Taken from Newsletter Issue 19 - November 2004

Ghostly cars are probably the rarest of all forms of phantom transport, probably because they haven’t really been around for very long. The few ghost cars that have been reported are most likely to have been part of some tragic road accident. Sightings of their ghostly predecessor, the horse and carriage, are much more common. Phantom trains are a very common form of ghost vehicle. Often they appear at the site of a rail disaster, as with the Tay Rail Bridge in Scotland. In 1879 the bridge collapsed in a terrible storm and a train that had been heading along the line plunged into the river below. There were no survivors. Since then several people have claimed to have seen a spectral train travel across the repaired bridge and vanish near the middle. Phantom trains don’t always appear because of rail accidents though. The ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, for example, passes along the route it took in reality, is often seen complete with a skeletal band on one »V of the wagons. It has yet to be established what tune they are playing.

Most ghostly planes are apparitions of aircraft from the world wars. They generally appear over Britain, France and Germany, for obvious reasons. As we have seen, ghosts are often created as a result of some disaster or tragedy and there could have been few planes during the wars that were not mercilessly shot out of the sky. The materialisation of these phantom aircraft are not usually triggered by anything specific but violent storms have been known to set off a few. There is one form of transport that has been in existence far longer than all the vehicles mentioned here. That form of transport is the ship and, as you might expect, the number of ghostly vessels that roam the seas reflects the length of time they have been around for. Examples include the Flying Dutchman, an 18th Century Dutch ship whose captain supposedly incurred the wrath of the devil and the Lady Luvibond, a British ship which was steered onto a sandbank by an insane crewman, killing everyone on board.