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The western Minnesota town of Vergas, with its creepy
Vergas Trails, its Hairy Man, and its spooky cemetery, has more than its
share of legendary activity, according to its young people. A student
of mine from nearby Dent, however, says his own community is not to be
outdone as a site of legend.
The student from Dent says there is a grain mill alongside the railroad
tracks, in the vicinity of a story told by many citizens of the community.
The incident took place in the 1950s, when a man was walking home from
a bar on a summer night, following the railroad tracks. Up ahead he espied
two figures on the tracks, one of them a girl crying for help.
The other person was the girl’s father, who explained that he and
his daughter had been walking along the tracks when she had gotten her
foot caught somehow in the ties. So the two men worked away together at
trying to free the girl’s foot, but to no avail.
“All of a sudden,” my student says, “a train whistle blew
three times signaling it was about five miles away and just going through
Vergas.” The two men worked harder to free the girl, who cried out
in greater panic. “The whistle then blew twice signaling that it
was crossing at Crazy Cove Resort, just three miles away.”
The father pushed the other man away and told him to search for something
to pry with. The whistle blew once more, a mile away.
The man from the bar raced back to the tracks to see the father and daughter
holding one another, the lights of the train spotting them, and then the
train sweeping over them. After the train had passed, the man searched
the tracks for remains, but, “No sign or trace or remains of the
man and his daughter” were to be found. The man went back to the
bar in Dent and told his story, and no one believed him. He began to think
it all might have been a drunken hallucination.
The next day, though, he returned to search the tracks again, when the
owner of the grain mill came out and asked him what he was looking for.
He told the mill owner his story, and the miller was not surprised.
It seems that twenty years earlier a man named Fred and his daughter Lily
had been struck by a train at this place. “Ever since it has been
known,” my student says, “that is you walk the Dent railroad
tracks down past the mill you are able to hear Lily’s cries for help
at night.”
Now, you may think you’ve heard a story like this somewhere else
before. Perhaps you have. The elements are common ones—a railroad,
tragic death, and the unfortunates returning to the scene of tragedy.
That doesn’t make the story of Lily and Fred any less a story of
Dent, Minnesota. We all need our stories. We can share them among us.
This text and audio may not be copied without securing
prior permission from Plains Folk.
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