Among Hertfordshire's ghost stories, the account of the Hatfield railway ghost stands out for combining a genuinely eerie apparition with a specifically protective outcome, a rescue rather than simply a fright. According to the account, a driver on the Great Northern railway line, travelling at full speed toward Hitchin sometime in the late nineteenth century, felt a figure step onto the footplate of his moving train, a considerably more alarming proposition given the speed and the physical impossibility of anyone actually boarding a train under those conditions.
The driver later described the figure in unusually vivid terms for an account of this age, dressed entirely in black, with, in his own words recorded by whoever first collected the story, the saddest face I ever come across, and eyes that seemed to look you through and through, a description with real literary force that has helped the story survive in a way many thinner Hertfordshire ghost accounts have not. His fireman, working alongside him on the same footplate, reported seeing nothing at all, leaving the sighting as the driver's alone. The figure indicated, apparently without speaking, that the driver should bring the train to a stop, and the driver, compelled by the encounter, obeyed.
The train came to a halt just outside Hitchin station. It was only afterward that the driver discovered the real reason for the timely stop: despite the signals along that stretch having been set fair, giving no official indication of any obstruction, two trucks were sitting unseen on the line just ahead of where the train had halted. Had the ghostly warning not come, and had the driver not heeded it, the train would in all likelihood have crashed directly into them. Whatever explanation is preferred, whether a genuine paranormal warning, a half-glimpsed hallucination born of fatigue that happened to coincide with a lucky, instinctive early stop, or simple embellishment added after the fact to a mundane near miss, the story endures as one of the more dramatic and specifically consequential ghost accounts associated with the county's railways.
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