It’s a foggy night on the Little Miami trail, and you’ve just crossed the bridge across the river at Miamiville, heading north. Something’s moving ahead—a human shape, fuzzy in the swirling mist. A light swings at his side. And then he’s gone.
On the morning of July 14, 1863, a passenger train transporting 115 new Union Army recruits to Camp Dennison, heads south toward Miamiville. Suddenly shots blast through the countryside, and the train picks up speed, entering a section of track called the Dangerous Curve. No one on the train sees what is around the bend: Two thousand Confederate Morgan’s Raiders, crouching in a cornfield, watching to see the results of their early morning handiwork.
Rounding the curve at full speed, the train roars into a blockade of railroad ties the Raiders had wedged into a cattle gap on the tracks. The locomotive derails, and a coupler breaks, leaving the passenger cars on the track. The Confederate soldiers rush in, taking the passengers hostage and setting the train on fire. None of the new recruits is seriously hurt, but the locomotive engineer is badly injured, and one man—Cornelius Conway, the train’s fireman—is dead.
A boy walking home along the tracks on a foggy night in 1905 sees a man walking about 20 yards ahead, swinging a lantern. “It’s the ghost of Cornelius Conway,” says his father, when the boy tells of the mysterious figure. “He’s warning travelers of the fog that hinders their view ahead.” In 1932, the engineer on a late-night train out of Cincinnati sees someone walking the tracks, blows the whistle and stops the train. But he finds no one there. In later years, people fishing the river on foggy nights report seeing a figure on the trail holding a lantern as though to warn them of something.
This Halloween season, if you encounter a ghostly figure near Miamiville on a foggy evening, you need not fear. It’s only Cornelius Conway, holding a light so you won’t run into trouble.
Information for this article comes from the Miamiville Historical Marker along the trail just north of Beechmont Avenue; Richard Crawford, both on the Clermont County Historical Society website and in "The Trainman's Ghost Still Walks the Line" from his booklet Uneasy Spirits. Top photo from the Miamiville Historical Marker. Photo at left from Uneasy Spirits.
Article by Janet Slater
October 2023
