Columnist Leah Keiter talks about why Moonville Tunnel is her favorite haunted spot in Athens and encourages students to see it for themselves.
The fascination Ohio University students and townies alike have with haunted Athens is something I have always been interested in, partly because I’m terrified of all the stories, and partly because it’s another layer of quirk that makes Athens so unique. As promised in my last column, the focus of this week’s will be one of my personal favorite spots in the spooky lineup: the Moonville Tunnel.
When I was a kid in Athens, I (unsuccessfully) played soccer on a travel team, and we would take a bus to the games. Naturally, driving back at night in the dark with nothing to do, conversation often strayed to ghost stories about someone who swore they had seen the stain in The Ridges and, on one particular night, about the weird things that go on in Moonville Tunnel. My coach proceeded to tell us about a time he and his friends visited the tunnel after dark, only to witness the middle of a satanic goat sacrifice, complete with blood paintings on the wall. Needless to say, 12-year-old Leah didn’t sleep that night, and 20-year-old Leah is still terrified of the place.
Moonville is in Vinton County, and in the time when coal mining reigned supreme in the Athens County area, Moonville was a hub of activity, albeit a small one. In addition to being a mining center, Moonville also became an integral part of a busy railroad line that took trips between St. Louis and Washington, D.C. As the town began to collapse and the mining economy tanked, the railroad traffic through Moonville continued to flourish.
The tunnel was right in the center of all that activity, and although as many as 15 trains would pass through a day in the 1970s, the tunnel was never really the safest place on the rails. This is partly because the tunnel is small and dark, and partly because the area around it had become desolate, with a graveyard of most of Moonville’s residents up the hill and only forested area for a few miles around. This alone is enough to make the place creepy — just picture an old tunnel in an abandoned town whose only close landmark of reference is a graveyard with tons of unmarked graves.
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The real ghost stories of Moonville come from the count of about 20 deaths that are said to have happened in the tunnel, which includes everything from train wrecks to drunk residents falling asleep on the tracks. While no one can be absolutely sure which ghost is the one haunting the tunnel, it's widely believed that there is definitely something spooky going on in there. Before I go any further, I want it to be known that I don’t strap on night vision goggles and go trolling around Athens hunting ghosts, but I’ve been to the tunnel both during the day and at night, and it scares me just as much either time.
Whether you go on a horseback ride with friends from Uncle Buck’s, take a guided tour or drive down with friends and see who can last the longest in the tunnel, put it on your list of spots to visit before you leave OU. It will definitely freak you out for some pretty unexplainable reasons, but the forested area surrounding the tunnel is also great for hiking and exploring abandoned Moonville (even the cemetery if you’re feeling bold) is a great way to get some actual context to put with the story of Athens’ mining past.
Leah Keiter is a junior studying journalism. Have you been to the Moonville Tunnel? Email her at lk969912@ohio.edu.
