GHOST TRAIN AT HOLYROOD STREET

No train has run from the Isle of Wight's main town, Newport for some 40 years, so when Kay Liggens of Freshwater, caught a glimpse of an old locomotive with three carriages, steaming towards the town of Cowes, it was a ghost-train she was seeing. She explained, "It was only there for a few seconds. It seemed to be crossing an old brick viaduct near where the Newport to Cowes road is now. I heard nothing at all; the train was totally silent. It was as if it was in mid-air above me. I saw the steam train and two or three carriages but it was all so quick that I could hardly believe it." Kay and her husband had been walking down Holyrood Street one lunch-time and were standing by the brewery depot when she saw the apparition. "I just stood there, open-mouthed. I asked Roger when the last steam trains ran in Newport." 'Not since the 1960's," he replied. It was then Kay knew for certain, she had just glimpsed something which reason told her was impossible. A ghost-train.

Take your cursor to the start position, and using your non-dominant hand,
follow the track all the way round in as short a time as possible. Do not
go off the track or you will upset the spirits!!

GHOST-TRAINS IN THE NIGHT

When you live in a house which backs onto a railway line you quickly get used to the noise of trains passing day and night, the sound of braking, shunting and whistles. But when Margaret Eldridge moved into a semi-detached house in Gordon Road, Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, which had the Cowes-Newport railway line at the bottom of her garden, she was astonished to hear the sound of the trains running through the old tunnel.... for the line had closed more some 40 years earlier. Margaret and her children moved there in 1986. For six years they lived quite happily in the Victorian house, apart from the odd noises in the early hours of the morning. "I thought I was dreaming the first time it happened. There were the muffled sounds of a steam train and shunting noises coming from the back garden where the track used to run. I could not see anything, I would just hear them approaching the station and pulling away again. There was the sound of wheels on the track, of engines and rolling stock being uncoupled, and the hiss of the steam engines. "The train noises usually happened very late at night or early in the morning when the town was otherwise very quiet. My children never heard anything, they just laughed at me when I told them I had heard the sounds again," Margaret said ruefully. "They thought I was imagining things or making it up. I know I wasn't and I did hear those ghost trains in the night."

The remains of Old Cowes Station