A narrator recounts local lore about a 19th century passageway called the “screaming tunnel,” built after construction began in 1851 and nicknamed the “Bloody Pit” after an explosion in an exhaust shaft that trapped thirteen workers. The hoist collapsed, a pumping station flooded the passage, and when the bodies were later exhumed months after the accident investigators found that roughly half of the workers had initially survived and tried to build a raft before suffocating. The town also remembers Emma Louise Heywood, a quiet teenager whose charred body was found in a pool of water in the tunnel; Emma had been ostracized at school and was reportedly carrying Jeb Offill’s child. According to the account, Emma gave birth alone, muffled the newborn’s cries with a knitted pillow, and left the swaddled infant on the church porch where the baby was discovered dead. The discovery provoked a town furor over the lack of charges, Jeb Offill’s life fell apart amid guilt and scandal, and family and community tensions hardened after Emma’s death. The narrator notes a personal tie: their father remembered sitting two rows over from Emma in Mr. Dolberry’s English class, underscoring how the tragedy lodged in local memory.
