In the 70s, I lived with my parents at a small station, which was simply called "318 kilometers." Our passenger trains stopped for only one minute, and, as a rule, no one got off at this godforsaken station. Even those on duty knew that there were usually no passengers either there or back. My father worked at this halt as a coupler, and my mother was just the move on duty.
And then one day such a strange incident happened that later they talked a lot about it at the station. Usually after school (we were taken to a nearby station by bus), as usual, I went to my mother on the move and saw that she was not herself on the sofa. Usually, before my arrival, my mother warmed up lunch on the stove, we had lunch together, and sometimes my father came in, and I went home to prepare my homework and wait for my parents.
And here there is no lunch, my mother literally looks at one point and, I see, everything is trembling. He began to ask what had happened, and my mother seemed to wake up from a dream: she fussed, took out the saucepans, turned on the stove … and again sat down on the sofa. I got scared, I ran after my father, he worked very close. Together, we somehow brought my mother to her senses, and she told us such things that at first we did not even believe.
As usual, at 14:12 a passenger train stopped at the crossing and, as usual, there were no passengers. Mom had already removed the flag when she suddenly noticed that a huge shadow, very similar to a human, had separated from the last car. The distance to the departing train increased, and the shadow decreased until it became like the shadow of an ordinary person.
Mom saw everything with her own eyes, and the shadow passed just by her. Mom felt a terrible cold, instantly exhausted and barely got to the hut, where I found her. Father did not tell anyone to tell about what had happened, but for the next several days he worked for Mom.
My parents hid from me what was happening there, at our crossing, but then from their conversation I accidentally learned that a strange shadow appeared every time this particular train stopped at the crossing. It was then that I first heard the word "ghosts." My parents never told me what these ghosts were.
Katenkov Leonid, Kustanai region