The Ghost Train of Perdition: a Western Ghost Story

The rails of the damned run deep through the American West.New Mexico Territory, 1882. Pinkerton detective Silas Quinn arrives in the remote town of Perdition Gulch following desperate telegrams about mysterious disappearances. What he finds is a community paralyzed by fear, where the mere mention of the abandoned Silver Vein Railroad sends grown men pale.Eleven people have vanished in three months. No bodies. No ransom demands. Just footprints leading to rusted tracks that haven’t seen a train in over two decades—and scorch marks that stay warm long after the desert sun sets.The truth is more terrifying than any conventional crime: a ghost train rides these rails, bound by an Apache curse cast in vengeance for the massacres committed during the railroad’s construction. Every night, its mournful whistle calls the living to board, adding them to the cargo of souls trapped in an eternal moment of dying.Engineer Thaddeus Cain, once a mass murderer, now pilots the train forever—frozen between guilt and oblivion, collecting passengers to pay a debt of two hundred souls. The curse is both punishment and prison, justice twisted into eternal torment.Silas must do the impossible: board the ghost train, survive its supernatural pull, and find a way to break a curse forged from blood and grief. With the help of a grieving widow, a drunk telegraph operator, a frontier historian, and an Apache spiritual guide, he’ll discover that silver rails and ancient ceremonies might offer salvation—but only if he can face his own buried grief over a brother lost to the rails years before.Rich in historical detail and supernatural dread, The Ghost Train of Perdition is a haunting tale of redemption, where breaking a curse means acknowledging the sins of the past—and learning when justice must yield to mercy.