The Haunted Telegraph Tower

A classic horror film formula in three easy steps:

1. A small group of men arrive at an eerie, isolated location.

2. The first thing that greets them is a corpse.

3. Then, strange and frightening things begin to happen…

Such is the situation we will discuss this week.  However, in this case, the plot was from real life, not a Hollywood set.

While telegraph towers were seldom noted for their beauty and cheery atmosphere, the station that once operated in Dale, Georgia, was a standout for its dismal atmosphere.  The nearest habitation was a quarter-mile away.  The tower was, in fact, all there was of Dale, and was surrounded by nothing but an extensive pine forest.  It was only used during the tourist season, between January and April.  The rest of the year, it stood empty, in a silence only broken by the occasional passing of a train.

In short, Dale tower was a place that seemed designed for trouble, and the little building certainly came through.  One day, right in front of the tower, an unknown man was fatally struck by a train.  He was buried near where he had fallen.  After this tragedy, train crews began noticing that strange and ominous things would happen when they passed Dale tower.  The brakemen would hear odd noises around the switch.  The enginemen would find their trains mysteriously uncoupled.  And then came the January morning when the telegraph workers arrived at the tower to kick off the tourist season…and found a long-dead body inside.  It was assumed he was a tramp who sought shelter in the tower, only to die a very lonely death there.  The man (who, like the first casualty, was fated to remain unidentified,) was also laid to rest next to the tower.  Small wonder that it soon got to the point where railwaymen dreaded having to pass the place, and very few had the courage to actually enter the tower.

On January 4, 1911, three men, E.A. Bright, R.L. Davis, and J.H. Clark arrived at Dale tower to begin their season’s work.  For the next three months, the tower would be not just their workplace, but their residence.  (It seems hardly fitting to call such a sinister little dump a “home.”)  The tower consisted of two small rooms, one over the other, with a trap-door closing the stairs leading to the upper room.  It is unrecorded if the three men were aware of the tower’s evil reputation.  If they were not, they would soon learn about it the hard way.

The first odd thing they noticed was that it was impossible to keep the trap-door shut, no matter how tightly they fastened it.  The moment their backs were turned, it would fly open.  They finally nailed the door shut.  Same result.  An iron bar was placed across it.  No luck.

Then, the men began hearing the sound of footsteps on the stairs.  Before their eyes, window sashes would be slowly raised and lowered by invisible hands.  Various items such as cans, lanterns, and pans would drift through the air on their own accord.  A can opener flew about with such fierceness that it fastened itself on the ceiling.  One day, objects were tossing themselves inside the tower with such mania that the men grew frightened for their safety, and fled outside.  As if in response, a chair was hurled out the upper window, narrowly missing Davis.

Understandably enough, the men began to feel that this job was definitely above their pay grade.  Bright twice walked the seven miles to Savannah with the intention of quitting, but on both occasions, he realized he didn’t have the nerve to try explaining that he was being chased out of his job by a ghost, so he returned to the tower.

The three men, desperate for the whatever-it-was to just leave them in peace, decided that perhaps their deck of playing cards was inciting all the trouble.  They tossed it out the window.  Immediately afterward, the cards were found in a bag of rice.  The case which had held the cards was in a tightly closed canister of coffee.

Thomas Hart Raines, who wrote about the case in the May 1911 “Occult Review,” related that the men finally resorted to burning a large amount of sulfur inside the tower.  (The trio obviously felt--not without some justification--that Satan himself was after them.)  Curiously enough, that may have satisfied whatever grim spirit was haunting the tower.  The men told Raines that after this little ritual, the mysterious phenomena troubled them no more.