She Was Out Looking For An Urban Legend...And What Happened To Her Is Actually Terrifying
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Victoria W
Author
Human beings have long been fascinated by tales of monsters, ghosts, and urban legends, but rarely does that fascination end in such tragedy.
Some people are drawn to exploring abandoned places or hunting down the subjects of ghost stories and urban legends for themselves, while the rest of us appreciate the fruits of their labor from the comfort of our computer screens. It's certainly a kind of thrill-seeking, and it often involves trespassing, but we usually consider it a relatively harmless expression of the spirit of adventure. For one young woman earlier this year, however, it took a deadly turn.
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On April 23, 2016, a young couple from Dayton, Ohio, was visiting Louisville to take a tour of the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, a supposedly haunted building that once served as a tuberculosis clinic. Before their scheduled tour, they heard rumors of a local legend called the Pope Lick Monster. The origins of the beast are somewhat murky, but it's supposedly a part goat/sheep, part human man that lives on, under or near the historic Pope Lick train trestle bridge. He is either an escaped circus freak or the product of a local farmer's deal with the devil. The goat-man supposedly lures people onto the tracks and uses hypnosis to freeze them in place in the path of an oncoming train.
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Looking at the photos above, you can probably understand why the couple assumed, like many people, that the rusted trestle was no longer used by a modern railway. They traveled past posted warnings and over an 8-foot fence to attempt to walk the trestle and get a glimpse of the Pope Lick Monster for themselves. Instead, they found themselves stuck in the middle of the narrow bridge, 80 feet up, when they heard a train rumbling down the tracks at 30 miles an hour, shaking the bridge and the ground below. Her boyfriend miraculously managed to cling to the edge of the shaky bridge while the train passed, but the young woman, Roquel Bain, could not. She was struck by the train and fell eight stories to the ground below. She was announced dead on the scene. This was the first confirmed death linked to seeking the Pope Lick Monster, but there have been many deaths on the trestle that could have resulted from curiosity about the legend.
This tragic accident reminds us to research thoroughly and heed warnings when visiting a new place, even when legend tripping or exploring abandoned places. Things aren’t always what they seem.
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