A Bit Bookish

One of the first ghost stories I ever heard/read was about the Maco Station Apparition. The following is a mixture of my own memory of the story and a bit copied from this book I found at work.

Joe Baldwin was a railroad conductor who worked the Wilmington-Florence-Augusta line (Wilmington is my hometown!). One night in 1867, he was standing in the caboose, his train heading home to Wilmington. As the train approached the little Maco Station (about an hour from Wilmington by car), Joe felt it slowing down. He knew something had to be wrong because there was no stop scheduled there. It was then that he realized the rear coach and caboose had come uncoupled from the rest of the train and were slowing to a halt. Moments later, a second train came roaring down the track. The engineer of the second train had no idea the cars were stopped- it would have been impossible to tell until it was too late. 
According to some versions of the story, Joe raced along the coach urging passengers to jump out as he headed to the rear platform to warn the oncoming train of his loose cars. He grabbed a signal lantern and waved it repeatedly from the platform, but the second train couldn't stop. Joe kept waving the light, doing his best to save the passengers and his train until the moment the train slammed into the stopped cars. In an instant the cars were destroyed and Joe was decapitated. His lantern flew into the swamp by the tracks but his head was never found; it's a matter of public record- Joe Baldwin was buried headless. 

Not long after the crash, people began saying they'd seen mysterious lights along the tracks. Usually they reported a white light that looked like a swinging signal lantern moving up and down the tracks at Maco Station. It appeared so often that train engineers on the route starting using red and green signal lights so their signals wouldn't be confused with the phantom white light.

The story goes that it's Joe Baldwin, searching the tracks and the surrounding swamps for his lost head.