The Tunnel | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

you're right on the edge of the Smokies you're in country that is just on the verge of being primitive and remote but
it's going rapidly to the tourists to the real estate people in the air is not as pure as it was when
I was a kid when I used to sit on that porch at night with my grandparents and there wasn't a sound
and to sit there in the dark I had no idea at the time that that was Paradise but it was
Gary Cardin has lived in this exact house in the mountains of Western North Carolina for almost his entire life he's
84 years old his grandparents built the house and raised him here I sat with him in the front room he told
me that I was sitting in the same spot where his grandfather's coffin was placed
because he's been here in this small town for so long he knows stories that others have forgotten like what happened
in December of 1882 something the Raleigh news and observer called too horrible to Chronicle without a shutter
I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] in the late 1800s North Carolina was trying to build a railway system through
the western part of the state they wanted it built quickly they wanted to move coal and Timber and hopefully make
a lot of money but there is no easy way to Tunnel through a mountain you're talking about
manual labor people using picks and and carting the the debris away here's Western Carolina University
archivist and historian George Frizzell they're not going to have the kind of mechanized equipment that people are
used to today we're not talking about heavy machinery earth-moving equipment bulldozers that's the reason the labor
is so strenuous in 1877 the state came up with a plant would both save money and speed
things up and they ran in prisoners to the railroad and the idea of being of course
[Music] you have to feed them six cents a day and you have to keep them put them up
for the night and if one tries to get away you can shoot them and if one dies we'll give you another
one [Music] the presence were turned into a business not far from where Gary Cardin lives a
group of African-American prisoners were leased to the Western North Carolina railroad company they were building a
new rail line in the mountains along the takasiji river they had to manually bore through 700
feet of stone to make a tunnel big enough for a train to pass through it would be called the kawi tunnel
the men were chained to one another while they worked and to get to the tunnel each morning
the men had to get on a boat in their chains to cross the river one morning at the end of December in
1882 it had been snowing and raining heavily the river was very high but the guards instructed the prisoners to board
the boat and they started to cross the river okay the bottom of that flat bottom boat is
full of slush it's water icicles so just a mix and it's you know a couple inches
deep because it's been snowing all night and as they go that slush goes to the front of the boat and then
it comes to the back of the boat and it's just going back and forth they think the boat sinking and that's the
water coming up through the hole and they get up and they said about sinking the boat sinking in the garden said no
it's not sit down sit down and they push the guards to the back of the boat and when they're all on the back of the boat
capsizes [Music] and into the river they go and of course it's freezing cold but because they were chained together
you know because I'm chaining to you when I go I'm gonna bring you and you'll bring the next one because
you're chained to them and it's just and all 19 of them went into the river [Music]
there were people on the the shore that said that it's the most pitiful site that every Witnesses when they're that
forced their head above the water and then call for help and they said they heard them call for wives
for mother for God for everything and then it got very quiet one local paper wrote it was one of
those accidents that seemed unavoidable due to the sudden Panic which sees the convicts in the boat
the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the convicts were drowned by clasping each other like knots of serpents and
swept down to the lower Rapids below which they were found by twos and threes tightly clasped together in their death
Lock 19 bodies were pulled from the takasiji river so they loaded a sled and people who saw
them lay the dead in the sled so it's pretty much like a load loading cord wood put them all in that sled and pulled it
up the top of the hill and they dug those three trenches and then they just kicked them in there there was no
ceremony in nothing the youngest was 15 years old the oldest was 52. Gary says the 19 bodies were dumped in
unmarked Graves and forgotten what bothers him is that it's likely that the men wouldn't have died if they hadn't
been chained together why did they have the shackles and change them kind of well the railroad says that's
because they're dangerous men well those dangerous men were charged with misdemeanors every one of them they were
there because they committed crimes like they walked on the highway after Dark you know or they were found gambling or
they found them behind the store with two other guys drinking it was not a serious criminal in the
whole crowd after the Civil War the so-called Black Codes were passed across the South
