{"id":475378,"date":"2026-10-24T11:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T11:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/475378\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T11:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T11:16:09","slug":"is-san-antonios-most-famous-ghost-legend-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/475378\/","title":{"rendered":"Is San Antonio’s most famous ghost legend a lie?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Live in San Antonio for long enough and you’ll eventually hear the tale of the ghost tracks<\/a> \u2014 a supposedly haunted portion of railroad tracks on the Southside\u00a0where for decades, locals have parked in hopes that spectral children will push their car\u00a0back to safety.<\/p>\n

As the story goes<\/a>, sometime in the 1930s or 40s, a school bus filled with children was lodged\u00a0on the tracks and struck by an oncoming train, killing everyone aboard. Since the story gained popularity, locals would sprinkle powder on the back of their car and park on the tracks at Villamain and Shane Road, as legend had it that the ghostly children’s handprints would be visible after they pushed the car off the tracks. However, the subject has been a point of contention \u2014 having been debunked a time or two before <\/a>\u2014 and one MySA reader and a local historian are casting more doubt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nancy Turner and Patty Johnson are cousins, and their family lived in the area\u00a0for decades. Johnson, who is 68, told MySA their grandparents owned 18 acres off Villamain Road near Mission San Juan, as well as some property south of that, where\u00a0Villamain becomes a dead end reaching the San Antonio River. She said they lived on the latter for 25 years after her grandparents passed away, starting from when she was a young high schooler. Nobody in her family remembers a school bus ever running to their neighborhood or to the supposed ghost tracks, and VIA buses didn’t start running there until she was 13, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Johnson didn’t hear about the legend until she had lived already in the area for a few years.<\/p>\n

“When I would tell my mom about [the urban legend], she started laughing. She said, ‘There’s never been no buses out here … We had to walk everywhere we went. Either that, or drive to school,'” Johnson recalled. Her mother and\u00a0aunts attended a Catholic school downtown, and “they had to walk from Villamain\u00a0all the way up South Presa to Military Drive to catch the bus.”<\/p>\n

Johnson said the story is also implausible because the ghost tracks are on a slight hill, making the push that some experience more an effect of gravity than paranormal activity. She believes ghost hunters will put their car in neutral to aid in rolling off the hill and said if you put powder on your trunk, you’ll just reveal\u00a0hand prints that are already there \u2014 not hand prints from phantom bus riders.<\/p>\n

John Serold with the Texas Transportation Museum here in San Antonio backed that up. He told MySA he’s been a bus enthusiast all his life, drawing the timeline from San Antonio Transit System to VIA in 1978. According\u00a0to Serold, no bus route ever ran\u00a0out to the tracks. However, he said there’s a rumor that the street names in the McCreless Meadows neighborhood just off Shane Road to the east of the tracks \u2014 Cindy Sue Way, Nancy Carole Way, Laura Lee Way and Bobbie Allen Way \u2014 were given for the names of the supposed children on the bus. Johnson doesn’t think that’s true, but it certainly adds to the mystique of the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“I don’t think it ever happened,” Serold said. “But … maybe someday some person will come up that really knows it did happen.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Live in San Antonio for long enough and you’ll eventually hear the tale of the ghost tracks \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2527,820,82,84,83],"class_list":["post-475378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-mysalifestyle","tag-mysastaff","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}