Oi gents! I wish I thought to take a clean audio clip while no one was there, but I’ll try to paint a picture for y’all cause this was the creepiest shit I have experienced in a long time. So I visited the Old Helensburgh Station, a train tunnel built in the 1880’s and abandoned in 1920, when they rearranged the train line. It was thought to be lost under rubble, but excavated in the last 20 years to find a thriving glowworm community. As I approach the entrance of the tunnel, light and visibility fall off about 15ft in and it smells of rusting sulfur. The ground is mush beneath my feet as I follow the mud tracks deeper into the cave. The echoes of my subtle foot sloshing is accented by water drips, what sounds like the occasional scraping of a man’s cane, and a knocking that I still can’t identify. The knock thumps irregularly. And then stops. I turn back for a brighter flashlight.
The damp cave reminds me of a basilisk labyrinth and I’m fairly certain the thick god-knows-how-deep mud pools along the side of the tunnel contain the remains of some poor sap, swallowed by the muck. I’ve never realized what it’s like to walk into a tunnel with no light at the end. I’m so hyper-focused on each footstep that I forget to look up and when I do spin my head to the graffiti-lined brick walls, the movement is so quick, and visibility so narrow, that I scare myself thinking there’s a pale creature living in the crevasses. There’s not - or at least that I can see. The train tracks are replaced by mounds of mud, rubbed smooth by other hikers and I have to zigzag my way across. The knocking is back.
Spots of ethereal turquoise light appear on the ceiling, which you would think is a relief in the darkness, but it somehow makes it worse. It’s like lifeless Christmas lights. No glint. No twinkle. The path eventually becomes more like a gray-brown cistern and I don’t have waterproof boots, so this is as far as I go. I stand and listen for about half an hour. A few travelers ruin the mood, but it was terrifyingly beautiful. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the worms glow and illuminate the tunnel to form a curved dead night sky with the occasional drip landing near my head.
