The Last Train to Hollow Creek

The last train to Hollow Creek always felt like a bad decision. But on the evening of February 21st, I didn’t have a choice. My sister had called in tears, her voice crackling over the bad signal, saying she’d locked herself out and needed the spare key. She lived a two-hour ride away, and the last train departed at 7:45 PM. I grabbed my coat and left my small, cluttered apartment without hesitation.

I was still nursing a cold, my sinuses throbbing, and my mood was already soured by a argument I’d had with her earlier that week. But she was still my sister, so I hurried through the rain-slicked streets of downtown Crestwood, past the closed shops with their dull, flickering signs, and into the train station. The station was nearly empty. A lone attendant, an old man with rheumy eyes, barely glanced at me as I bought my ticket. He pointed to platform 3. The train was already there, its doors open, waiting.

I found a seat in the middle of the car, away from the other few passengers—a young couple arguing in hushed tones, a middle-aged man with a suitcase who looked like he hadn’t slept in days. The train jolted to life, and we slid out of the station, the lights of the city fading behind us. I leaned my head against the window, watching the rain streak down the glass. Around us, the landscape turned to dark, dense pine forest, broken only by occasional clusters of houses. That’s when I noticed the woman.

She was sitting three rows ahead, on the left side, facing me. I hadn’t seen her board. She was dressed in an old-fashioned black dress, a style you’d see in photographs from the 1940s. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and she stared at me with an unblinking intensity. At first, I thought she was just odd, but as the train rattled on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her gaze was fixed on me, even when I averted my eyes. When I looked back, she was still there, like a painting.

To ease my anxiety, I pulled out my phone, but the signal was already gone. I flipped through my music library, but the songs felt jarring. So I just watched the window, trying to ignore her. But then, I saw a reflection. In the rain-streaked glass, the woman’s reflection was not mirrored. It was sitting in a different seat, slightly ahead, and its eyes were closed. My heart hammered. I turned to look at her directly—she was still staring. I looked back at the window; the reflection was still there, not matching her position. I knew what I was seeing, but my mind rejected it.

I stood up abruptly, stumbling into the aisle, and moved to the far end of the car, near the bathroom. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that my cold was making me feverish. But as I steadied myself against the handrail, I saw the train attendant from the station—the same old man—walking down the aisle. He stopped at the woman’s seat and said something to her. She didn’t respond. He turned to me, and his face was pale as death. ‘You shouldn’t have taken this train, son,’ he said, with a voice like dry leaves. Then he moved on.

When the train finally screeched to a halt at a small, unmarked station, the conductor announced in a hollow voice that this was not our stop. Panic spread among the passengers. The man with the suitcase stood up, demanding answers. But the conductor simply repeated, as if on a loop, ‘Not this stop. Not this stop.’ The train moved again, and I decided I had to get off at the next stop, even if it was in the middle of nowhere.

The next stop was a platform barely lit by a single yellow lamp. I jumped off as soon as the doors opened, and the old man followed me. ‘You’re heading to Hollow Creek, aren’t you?’ he said. I shook my head. ‘I need to get to my sister’s. Something is wrong with this train.’ He smiled, a sad, knowing smile. ‘Everything has been wrong for a long time. You just didn’t notice before.’

I walked away, following a dirt road that wound through the trees, hoping to find a road or a village. After nearly an hour, I saw a house—a rundown farmhouse with a porch and a single light in the window. I knocked. A woman answered, her face wrinkled, and her eyes glazed over. I asked if I could use her phone. She opened the door wide and gestured inside. The house smelled of dust and decay. In the dim light, I saw photographs on the wall, all of the same woman, but in different decades. In one, she was young, in a 1950s dress. In another, she was older, in 1970s clothes. And in the last, the most recent, she looked exactly like the woman on the train.

I turned to ask her, but she was gone. The house was empty. The front door was locked from the outside. I heard a train whistle in the distance, and the floorboards beneath me began to tremble. That’s when I noticed the mirror on the wall. In it, I saw my own reflection, but standing behind me, was the woman from the train. And in the reflection, she was whispering words I couldn’t hear.

I ran. I sprinted out the back door, through the tall grass, and onto the train tracks. I ran until my lungs burned, until I found a road, and finally a small diner that was still open. I collapsed in a booth, gasping for breath. The waitress asked if I was okay. I told her I’d seen something terrible. She looked at me with pity and said, ‘You’re from the 7:45 train, aren’t you? We get them every now and then. That train has been running for decades, but it never picks up the living. The ones who walk away, they’re not the same. They keep looking in mirrors, expecting to see someone else.’

I didn’t want to believe her. But that night, when I looked at my reflection in the diner’s window, I saw, for just a split second, the woman’s face, contorted in silent laughter. I haven’t stopped looking over my shoulder since. They say the last train to Hollow Creek only stops for the dead, and if you’re unlucky enough to get on, you might not be yourself when you get off.