Adavoyle station, on the Dundalk to Newry line, opened in 1892 and closed to passengers in 1933, though trains still pass. In June 1921 a military train carrying cavalry and their horses was attacked and derailed near the station. Soldiers and a railway guard were killed, and a large number of horses died or had to be destroyed and were buried near the line. Local sources link the later stories to that day.
A Wikipedia article on Jonesborough records that for many years gatemen saw the lights of a train heading south, opened the gates to let it through, and found no train. Armagh I repeats this, and Spirited Isle adds more: farmers hearing brakes screech and timber splinter at night and finding nothing, phantom whistles and rumbling around the anniversary, and the faint whinnying of horses on certain nights.
Spirited Isle also tells a story dated to the 1970s. A stationmaster at Dundalk was woken by word that an army patrol had seen a fast train heading north on the Adavoyle line, with no service scheduled and another train waiting in Dundalk. The patrol said it was hauled by a steam locomotive, long obsolete by then. An alert went out but no train appeared. The stationmaster is said to have concluded it was the ghost train of Adavoyle. No official record of the alert has been found.
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