The Ghost Train

One of the best plays I’ve seen at the Theatre Royal in Norwich was Arnold Ridley’s ‘The Ghost Train’, a stage comedy-thriller, written in 1923, set in a remote rural station, where railway passengers have been stranded overnight. The station master tries to persuade them to leave so he can lock up for the night, but they insist on staying as they are too far from a hotel or guest house, despite being warned about the ghost of a passenger train wreck several years previously. He tells them that it haunts the line at night, bringing death to all who see it. The play develops into a spy adventure, when it is revealed that the ghost train is real and is being used by communist revolutionaries to smuggle machine guns from the Soviet Union into England. The ghost train has been concocted to scare potential witnesses.

What gripped me was the idea of a ghost train, of getting on and travelling into the supernatural realm, specifically at Halloween, which is why my husband and I went on the Halloween Express steam train one year, and listened to ghost stories with a host of passengers wearing amazing costumes, We even stopped off at a ‘haunted railway station’. Back in 2015, I posted a piece of flash fiction about a ghost train, which you can read here.

ghostly whistle blows
emerging from a tunnel
an empty carriage

Kim M. Russell, 27th October 2025

This Monday at the dVerse Poets Pub we are writing Halloween haibun with Frank.

He reminds us that the veil between the physical and spiritual realm thins during this time of year, as the ancient Celts believed, and they celebrated Samhain, a harvest and new year celebration. He says, “Confident that the spirits of the dead would return to visit the living, they prepared feasts for them’ and in order to avoid malicious spirits, they took to disguising themselves as spirits, from which trick-or-treating and costume-wearing evolved.

Frank also touches on the Christian celebration of All Hallows Eve, the night before All Hallows or All Saint’s Day, sometimes known as the Christian Days of the Dead.

He has shared haibun, haiku and poems inspired by Halloween from Martin Gottliev Cohen, Srinivas S and Edgar Allan Poe. To inspire us to celebrate this Halloween with our own haibun of horror.

31 thoughts on “The Ghost Train”

    1. Cheers Willy. We recently went to Four Ghost Stories by Candlelight, and a dramatization of Agathe Christie’s And Then There Were None. We’re lucky to have quite a few theatre’s in Norfolk. Can’t wait for the next one.

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    1. I love the theatre. We’ve seen two plays recently, with another in November. The Halloween Express was brilliant, but for adults only, so with the grandsons we’re doing something aimed at children this year.

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    1. I would have liked to do it again this year, but my daughter is coming up with her husband and the grandsons, and they are too young for the Halloween Express.

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