Sensabaugh Tunnel in Hawkins County near Kingsport is one of those places that folks around here have at the top of their list of haunted places. The legend has many versions, but they all maintain that a small child, possibly a baby, ended up getting killed in the waters that run through the tunnel. It's a creepy place even in the daylight, but at night it looks like a haunted place. The tunnel is about 150 feet in length and serves to enable traffic to pass under the CSX railroad. Accompanied by my sons Matthew and Andrew, we spent some time at the tunnel this weekend. We made some photos using on the headlights from my car and a few passing vehicles. In the above photo, the inside of the tunnel is lit by the headlights of a car inside the tunnel. Matthew said the word around his school is that if you stop your car inside the tunnel and turn off the ignition, it would not restart. After getting all the photos I needed, we decided to test the theory. We drove into the tunnel and shut off the car. We sat there a few minutes just listening for any unusual sounds. The rushing of the water beneath the car was the only sounds we heard. The car started up without any problem and we drove back out of the tunnel. There was one unusual thing however. Just off the road, a horse began a strange whinny noise of the type they make when something is very wrong. We hadn't heard the horse the whole time we were making photos. There had been silence except for the sounds of the water. "Something is wrong," I said to the boys. "Something has that horse really upset." We could not see the animal in the dark field beside the road. I don't know if the horse's cry in the dark had anything to do with the legend of the tunnel, but it didn't make a sound until we stopped the car inside the tunnel to test out the legend.
It's weird how these stories change through the years. I had a few opportunities to test out the tunnel while in high school but the story was much different. I heard that the white house on the other side of the tunnel was the scene of a murder. The man living there killed his wife and baby. He then hung himself from a tree at the end of the tunnel. Supposedly, when you turn off your car and lights you can see and hear the man swinging from the tree.
I never saw or heard anything but it still scared the hell out of us!
Posted by: Angelia | February 17, 2009 at 09:23 AM