Train Wreck!

Did the Ghost of Casey Jones Ride the Rails into a Woman’s Heart?

Keeping Tabs Weekly, Fall 2000

It was almost 4:00 in the morning in late April when the neighbors of Lyndon and Loretta Boedecker heard the roaring sound of a locomotive passing through their small neighborhood in unincorporated Fulton County, Kentucky. Window panes shook. Dogs, roused from their sleep, barked as the train’s piercing whistle broke the foggy night.

But the railroads never ran through that part of the state.

There were no stations, no tracks. 

No trains.

Lyndon Boedecker called the sheriff’s department just after dawn that day in 1992 to report that his wife, Loretta, was gone from their home when he woke up that morning. Her purse, keys, and other personal belongings were left behind in their house, and deputies found no indications that anything out of the ordinary had taken place in the residence.

Just the same, law enforcement suspected Lyndon Boedecker.

Loretta’s friends suspected Casey Jones.

“Hometown Girl”

Casey Jones had grown up in Cayce, Kentucky, not far from where the Boedeckers lived. But he’d done so over a hundred years earlier and had been dead for more than ninety years at the time of Loretta Boedecker’s disappearance. The train he was engineering collided with another train four hours south of Cayce in Vaughan, Mississippi. He died, legends say, with his hand still on the air brake.

“Course, we all knew the story,” Sissy Greer said when interviewed about her best friend Loretta. Both women grew up around Cayce in Fulton County; Greer described them as “hometown girls” who never expected to live life anywhere beyond the county line. 

“Loretta knew the Casey Jones story better than most of us,” Greer said, then laughed. “She had a crush on him, believe
it or not. She thought he was a hero, and a good-looking one at that. She carried this picture of him from a few years before he died, sitting in the cabin of an Illinois Central Railroad locomotive, looking like a legend. When she married Lyndon, everybody—including her—said she was just settling.”

For his part, Lyndon Boedecker said he was never threatened by his wife’s infatuation with the legendary engineer. “I had a crush on one of my sister’s dolls when I was little,” Boedecker admitted. “She looked like a real little girl, I’m telling you. Anyway, I wasn’t too worried about this silly crush thing with Loretta.”

Not, that is, until she took over as a postal carrier for parts of rural Fulton County, and he said she began to suggest she’d seen Casey Jones while she was out on her route.

“She was always a stickler for schedules and deadlines,” Maryann Ford, another of Loretta’s lifelong friends, explained. “But she got a whole lot worse about it when she started delivering mail. And you know, Casey Jones was all about schedules, too, she used to tell us. That’s what got him killed, she said, him trying to be on time. Well, she thought her being the same way was what attracted him to her.”

Other residents of the area, particularly along Loretta’s mail route, described hearing the sounds of a train from time to time, though no trains ever ran through the region before. Locals were unable to trace the exact source of the sound effects, though even state police were eventually brought in to investigate.

“It was Casey,” Sissy Greer said with certainty. “He came a-courting, and Loretta was ready to be courted.”

All Aboard

“She started showing off an antique ring,” Maryann Ford recalled of the week before Loretta disappeared. “It was gold with a little diamond in it. It looked kind of cheap. She called it a ‘betrothal’ ring, but I’d never heard that term before.”

“She didn’t wear it around Lyndon,” Sissy Greer said, confirming the presence of Loretta’s ring. “She knew she couldn’t explain it to him. But she told me a few days before she left that April 30th was the day Casey was coming for her at last. When I laughed, she said, ‘And I’m going, you bet I am.’”

April 30th, 1900, was the date of Casey Jones’s fatal accident.

For four years after that deafening train sound shook the neighborhood, Lyndon Boedecker was the sole person of interest in his wife’s missing person case. She had no life insurance and left no debt, and once the Casey Jones story was dismissed, nothing amiss turned up in the Boedeckers’ private lives. Officials described Boedecker’s reaction to Loretta’s inexplicable disappearance as sincere grief, and with nothing more to go on, they let the case go cold.

To this day, Boedecker has no explanation for what took place. He remains in Fulton County in the same house he shared with Loretta, but he denied he is waiting for her to come home again, despite the rumors around the county. He also denied he had anything to do with the repeated vandalism of a Casey Jones historical marker in Cayce. And he has dismissed paranormal investigators, ghost chasers, and so-called cryptid casters who have sought to solve the mystery. None of them, he said, came with anything “smart” to offer.

“Loretta didn’t run off with some ghost from the nineteenth century who left town when he was seventeen and died three hundred miles away from here,” Boedecker sniffed. “Besides, she was already married to me. It’d be illegal.”