Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
South of Fairhaven a working railroad still uses a tunnel in the bluff. It is not a park feature. It is not a walking tour. Trains run through it. The right-of-way is active. People who treat it as a picturesque hole in the hill are trespassing on a working line, and the line will not pause for folklore.
T.A. Warger, in Murder in the Fourth Corner, reports an unidentified hanging associated with this tunnel — a grim civic footnote, not a mascot and not a named martyr the city ever processed into a plaque. Unidentified is the word that should stay in the sentence. A body without a name is not improved by a nickname invented for October.
This is a different story from the Chuckanut trestle lore farther south, and it should be kept different. Trestle talk, tunnel talk, and cottage talk get folded together on websites that want one “haunted railroad” page for the whole coast. The Fairhaven tunnel hanging, as Warger has it, is a local report about a specific hole in a working grade. It does not need a phantom locomotive or a woman in white on the ties. South of the village the bluff pinches the line against the water; the bore is there because the railroad needed a hole, not because the city needed a monument. Crews still use it. That is why the footnote stays grim and why it should stay unpublished as a destination.
Warger’s Fourth Corner work is a crime-and-custody survey, not a ghost catalogue. A hanging without a name fits his period: the county had more deaths than it had ceremonies. Fairhaven’s boosters in the 1890s wanted hotels and brick. They did not want an unidentified body in a tunnel south of town in the souvenir book. The omission is not a mystery to be solved with a séance. It is a civic preference.
The story has mostly moved through true-crime and local-history readers, then into the same lists that harvest any death near a tunnel. The railroad did not advertise it. The city did not interpret it. There is no gift shop. There should not be one.
What is unknown is almost the entire human file: who the dead person was, when exactly the hanging happened in the way Warger records, whether it was a suicide or a killing, whether the tunnel was chosen or merely available. An unidentified death on a railroad is a police matter that became a paragraph. It did not become a character.
Do not walk the tunnel. Do not walk the tracks. The footnote exists in a book. The tunnel exists to move freight and passengers through a hill. Those are separate facts. Keep them separate, and keep your body out of the bore.