The Clay District’s Last Bus

The town of Ridgecrest sat in a narrow valley, its red-clay hills crumbling into the streets after every hard rain. The old mining road, now mostly forgotten, wound up through those hills, passing through three old railway tunnels that had been converted for cars decades ago. Locals called them the Clay Tunnels, and they had their own story, a story that felt older and stranger than the one about the school bus in Colorado.

According to the old-timers, back in the 1950s, a bus full of elementary school children from the doomed St. Agatha’s Orphanage had been on a picnic up at the old lookout when a sudden storm caused a landslide. The third tunnel, the one closest to the peak, collapsed right on top of them. The town records show no such accident, but there is a sealed, rusted grate at the mouth of the third tunnel, and sometimes, when the wind is just right, you can hear the faint hum of an old engine and the sound of children singing.

The second tunnel, a hundred yards below, is where the strange things happen. The myth goes that if you drive up there at night, park inside the second tunnel, kill your engine, and put the car in neutral, you’ll feel something push you out, up the hill, past the collapsed third tunnel, and onto the old lookout. And when you get home, you’ll find tiny handprints pressed into the red dust on your trunk, as if the children tried to climb in and hold on.

I thought it was all nonsense, a story the old-timers told to scare teenagers away from their drinking spots. But one night, after a fight with my girlfriend, I drove up there alone, just to clear my head. The road was rutted and dark, the red clay slick from the evening rain. The tunnel mouth loomed ahead, a black gap in the hillside.

I pulled my ’65 pickup into the second tunnel, the headlights carving a weak cone through the darkness. The air was cold and damp, and the smell of wet iron and old coal filled the cab. I turned off the engine and the lights, and the silence was absolute, except for the drip of water somewhere deeper in the tunnel.

I sat there for a minute, my hands on the wheel, waiting. Nothing. I was about to turn the key and leave when the car shifted. A gentle nudge, like someone had put a hand on the bumper and pushed. The car rolled forward, slowly, out of the tunnel, into the dark night. I didn’t touch the brake. I let it roll, up the hill, past the third tunnel’s collapsed mouth, all the way to the flat expanse of the old lookout. There, under the moonless sky, the car stopped.

I got out, my legs shaky. The air was cold, and the only sound was the wind hissing through the dead grass. Then I saw them. Tiny lights, like fireflies, dancing at the edge of the cliff. As I watched, they flickered and went out. On the wind, I could have sworn I heard a child’s laugh.

I drove home fast, my hands white on the wheel. When I pulled into my driveway, the porch light was on, and the red dust on my trunk caught the light. I walked around the back of the truck. There, pressed into the film of dust, were a dozen small handprints, no bigger than a child’s. They were clustered around the handle of the tailgate, as if they had tried to hold on, but the truck had left them behind.

The next morning, I drove back to the tunnels. The third tunnel’s mouth was blocked by a massive steel door, but the door had been pulled open, the hinges screaming in protest. Inside, I saw the faint silhouette of a bus, half-buried in rocks and dirt, its windows shattered and dark. I didn’t go in. Instead, I drove to the county records office and dug through old newspaper archives. There was nothing about a bus accident at the Clay Tunnels, but there was a brief note from 1955: a bus from St. Agatha’s had been reported missing on a field trip, but the children were found safe three days later, huddled in the second tunnel, claiming they had been pushed out by a ‘kind man in gray.’

The orphanage closed down the following year. I never went back to the tunnels again, but sometimes, late at night, I hear a knock on my door. When I open it, there’s no one there, but on the porch, in the red dust, there is a small, muddy handprint, as if someone had just reached out and touched the wood, and then vanished.