The Downingtown Twin Tunnels are
a place of fascination, with loads of spooky stories associated with
them.Quite honestly , I had never considered that there
was any truth to the stories.Teenagers pass them along to scare each
other.
One Friday night, Chuck
suggested that we traipse out to the tunnels to see what was up.It was a little embarrassing, since we were
the only people over 30 in the tunnels.You have to ride back and forth again and
again, stopping briefly in the center to try to do EVP work, because
they’re so busy.
One of the oldest stories is of a
woman who was despairing over having a child out of wedlock.She climbed up on the hill and hanged
herself, holding the baby.As she died, she dropped the baby, and it
rolled down the hill and died.The story is that if you stop in the middle
of the tunnel and flash your lights, you can see the spooks of the
mother and child standing in front of you, and you can hear the baby
crying.We find this story a little hard to believe.Unless you’re in Cirque du Soleil, the
ability to hang yourself while holding a baby is a little hard to
swallow.
There's also supposed to be the ghost of
a man who hanged himself by throwing a rope over the wire that crosses over the
tunnels.This is also a high commitment procedure that seems a
little more difficult than suicide needs to be, but who knows what drove him.
You’re supposed to be able to hear his
feet scraping the top of your car, and tapping on the windows.Poppycock, we thought.So we were parked in the middle of the tunnel, and I
swear that right next to my ear, someone tapped on the car window 3 times.I tried to convince myself that it was water
dripping on the roof, but it wasn’t a sound from the roof – it was fingernails
tapping on the window.I thought maybe Chuck had made the noise, but I
turned back, and he had both arms out the window, holding an EMF detector and a
digital recorder out the window in the traditional ghost hunting position.Chuck is not a Cirque du Soleil performer, so he
didn’t have any way to tap on my window.
At another point, we were parked in the
center of the tunnels, and we clearly heard a woman singing.It was just a hum, but it was loud enough for all of
us to hear it.
We had our recorders going, but in
Pennsylvania, we appear to feed our atomic waste to crickets.The mutant six foot atomic crickets were so loud
that they drowned out the tapping and singing.We plan to go back in the winter when they’re dead.
The most famous
is the "Suitcase
Jane Doe" murder in the
1990s when a suitcase filled with body parts was found outside one of the
tunnels.Locals suspect a motorcycle gang was responsible, but no
one has ever been charged in the case.Inside the tunnel, there was to be a graffiti of a
suitcase with an arm hanging down, pointing to where Jane Doe's suitcase was
found. "Help Me" was spray painted beside the picture, although it’s no longer
there.Some people have reported hearing “Help me!” echoing
through the tunnels.
The first EVP we got was early in the
hunt.It was our second pass through the tunnels.Just as we started in, we caught a disembodied voice
whispering what sounds like, “Mary.”
The last story is a simple historical
fact.When they were building the tunnels, safety precautions
were expensive, and immigrant labor was cheap.A number of workers died in the process of building
the tunnels.
On our last time through the tunnels, we
stopped in the middle, and I shouted, “This is our last time through the
tunnels!If you want to tell me something, you have to do it now!That’s when we caught the EVP that sound like “I
died while rocks fell.”I think that we caught the disembodied voice of one
of the unfortunate immigrant workers who died during construction.
There are older urban legends of a
keeper, guardian, and hounds being spotted there, gargantuan protectors of the
tunnels.These stories have been lost to time as the more modern
ghost stories have gained traction.
The most compelling evidence that
something weird is going on in the tunnels is the lack of evidence rather than
what is there.As you face the front of the tunnels, there are
three arches.The leftmost arch is for a tunnel with a stream running
through it.The middle tunnel goes all the way through, and it’s
completely dry.The third is the one that you drive through, with
another tunnel halfway through, with a small gap in between.Those are the twin tunnels.
The creepiest of the tunnels is the
middle one that has a dirt floor and runs all the way through.If you were a teenager who wanted to do bad things
away from the eyes of adults, that’s where you’d hang out.
There’s one graffiti about 10 feet in.Other than that, the tunnel is completely clean.There’s not a beer bottle, not a candy wrapper, not
a bit of graffiti.Even kids who push the limits and buck authority
find the place too creepy to use it as their bat cave.
Based on all of our experiences there,
photographic, audio, and sensory, there is something going on in the tunnels.Urban legends don’t survive for such a long time
without being based on some sort of truth.We’re planning to go back, once the giant mutant
crickets are silenced.
