.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonville_Tunnel
Zinicola, Roger, ed. “Baltimore & Ohio Timeline.” Classic Trains Magazine (Trains.com). Updated November 3, 2020. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.trains.com/ctr/railroads/timelines-book-reviews/baltimore-and-ohio-timeline/
Author Note: I wrote this to keep the history and the folklore side by side, because Moonville’s story lives in both records and memory. If you visit, please treat the tunnel and the old town traces with respect and leave the place as you found it.