Mysterious History: Lincoln’s Ghost Train
Mysterious History: Lincoln’s Ghost Train Every April The Train Ghosts Through Albany Following Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, two coffins—one containing the president’s body and the other bearing the exhumed remains of his young son, Willie, who had died in the White House—were placed on a train pulled by a steam locomotive for transport back to the Lincolns’ home state of Illinois, where they would be buried. All along the route from Washington to Illinois, people lined the tracks to bid farewell to the president who had fought and won the Civil War. The funeral train was made up of nine cars. The ninth car, which had been built to take the living president and his family on rail trips, was the one in which Lincoln and Willie were carried. The train’s route passed through Albany, New York, and for a number of years afterward, around the anniversary of Lincoln’s final journey, Albany-area railroad men reported seeing a phantom version of the funeral train traveling ...