Laura Wright 
Some ghost stories are frightening because the dead are believed to harm the living.
The legend of the San Antonio ghost children is different.
According to one of Texas’s best-known urban legends, a group of children who died horribly at a railroad crossing never left the place where they were killed. But they aren’t waiting there to frighten anyone.
They are still trying to save lives.
Motorists who stop near the tracks are said to feel their vehicles mysteriously begin to move. The cars roll across the railroad tracks and come to rest safely on the other side.
And according to the legend, there is a way to discover who pushed you.
Cover the back of the car with baby powder before stopping.
When the car reaches safety, get out and look.
Sometimes, people say, small handprints appear in the powder.
The School Bus Tragedy
The story is usually placed sometime during the 1930s or 1940s, although later versions move the accident into the 1950s or even 1960s.
According to the version collected in the original article, a school bus filled with children approached a railroad crossing in San Antonio.
There were no modern crossing gates or flashing warning lights.
As the bus crossed the tracks, it stalled.
The front wheels had already passed over the rails, but the rear of the bus remained trapped on the crossing. The driver couldn’t restart the engine.
Then someone saw the train.
A few children reportedly managed to escape through the windows.
Most could not.
The train struck the bus, killing the driver and many of the children inside.
But according to the legend, death didn’t end the children’s concern for others who crossed those same tracks.
They remained behind.
And they would never allow the same thing to happen again.
The Ghost Children
The ritual associated with the legend is remarkably simple.
Drive to the crossing.
Stop the car near the tracks.
Put the transmission into neutral.
Wait.
According to countless versions of the story, the vehicle begins moving.
Slowly at first.
Then it gathers enough momentum to cross the railroad tracks completely.
The driver hasn’t touched the accelerator.
Nobody appears to be pushing.
But the car moves.
The explanation offered by local folklore is that the dead children have gathered behind the vehicle.
They are pushing it away from the tracks.
The Fingerprints
The most famous element of the legend involves baby powder.
Before attempting the experiment, visitors dust the trunk or rear bumper of the car with powder.
After the vehicle has mysteriously crossed the tracks, they examine it.
Some claim to find small fingerprints and handprints.
The implication is obvious.
The children pushed the car.
Stories about the prints have circulated for decades, and some visitors have described surprisingly distinct marks. One account describes tiny handprints in which the lines of the palms and patterns of the fingerprints could supposedly be seen.
The phenomenon became so closely associated with the legend that the fingerprints are almost as famous as the moving automobiles themselves.
But there is another part of the story.
The tragedy that supposedly created the ghosts appears never to have happened there.
The Streets Named for the Dead Children
Several streets near the crossing have names that sound remarkably like those of children.
Among the names associated with the legend are Nancy Carole, Cindy Sue, Laura Lee and Richey Otis.
Naturally, another piece of folklore developed.
These were supposedly the names of children killed aboard the school bus.
It is an extraordinarily effective detail because the evidence seems to be right there on the street signs.
But the names weren’t memorials to children killed in a railroad accident.
The streets had been named independently of the supposed tragedy.
And researchers looking for the fatal San Antonio school bus accident encountered a considerably larger problem.
They couldn’t find it.
The Accident That Never Happened
No historical record has been found of a school bus being struck at the famous San Antonio crossing with the mass loss of children described in the legend.
For such a terrible event, that absence is significant.
A collision killing a busload of schoolchildren would have generated newspaper coverage, death certificates, funeral notices and other contemporary records.
Yet the San Antonio tragedy seems to disappear when researchers look backward for it.
The legend itself, however, can be traced at least as far back as the 1970s.
So where did the dead schoolchildren come from?
Possibly from a real tragedy hundreds of miles away.
The 1938 School Bus Disaster
On December 1, 1938, a school bus carrying children was struck by a freight train near Salt Lake City, Utah.
The accident was catastrophic.
The bus had become caught at a railroad crossing during poor weather conditions when the train struck it.
More than twenty children were killed.
The disaster attracted national attention and became part of the larger discussion surrounding school bus and railroad-crossing safety. The original San Antonio legend bears obvious similarities to the Utah tragedy.
