Ghost Train?
It all started pleasantly enough. A nice 1994 Summers evening, some proper soapbar hash and a Purple Ohm acid blotter, each.

My pal G and I then started to play Sensible Soccer and listen to NEU!. While I was beginning to soar, he was beginning a whiney freak out episode. He needed fresh orange juice and some pills. Asprin, paracetemol, brufen, whatever. He thought if he took something, it would make his mind work properly again. I wanted him to stop freaking out, and those walls did look a little closer than the last time I looked. So, we had to leave the womb, my room, with all its gifts, music and safety and venture to the fucking BP garage.

Unsteadily, we leave, giggling and loping our way towards the dispensary of sanity.

After an uneventful journey, despite the notorious neighbour, we arrive at. Our destination. An often robbed petrol station in Port Glasgow. I, do not have the composure to enter, and mix with real people. I instead giggle through the window at G, who, clutching his Tropicana, asks for Asprins, or whatever. He can see me pishing myself laughing and is beginning to lose it himself. In an instant he is outside, reality bringers, in hand.

We sit on some stairs and breathe a sigh a relief, and watch the grass, when all of a sudden a white plastic bag blows towards us. I think nothing of it, but G jumps up in terror, and goes to run. He thought the bag was a Pit Bull Terrier. The stupid cunt.

We sit in various swingparks and don't even smoke the packed joint I have rolled and have placed in a TDK tape case. In the final park we are sitting and in a fit of mild paranoia, I hide the case over in some long grass, as we sit on the tyre swings.

We decide to head back to mine and begin the mile or so journey. I suggest we cut through the graveyard, which is much quiter and peaceful than tramping the horrible streets. To acces it, we had to walk up a steep, tree lined roadway. Very, very dark, and the overhanging trees gave the impression of being in a tunnel, with the exit, as such, at the top of the hill. About 2/3 of the way up I see 4 or 5 figures flit silently across the top of the hill. I stop and simply start walking back down the hill, suggesting quietly that G follows.

In all the years of using the graveyard as a shortcut, I have never seen a single soul. So, tonight of all nights was a major freak out. This diversion meant we had to walk along the main road, past the train station etc. The chances of running into real trouble and fear was greatly increased.

As we got back down to the main I could smell burning. A fire perhaps, a housefire? Not sure. As we walk along beside the railway the smell gets stronger. We begin to draw level with the train station, Woodhall, actually. A grimmer station you couldn't imagine. Flanked by run down housing, infamous schemes and general blossoming misery, I see a train in the station.

Weird, its too late for trains, it's 2am. There are no lights on onboard the train. The windows are smashed, it is smoking, it has been on fire. And what are all those holes all along the side of it. We keep walking.

There is nobody about, at all. No Police, no train guys, no, fucking, body, at, all. My mind is racing. Have we somehow entered a Philip K Dick style 'paused' reality. What happened here. It looks as if the train had been strafed by a machine gun, smoke still issued from the broken windows. What the fuck happened? Not a sound. Total silence. Nobody, not even a car to be seen. The silence and foreboding shadowy violence that the train exuded freaked me out

Our minds were racing, as were our legs. We arrived back at mine in quiet shock. As we were P.I (Pre Internet), we could only speculate as to what caused this. Was it a ghost train? Had it been shot to pieces. Was it even real?

Fuck knows, we had no answers...or spliff, I left it in the grass. Fortunately I had some more, but the annoyance of losing the spliff, the flitting characters at the graveyard, the inexplible ruined and silent train and the Ohms and more or less scrambled my brains. It was freaky, creepy and unexplained. A real life, mystery.

Sleep arrived and so did the next day. I raced down first thing in the afternoon for a local paper. The mystery was solved. A Glasgow bound train has stopped at Woodhall and some bored locals threw paving slabs off the station bridge onto the overhead lines. This caused the whole line to become inoperable. The train was stranded at a real life Wild West station, namely Woodhall. The slab throwing locals then decided to run through the train robbing people and setting it on fire. They then picked up stones from the railway tracks and pelted the train, smashing windows and causing the machine gun fire style holes.

The passengers were ferried to safety and the perpetrators ran up into, the cemetery. Yes, the shadowy figures we saw must have been the modern day highwaymen, coming back to look down the hill at the train, just to see what was happening. An explanation was mine, and I felt so relieved. Nothing like a cleansing acid comedown and solving a mystery to freshen the mind.

It still stands as one of the most surreal and unsettling experiences of my life. The fact I was on acid seemed to fit perfectly with the whole script. Truly bizarre.
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Tue 12 Apr 2011, 3:01, 1 reply)

I like this
creepy, completely fucked up and with a proper explanation at the end
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Tue 12 Apr 2011, 10:18, closed)