History & local legend
The road tunnel below Horseshoe Curve near Altoona has a legend about a young Irish woman waiting for a railroad worker who never came home. Local writer John Hunter Orr placed her at the downhill entrance, dressed in white.
In Orr’s telling, her sweetheart helped build the railroad above the tunnel and died in a barroom fight after work. The woman continues to wait, sometimes seated on the low stone wall and sometimes standing beside the first spruce tree.
Her appearance is associated with a wet night and a full moon around midnight. Orr also described fragments of an Irish workers’ song mingling with the sound of Glen White Run near the culverts. Later versions changed how the young man died, but kept the waiting woman at the tunnel’s Altoona-side entrance.
Sources
- John Hunter Orr, The Secret, earlier local newspaper account reproduced by Pennsylvania Mountains of Attractions
- Discovery PA, site photographs and differing tellings at the Horseshoe Curve roadway tunnel
- Railroaders Memorial Museum, Horseshoe Curve construction by Irish immigrants
- OpenStreetMap, Altoona-side entrance of the Veterans Memorial Highway tunnel
