Jason Cochran - Here Lies America: Buried Agendas & Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went

It starts, as all stories do, with what we dont know yet. I wasnt there, and neither were you, but you should trust me that this is how it happened.

In rural west South Carolina, near a town that isnt there anymore, in the middle of the night, a faraway train approaches on tracks laid through a deep gash in the fields. It is February, between 2:30 and 3:00 in the morning. Stand on the rails and wait for history to happen. The churn of the locomotive grows louder and more insistent, nine minutes late through the farmland.

As it approaches, you discern more. The distant chug becomes layered with a steam hiss, and beneath that, the arrhythmic creak of carriages in tow. The peace of the farmhouses in slumber now bellows with industry as the grinding of the train assumes control over the landscape. And then, at 2:47, in a time and place that all people have forgotten, you see the headlight of the locomotive as it rounds the bend and into your sight. The rails shine in the light, the steam billows proudly in the air, and as it gains speed, you can barely make out the engine number: 1233.

But then it tips. The headlight beam unexpectedly slouches against the embankment, spotlighting weeds, and before you understand whats happening, the locomotive is somersaulting sideways. Metal screams, steam plumes gush in every direction, and a burst nest of scattered sparks casts crazy fleeting shadows over land that only one second ago was silent and dark. Rails jump from their beds and flutter in the air like charmed snakes. Through the cacophonous molten flicker, you can see the trailing carriages tipping, too, collapsing behind in strobe, window glass twinkling as it shatters. The tumbling kaleidoscope of machinery drags a scar through the earth for twenty, thirty, forty feet, spitting steam and sizzling water, before finally halting, just short of you, under its own dead, groaning weight.

The jumbled train curls like a felled beast, steam deafeningly blasting from somewhere within its tangled guts. It curls, as if pausing to calculate how to spring forward into an escape. A moment passes, with no sign of movement except clouds of gas. But then, a human stirring. An arm appears in a blackened depression that you now realize was a window of the locomotive cab. Then another arm, joined by a head, joined by a man. He is dragging himself out of the wreckage, wheezing, gasping. You cannot see him well, but you think he might be somehow unbroken, because he is crawling.

His movements are painstaking and erratic, first in one direction, then another, perhaps disoriented, but moving insistently toward the embankment. And now you hear other voices, too, from the rear of the train, both male and female calling out to each other. Some are sobbing. Signs of life increase, and another body drops from the crushed locomotive window, slower than the first one, tentative with effort, pausing too often to pull itself from the hot spattering cloud.

The first man has found the bottom slope of the embankment, but now he doesnt seem able to stand. Instead, he is laboriously trying to clamber up. His shoes cant secure a grip, and stones roll from his failing grasp as he feebly leans into the hill. In the dark, in the distance, he disappears against the earth, but you can hear his ghastly struggle for breath.

It was set, he gasps.

A long time passes. Its hard to know how long, but long enough for reality to set in. This wreck really just happened. Passengers in their nightclothes are coming from the rear of the train now, picking their way around debris to view the mangled condition of the locomotive. There is more sobbing, some embraces, the dusting off of clothing, the inspection of light wounds. The hissing has subsided, and now the cooling metal clicks and pongs in aftereffect. And then someone cries out that someone is over there, Look, on the embankment!

A man shouts out and three human shapes rush away from the wreckage and halfway up the slope to meet him. Its the engineer! cries a voice. Sir, were here.

A man bends down to help him. He looks in the engineers face. He freezes.

Oh, dear God, he says.

That was the main event, but its also how it started, in 1909.

Heres how it goes now.

Its slightly over a century later. Like the train, Im also in rural South Carolina, on the cusp of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I am whole and standing, and its daytime. I need to find the place where the wreck happened. Im on a half - overgrown gravel road with logs slung across it, well past the signs that plainly informed me that I was in a position to get shot if I was discovered. Although my story went through this place in 1909, Im a city boy now, so I instinctively locked my rented Nissan Versa when I left it, even though there isnt a soul in this empty wilderness, only kudzu and grinding insects. Whoever hung that sign has a shotgun loaded because theyre probably just as gripped by baseless fears, and thats all it takes to end everything. Step by step, tempting the wrath of my countryman, I push into denser greenery, the shifting rocks giving me away to my murderer with every inch gained.

But this road is the road, I think. Ive studied the satellite images, Ive pored over maps from the era, Ive worked against the laws of entropy in archival materials to locate the few source materials that anyone cared to preserve. This was always an ignored backwoods, even in its unnoticed heyday. The eras newspapers said the crash happened at a bend in the railway at a flag stop at Harbins, which, based on a hand - drawn map Id found, seemed to correspond with a crossing at the modern - day Idlewild Drive. This blocked gravel road hasnt even merited pavement in the one hundred years since that map, but if Im right, it leads on for a few hundred yards, I surmise, and then it crosses the old railroad on a wooden bridge. Within sight of that bridge, Ill find the bend where the No. 1233 crumpled right by the whistle stop. Thats no longer there. As long as I could spot it based on its no longer being there. And as long as nothing has changed. Or so I think.

I spent the early afternoon trying other roads that I triumphantly concluded were also about to lead me there before they would veer into other directions, routed in antiquity around homesteads that no longer existed. I went down six or eight failed roads like this, miles from town, the only driver, perhaps ever, to slowly cruise suspiciously in an economy car past the occasional sullen houses with their rusting railings and shifting curtains.

So this road, the last of my options, has to be the road, Idlewild Drive. When the train crashed, in 1909, it was probably rutted with farm carts that shuttled down to the railway to pick up supplies. This place was rolling farmland where electricity wasnt a guarantee and where the approaching whistle meant the mail, your only proof of the world beyond, had arrived.

Societys regard for this corner of America hadnt changed much; my GPS is useless because this corner of South Carolina isnt deemed worthy of mobile service. Now, instead of streaming with sunshine and waving with crops, the land, gone wild with gnarled trees, envelops me in ever - greener darkness the more I dare to move into it. Between the rustles and the sticks, I can almost imagine the ghosts of cows that once wandered this patch, the long - faded calls of farmhands across fields, the clang of a dinner bell that surely lies rusting somewhere under soil.