Season 08 Episode 13: The Tunnel Without End

·32 min·2 clips

Two men walking two miles into the Hoosac Tunnel in 1872 encountered a headless blue figure that stopped within arm's reach and appeared to observe them.

The tunnel demands its price. The story begins with nitroglycerine, an explosive with a blunt promise: faster digging, more broken rock, more tunnel gained. It more than doubled the pace of the work. But heat, shock, and a small human mistake could turn it at once. On March 20th, 1865, that danger caught up with the men inside the Hoosuk. Ringo Kelly lit a charge before Ned Brinkman and Billy Nash had reached the safety bunker. Rock came down immediately. Brinkman and Nash were buried beneath tons of it, while Kelly disappeared into the suspicion that settled almost as fast as the dust. Rumour gave the blast intent. Murder, or something close to it, stuck to his name, though the account does not offer proof beyond the terrible timing. Then came March 30th, 1866. Just over a year later, Kelly's relatively fresh body was reportedly found two miles inside the tunnel, near the place where his colleagues had died. Charles Gibson, the deputy sheriff, is said to have declared that Kelly had been murdered by strangulation. The examination suggested he had been killed the previous night. No culprit was found. So the story handed the answer to the dead, and Brinkman and Nash became the first supposed ghosts of the Hoosuk. More deaths followed. On October 9th, 1869, three miners headed from the eastern entrance toward the nitroglycerine stock. The explosion left one man alive and two bodies too destroyed to bury. Felix and Oswald Le Montagne vanished completely. In this telling, the tunnel is not just a passage through stone. It is a record of speed, danger, and the stories people make when official answers run out.

As heard by us

A tunnel job turns into a ledger of deaths and a ghost story.

The episode tracks a nineteenth century tunnel dig where nitroglycerine, labor, and luck keep colliding, and the work quickly feels less like engineering than a sustained battle with the rock.

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Why you'd press play

For when a tunnel project should feel like progress, but instead feels haunted.

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