# 1: Phantom Train: PEI Legends and Lore series Traditional Cache
Olewaif: Out and about with the Dryland Sailor retrieving caches as a prelude to archiving same. We also made some finds today . This was a nice cache and one of my favorite stories as it had a lot of witnesses to it.
# 1: Phantom Train: PEI Legends and Lore series
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Camoed pill bottle in a tree... across the bridge and down the path.
" They have tales ." Oh yes they do ! P.E. Islanders love to share tales and there is no shortage of yarns both short and tall to tell. The history of this tiny island is replete with strange occurrences and each seems to spawn one or more explanations to account for them. Ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night are commonplace in this lore. The stranger the actual events the more detailed the often supernatural story around it. Some of these tales go back centuries. Loss and gain, treasure, triumph, disaster, birth, life and death all feature prominently. Not many who live here doubt the existence of spirits and ' haunts' , nor the places they can be found. Forerunners, omens of all kinds, even Satan himself often show up in these accounts.
I have lived here too long to dismiss all these tales as fiction, nor the beliefs that they encompass. I know too many perfectly sober honest people who have had ' strange ' experiences to doubt the veracity of what they say happened.
This series contains a variety of such tales I gleaned from several Island folklore books, old newspaper articles, a few first-person accounts and even an on-line site or two. None are original to me and I certainly wish to thank all those who gathered the stories. I have tried to place the caches in the communities and, if possible, on or close to the exact sites of the described events. For some of these stories you would NOT find me at the exact site late at night. Not a chance. I hope you enjoy both the story and the going to where it happened !
# 1 : The Phantom Train
The Phantom train story is a particularly sad and startling account. It begins with a skating party on the pond at Barlows Mill on December 6, 1885. It was a cold but exciting day as preparations in the Mill house for the wedding of Janet Crosby, the millers daughter to the dashing Hilbert Coates were in full swing. The skating party was close by as young people skated and raced. This is where the tragedy happened as a young boy skated too close to the flume, fell through the thin ice there and drowned. His body was retrieved and sadly brought to the Mill house, stilling all the celebrations there . The company sat, as was the custom in those days , with the body late into the night. Around midnight the quiet was shattered with the whistle of a train in the distance. All wondered what train could be running on that line at that time of night, which was not the usual schedule. The train came closer until the whistle sounded again a half mile down the track.. then the train rounded the last curve and the bell and bright single light could be heard and seen by those in the adjacent Mill house who had run to the windows. The light flashed over the mourners and wedding guests as the train thundered past and disappeared around the curve a hundred yards down the track. Some said later they had seen people in the cars as it flashed past. One wedding guest there that night was a railroad section man who had used a trolley to get to the site. As the train approached he and two other men had run down the tracks to remove the trolley from the tracks a couple hundred yards past the corner where the train went out of sight at the Mill house. They related how as the train was approaching them, they stepped out of its path only to see it melt away and disappear right before their eyes. Inquiries in Summerside revealed that NO train had been sent out nor would there have been any train on those tracks that night!
This story is unlike some in this series in that a LOT of people saw and heard the train that night.... What was it? who knows? Perhaps come to collect the soul of the departed boy? The cache is located a few meters into the woods, just off the old railbed, and just before the curve where the phantom train went out of the Mill House guests sight and vanished before the three mens' eyes.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
5- 6 - hc fznyyvfu rireterra
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