laws designed to control newly freed enslaved people these laws made it easy to arrest black
men and women and charge them with felonies for misdemeanor crimes they could serve five-year prison terms
for minor offenses like stealing a pig or a chicken worth a dollar vacancy statutes made it a crime to be
unemployed standing on the street became loitering and walking at night became breaking
curfew s were called the black code and when a little research is done you find out they're just Reinventing
slavery it has a different name it has a sanction of the government but it's uh actually an immoral unethical practice
in 1870 the prison population in North Carolina was 121 by 1890 that number had grown to 1 302.
the state didn't have the resources to manage the incredible influx of prisoners
one prison official asked the legislature to just let some of these men go but instead the state put them to work
on the railroad it was called convict Leasing and it happened all over the South
the 13th amendment abolished slavery in 1865. but the amendment left an exception
slavery shall not exist except as punishment for crime instead of being sent to prison people
convicted of crimes could be leased to businessmen plantation owners and corporations
professor Matthew Mancini writes about the history of convict leasing in his book one dies yet another
he writes that more than 90 of the convicts were black and describes the least system as one of the harshest and
most exploitative labor systems known in American history from 1877 to 1891 more than half of
North Carolina's prisoner population was working on the railway they sometimes committed suicide they
were so miserable I would work until they defended and they they knew what they could do if
they just couldn't take it anymore you just dropped your hammer and started walking away and the guard
would shoot you and there were there's even a story I don't know whether it's true about two
brothers who just looked at each other and says he ready James yeah I'm ready let's go and
they dropped their Hammers and walked until they were shot the railroad company's promise quote
very comfortable quarters meals and clothing conditions were incredibly harsh one local reporter who visited the
living quarters wrote that the prisoners were driven into a row of prison cars where they were tightly boxed for the
night with no possible chance to obtain either air or light and that the conditions in the camps
were squalid and horrifying after the Cowie tunnel disaster the Western North Carolina Railroad Company
went back to work new prisoners were brought in and construction of the tunnel was completed
Gary Cardin says he grew up hearing the story as a sort of Legend a ghost story about dangerous felons
that's the way a lot of people in Jackson County talk about it well if you drive through the once you go down to
Dillsboro and they've got this tourist trap little town down here they have a train and it's called the
Smoky Mountain train and of course it's a tourist trap too and the tourists get on it and ride through the tunnel
well I come through that tunnel and there's always somebody on that train that says you are now coming through
Galilee tunnel 19 men died working on this uh they drowned on the river down there
and they brought them back up here and buried them on top of the tunnel up here and that's their tears falling through
here that you see now as we go through there's a lot of water falling that's the tears of those dead men
foreign [Music] in 1963 the Asheville citizen times published an article called some believe
kawi tunnel there's a curse the article goes on to say death accompanied its building trains have
wrecked in it cave-ins have plagued it from the beginning there are many stories about trains
inexplicably stalling in the kawi tunnel stories about train derailments and of the tunnel caving in and trapping trains
people in Jackson County say they've heard the sounds of pickaxes on Stone clinking chains and splashing water
we learned about the tunnel from a listener his name is Al Fisher he sent us an email saying he'd recently moved
to the area from Georgia and realized he was living right up the mountain from a
train tunnel that people said was haunted we asked Al if we could come visit I said I'd pick him up
we met near a restaurant called the forger's canteen and drove a few miles before he told me to pull over just off
the road so we could start walking so you'll see the the river is down off the side of the road here on the left and
the river runs right along the railroad tracks or the railroad tracks run along the river
and this is the river where the men drowned yes correct he had never been to the tunnel himself
but said he had done some research and he was sure we would be able to find it hard to get to oh boy okay here we go so
I'm gonna take my [Music] okay let me um let me put on my hat okay they have a hat we're really going in
here yeah so if you if you aren't up for this we don't have to no no no no please
please please I didn't know that I mean I guess I shouldn't have assumed that we would that it would be a paved
Road I wasn't prepared to go hiking we made our way down a steep bridge to the railroad tracks below the brush was
dense and it was hot Al seen prepared with a backpack I wouldn't have been surprised if he had