Over time, the location may simply have changed.
Utah became Texas.
A documented disaster became a local tragedy.
Then the local tragedy acquired ghosts.
And the ghosts began pushing cars.
Why Do the Cars Move?
There is a natural explanation for the most dramatic part of the legend.
The roadway creates a misleading visual impression.
What appears to motorists to be level ground, or even a slight uphill grade, actually allows a vehicle in neutral to roll through the crossing.
Similar locations are often called gravity hills.
Surrounding terrain can distort a person’s perception of the horizon, making a downward slope appear level or uphill.
Investigators have measured the San Antonio location and found that gravity is sufficient to account for the movement.
That explains why the car moves.
It doesn’t necessarily explain why generations of visitors have continued returning.
Nor does it completely settle the detail they find most compelling.
The handprints.
What About the Handprints?
Fingerprints can remain on a vehicle long before powder is applied.
Natural oils left by hands may be difficult to see on an ordinary painted surface. When fine powder is spread across it, however, old prints can suddenly become visible.
The principle isn’t particularly mysterious. Powder has long been used to reveal latent fingerprints.
Small marks may also be interpreted as children’s hands once the observer knows what they are supposed to find.
That offers a perfectly reasonable explanation for the famous prints.
And yet some visitors insist their experiences weren’t quite so easily dismissed.
People have claimed that vehicles were clean beforehand.
Others have described prints in locations where nobody remembered touching the car.
Some insist they found numerous small handprints after crossing the tracks.
One woman who visited the location repeatedly during the 1970s and early 1980s later described finding both small and adult-sized handprints after performing the experiment. She remained convinced that something unusual occurred there.
Such accounts cannot establish that ghost children made the marks.
But they helped keep the legend alive.
A Legend Without Its Tragedy
The strangest thing about the San Antonio ghost children may not be the moving automobiles at all.
It may be that the haunting survived the disappearance of its own history.
The bus accident apparently didn’t occur there.
The nearby streets weren’t named for its victims.
The movement of vehicles has a physical explanation.
The fingerprints have plausible explanations as well.
By ordinary standards, that should be enough to kill the story.
It hasn’t.
People continued visiting the crossing for decades.
Some went merely for entertainment.
Others came away convinced that something had touched their cars.
And the legend itself spread far beyond San Antonio. Similar stories of dead children pushing vehicles from railroad tracks have appeared in other parts of the United States. Folklorists have identified the pushing children, handprints and sometimes the sound of children crying as recurring elements of the wider legend tradition.
Perhaps San Antonio simply became the most famous home for a wandering American ghost story.
Or perhaps an old legend settled there because the location already provided exactly the sort of experience needed to sustain it.
Fingerprints
The legend eventually entered popular culture.
The 2006 horror film Fingerprints used the ghostly railroad-crossing story as a central part of its plot.
The film follows Melanie, a young woman returning home after rehabilitation, who becomes involved with the mystery surrounding children supposedly killed in a school bus accident.
By then, the San Antonio story had completed a curious journey.
A supposed historical tragedy had become folklore.
The folklore became a paranormal attraction.
And the paranormal attraction became fiction.
The Children at the Tracks
There is something unusually gentle about this particular ghost story.
The children aren’t seeking revenge.
They don’t lure travelers onto the tracks.
They aren’t trying to frighten anyone.
According to the legend, they remember what happened to them.
And whenever another automobile stops where their bus once stopped, they gather behind it and push.
History gives us good reason to doubt that the children ever died at this particular crossing.
Gravity can explain the moving cars.
Old oils and powder can explain fingerprints.
Perhaps that accounts for everything.
But folklore doesn’t always disappear simply because its historical foundation collapses.
For decades, people visited those tracks and came away with stories of their own.
Some felt their cars move.
Some found small marks in the powder.
Some became believers.
Others did not.
And somewhere along the way, a tragedy that apparently never happened produced one of Texas’s most enduring ghost stories.
Maybe there were never any children at those tracks.
But generations of visitors have continued looking for their fingerprints.
And some insist they found them.
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