Roadside Assistance

A gaggle of ghostly children proves its always unwise to get caught on the wrong side of the tracks.

Next to tales of ghostly hitchhikers, one of the most widely circulated supernatural stories concerns a group of schoolchildren who, many years ago, were killed when a train collided with their school bus, which was stalled on a section of railroad track. The event is supposedly commemorated in a nearby subdivision, which was allegedly built at about the same time as the accident. The streets are all named after the dead kids. And now, the story goes, if you park your car on the tracks where it happened and put the car in neutral, a pack of invisible tots will push the vehicle out of danger. Even more creepy, if you dust the back of the car with talcum powder, after you roll off the rails youll be able to see ghostly handprints on the trunk. The story seems as implausible as it is entertaining. What makes it even more astounding is that it contains a graina very small grainof truth. It turns out the original mother of all child-haunted railroad crossings is set on the southern edge of San Antonio, near a tiny suburban neighborhood where the streets do

indeed bear names such as Nancy Carole Way, Cindy Sue Way, Laura Lee Way, and Shane Road. Head west on Shane, and youll very quickly hit a rail line. The rail line. If you pull up to the eastern side and look across the tracks, it seems as if the road ahead slopes gently uphill. Which makes what comes next even more disturbing. Throw the car into neutral and it will roll eerily forward, over the tracks, and back onto the road. And if you conduct the talcum powder test, theres a decent chance you may find prints on your trunk at the end of the adventure. Not surprisingly, this railroad crossing is an extremely popular spot with teenagersparticularly around Halloween, when lines of cars wait patiently for a chance to roll across the tracks. Indeed, one wonders if the ghost kids ever get tired. One also wonders, given the stupidity and inherent danger of goofing around on railroad tracks for any reason, whether the toiling tots havent been joined over the decades by a few unobservant thrill seekers. One would think those invisible, car-pushing grade schoolers would serve as a warning. Sadly for ghost lovers, theres a logical explanation for almost all of this. A few years ago a San Antonio TV station hired surveyors to examine the road. They found that in spite of appearances (or a common misperception), the grade slopes downhill rather than up. So a car placed in neutral could roll over the tracks from east to west naturally, without any ghostly assistance. Even more telling, extensive research turned up no record of a school bus crash at that spot. Theres even a perfectly reasonable, perfectly boring explanation for the handprints. When would-be ghost hunters spray their trunks with talc, the material is soaked up by oil from any handprints that might be there already, casting them into sharp relief.

As anyone who has taken a criminology course, or even watched an episode of Law & Order, already knows, this is exactly how the cops dust for fingerprints. And by the way, the streets in the nearby neighborhood arent named after dead children. Theyre named after the suburban developers own kids. Not that true believers cant find some wiggle room. The TV station that tried to debunk the story admitted that while it couldnt locate any hard evidence of a school bus accident, records from earlier decades were so spotty that something might have been missed. Even more telling, not long ago the teenage daughter of Andy and Debi Chesney brought back a tangible souvenir from her trip to the tracks. After she and her friends took the customary roll over the rails, she shot some pictures to commemorate the event. But when the roll was developed, the Chesneys were disconcerted by one particular picture. Down in the left corner was a transparent, child-sized shape. It looks, to some, like the outline of a kid carrying a teddy bear.