brought a first aid kit an extra water all I had was four extra batteries in my back pocket in case the recorder died
we walked her about a quarter mile down the tracks before we came to the river so now we're kind of coming around a
curve here yeah and we'll this the tracks actually crossed the river right here and then right on the other side of the
river is the tunnel and now we're we're gonna cross the River on the tracks yes and so then you can see the tunnel
that's that's the mouth of the tunnel right there in the curve there but it's kind of dark
well don't don't break your ankle on this thing I'm glad there's not a train coming can you
imagine the Run we'd have to do so we're crossing the river on the train ties which
it seems like the safest thing but so on the other side of the Bridge here the tunnel starts
Okay so we've made it to the other side there's the entrance to the tunnel if we were frightened people we might
think this was a little scary but here we go plowing ahead it looks dark doesn't it
the tunnel looks fairly big enough for a train to pass through it's pretty amazing that it was dug by hand well
here we go into the tunnel the minute you go inside the temperature drops you can feel it
the light from the opening stays with you for the first 50 feet or so and then it starts to get dark gosh
and I ask you will you hold that light light wow it's getting dark very quickly in here
um but it's amazing to look at the rock that you can see oh it's kind of wild um that they've really chiseled this
rock out yeah it's pretty amazing and now we're kind of so we can still see the light behind us
but that will go away so if a train were to come right now we just get along the side of the wall I
guess after a couple hundred feet the tunnel begins to curve and all the light disappears
we stopped Al turned off the small flashlight he was carrying it was Pitch Black and the
sound of the dripping water came from all around I asked him to turn the light back on it
shown like a spotlight on the rough ceiling of the tunnel above us you can see all these small dents in the
Stone I wondered if they were created by the men who had been forced to work here
every day I wondered if maybe the story is is more it's the mountain crying to remind us what happened here
[Music] foreign just a reminder of the past that was forgotten for a long time forgotten for a long time
and there's the daylight again [Music] today the Cowie tunnel disaster lives on for people riding the Taurus train
and for those who love to tell ghost stories they're folk songs but what happened
but Gary Cardin says that's not good enough we owe those 19 men more than that he wants to find other ways for
people to remember what really happened he's been researching the incident and with the help of various Scholars he now
has a list of the names and ages of the 19 men who died if I had my way you would bring those bodies out of there
and you would re-enter them in a grave in Dillsboro and there would be a little Museum there the history of what
happened to those 19 men it's unlikely that the bodies will be disinterred and given a proper burial in
part because there's confusion about exactly where they are there has been talk of putting a plaque
near the tunnel but Gary doesn't think anyone will hike out to the woods to look at a plaque and
having been in those woods I have to agree he wants something in town something the
people of Jackson County will see and talk about the best memorials he says are conversations
[Music] thank you [Music] criminalists created by Lauren Spore and me media Wilson is our senior producer
Susanna Roberson is our assistant producer audiomix by Rob Byers special thanks to Wilson Sayer Julian Alexander
makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this criminal.com where on Facebook and
Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio wunc we're a
proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
[Music] s

In the late 1800s, North Carolina was trying to build a railway system through the Western part of the state. In December of 1882, something went wrong. The Raleigh News and Observer called it “too horrible to chronicle without a shudder.” We speak with Gary Carden, George Frizell, and Al Fisher about the Cowee Tunnel disaster.

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 120 originally published August 2, 2019. https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-120-the-tunnel-8-2-19

Music in this episode: “Gaddy” by Blue Dot Sessions “Wahre” by Blue Dot Sessions “Order of Entrance” by Blue Dot Sessions “Then Crash (Original Music for Criminal)” by Blue Dot Sessions “Understanding Our Ways (Original Music for Criminal)” by Blue Dot Sessions

Brief Summary

The episode recounts the Cowie Tunnel disaster and the exploitation of prisoners in North Carolina's railroad history.

Key points

The Kawi Tunnel Disaster. In December 1882, 19 prisoners drowned while crossing a river in a capsized boat.
Forgotten Lives. Gary Cardin seeks to honor the memory of the 19 men who died in the Kawi Tunnel disaster.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I had no idea at the time that that was Paradise.

Reflecting on childhood memories of a peaceful place.

0:32WatchApr 3, 2026

Tension

70/ 100High tension

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