Just over 50 years ago a young man secured a job in a local steel foundry as a mill worker’s apprentice running a “buggy” – a small slow moving train that traveled under the blast furnaces after they were purged so that the slag and other impurities may be gathered and cleared from the area before the next batch of steel was poured. Once all of the slag and other solidified materials were gathered from the furnaces he was to pilot his train down a set of narrow gauge tracks to a specified dump site and drop the slag in a refuse heap. The job was repetitive but called for vigilance nonetheless because it could become extremely dangerous in an instant.

When you work at a job day after day you become intimately familiar with the nuances of its sights, sounds and inner workings – a kind of familiarity within the monotony where even the slightest errant detail grabs your attention. On this particular day, however, the familiarity was to be broken in a most unexpected way. As the young man made his way down the track to the dump site he had been to so many times prior he saw a woman standing next to the tracks just ahead of him. She stood there, her hair pulled back and tucked under a red scarf; her coveralls slightly tattered and stained with the dirt of a mill laborer. He slowed his buggy, forcing it to come to a grinding halt next to her, and, looking quizzically at the lady he said: “Ma’am, this is a dangerous place, down here, you’re likely to get killed.” She looked up at him and said: “I can’t get killed…I’m already dead.” Shaking his head in disbelief the young man looked away for only a second, two at best, and she was gone – disappeared.

The apprentice started up his engine, went to the slag pile, dumped his cargo and made his way back to the mill. Upon arrival at the plant he reported to his supervisor and explained his run-in with the strange woman. The supervisor didn’t seem to be alarmed that there was some weirdo who believed she was immortal or something roaming the plant, he just continued to shuffle through his desk drawer, then, as if he had found what he was looking for he glanced up at the young man and said: “Follow me.” He led the young man into one of the back hallways of the office, one that was obviously not used all that often, pointed to an old photo behind a dusty pane of glass and asked: “That her?” The apprentice replied in the affirmative but was visibly baffled, thinking she may have been a former employee who had come back to cause trouble. She had come back, alright. “Her name was Annie.” The supervisor responded. He continued: “During the war (World War II) she was killed in an accident in a slag dump tunnel near the one you work now. Gonna’ be 5 years ago this month. That’s her train you’re driving, by the way.”