So mine and Lizzie's real goal in Clinton, MA was finding this abandoned train tunnel. When the Nashua River was dammed off, the original train tracks were flooded, and so this tunnel was built in 1903 for the Central Mass Railroad. At the time, it was the second biggest tunnel in the state, at a whopping .2 miles. Just 50 years later, the tracks had been ripped up, and this tunnel abandoned by the state.
To find the tunnel, we first had to locate the remains of the trestle on Boylston street. Once you found the trestle, you had to climb a small hill to where the tunnel's mouth sits, and at the top, you could see the headless trunks of rest of the trestle sunk into the reservoir on the other side of the street.
We hadn't originally planned to walk its entirety, but when we could easily see the, well, light at the end of the tunnel, we decided to pass all the way through, though we knew the tunnel was supposedly haunted, and that a young girl had been found dead here 40 years ago. After all, it was early afternoon, and we had hours of light left, and the tunnel was so short.
Time seemed to slow down once we passed through the tunnel's wide mouth. The cold granite around us dripped eerily, and the .2 miles stretched on, and on, and on. Lizzie and I joked that at this point, we were more concerned with the living--if there were people hiding in the dark corners, behind the crumbling concrete. We walked on, and on, and on, joking with each other until we finally hit the opposite end. Time returned to its normal pace. We laughed about how creeped out we'd been.
But we had to go back through to get out. Had hours passed? We reentered the tunnel, following the non-existent tracks back (though somehow, they've appeared in this picture--the ground is rocky, full of crumbling stones, but there are no actual tracks), toward the eerie light, through the dripping ceiling, shivering as the ambient temperature dropped degree after degree. When we got to the center of the tunnel, it was so cold that we could see our breath--it hadn't felt like that on the initial pass. Noses running, hands freezing up like they do after a first, damp, snow, we stopped for a minute, feeling a strange thrumming in our chests, as if an actual train were passing by. We heard the low rumbling, thum-thum-thum-thum, and nervously mumbled about the magic of physics before picking up the pace. Again, the compact tunnel somehow stretched on for miles in both directions--we'd look back at the exit behind us, to the exit in front of us, both light, and beckoning, and still felt trapped in a never-ending purgatory of freezing darkness, with the bass of a passing train vibrating around us. Our echoing footsteps seemed to be in vain, as the exit's light loomed in front of us, somehow staying the same distance away as we moved in what we thought was a forward direction.
But we made it out. The feeling slowly returned to our fingers. The tips of our noses warmed back up in the fall sunlight. We joked about returning sometime at night, but neither of us are ready to board that ghost train quite yet...
