The Ghost of Methane Past

When I was a kid, we were told never to go near the railroad tracks in the town of Waverly, Virginia because there was a ghost who would run after you. He was a black man, so they said, who had tripped on the tracks and got his head cut off by an oncoming train. Now he walked along the tracks with a lantern, looking for his head.

Was this true? I have no idea. These stories are supposed to discourage children from going near the railroad tracks and it worked for me.  I was too terrified to check out the ghost, though numerous high school boys claimed to have gone out there late at night and looked for the unfortunate man. Some swore to have spotted the him with his lantern.

My daddy said, "It's methane gas, baby."

So I said, "What is methane gas, Daddy?"

His explanation involved decaying leaves and tree limbs, stagnant water and bacteria.  It glows, he said. I wasn't sure I understood how that phenomenon could appear to be a headless black man with a lantern.

So let's move forward to a night when I was in high school myself, and up to mischief with my friends in Homeville. We had avoided a broken leg in the local abandoned houses on previous outings. We were in the country, so we couldn't really go look for the black man without a head, as he was situated in Waverly.

But, I reasoned to my friends, if it was methane gas, caused by the miasma of swamp water and decay, there was plenty of that (if not more) right here in hour little village. We also had an abandoned railroad bed, which, on the whole is much safer than a track that is still in use where we might ourselves become headless ghosts. We parked near a dark stretch of pine forest, loaded up on mosquito repellant and took a weedy path back to the raised railroad bed. We had flashlights. It was very dark, and the call of crickets was loud and persistent.

I remember that I loved the idea of an old railroad bed. The past had always seemed so close to me during my childhood in Homeville. I was aware, since I lived in an old house, that many lives went before mine. I felt these people from the past, like they wanted to talk to me, or come through the veil that separated us and explain what had gone one.

That sense was strong near this old track -- it was a place where a whole business had come and gone. A train that took passengers and goods right by this very spot and then, one day, it was cut off, went out of business and disappeared. There must be ghosts looming here whether they had connected with any methane gas or not...

...And, sure enough, after about five minutes of breathing and listening to noises in the forest, a boy shouted, "There. I see it."

"Where?" The rest of us were looking back and forth, trying to see the "it."

"Down there," he said as he tried to turn us in the direction of the crescent moon over a particularly thick patch of pine. I squinted. My best girlfriend screamed. Everybody started running back to the car. I stayed, only for a few brave seconds, but I did see a light in the trees, a glow down low to the ground, bluish green in color. Not a lantern, not a man, black or white, but a distinct glow -- and then I screamed and joined my friends hurrying through the weeds to the two lane blacktop and home, where I rehearsed my story for school in the fall.

So...was it methane gas...a ghost...another group of kids looking for the headless man of Homeville? I will never really know. Maybe it wasn't even there at all, and I imagined it.

That's why, for me, things are still mysterious in New Mexico....(even if they happened years ago in Homeville).