Railroaders Memorial Museum

The story

Altoona, in Blair County, Pennsylvania, owes its history to the Pennsylvania Railroad and its vast shops, the Altoona Works. The Railroaders Memorial Museum, opened in 1980, was created to tell that story from the workers' side: the people and railroad communities of central Pennsylvania rather than the engines alone.

The museum took years of local persistence. Members of the Altoona Railway Museum Club kept pushing for a museum in the city after a setback at the state level. In 1968 the National Railway Historical Society chartered them as its Horseshoe Curve Chapter, and they gathered artifacts and showed them in vacant storefronts and at civic events to build support. In 1972 they set up a separate nonprofit corporation under the museum's present name to raise money and enlarge the collection. Its first major purchase, in 1975, was The Loretto, the private railroad car of steel magnate Charles M. Schwab.

In 1975 as well, the Altoona Redevelopment Authority sold former Penn Central land to a shopping-center developer, on condition that the buyer give part of the parcel and $50,000 toward a museum. The museum took full title in 1978, broke ground on May 13, 1979, and opened, still unfinished, on September 21, 1980.

Trouble followed. In the small hours of October 8, 1983, an arson fire badly damaged The Loretto; two juveniles were charged and the damage was estimated at $200,000. A committee formed to fund its restoration, and that effort led the city council to consider a similar campaign for PRR 1361, a city-owned K4 steam locomotive slowly decaying on display at the Horseshoe Curve. In 1985 the museum was given the engine on condition that a replacement be found for the curve. Conrail donated a GP9 diesel, PRR 7048, and the state supplied $50,000 plus a team of state employees to relocate the locomotive and start restoring its appearance.

The museum moved in 1998 to its current home, the Master Mechanics Building. The Pennsylvania Railroad erected it in 1882 to hold offices and, initially, its Test Department, the laboratories where materials were tested. A third floor was added in 1886, and by 1909 the building had four. It later served as headquarters for the railroad police and as Conrail medical offices before standing empty from 1984 until the museum moved in.

The legend

This legend can be traced unusually clearly, and the honest version is worth telling. The earliest documented trace of the ghost story is a marketing theme. In 2003 the museum started promoting the Master Mechanics Building as a haunted attraction, and its Halloween tours that October were built around what it billed as real ghost stories, as the Altoona Mirror reported at the time.

The next year television arrived. Ghost Hunters, the Sci Fi Channel series following The Atlantic Paranormal Society, devoted its second episode (season 1, episode 2), first aired on October 13, 2004, to two Altoona sites: the Mishler Theatre and the railroad museum. The TAPS team followed up reports that included the spirit of a railroad worker seen in the museum. Their verdict was that neither location was haunted, and Wikipedia describes the episode as portraying the haunting as fictional.

The story did not end there. In 2008 the local authors Patty A. Wilson and Scott Crownover published Ghosts of the Museum, a collection of strange tales about the museum, arguing that dead workers of the railroad haunt the building. That is the core of the legend today: unnamed men of the Altoona Works said to linger in a building their employer put up in 1882. The sources consulted, which did not include the text of the 2008 book, mention no named ghosts, no dates of death and no particular phenomena beyond the reported sighting of a worker's spirit.

So the balance sheet is plain: a museum Halloween promotion in 2003, one television investigation that found nothing, and one local book. Visitors can make up their own minds, but none of the sources consulted documents a tragedy in this building.

What remains today

The Master Mechanics Building, a working structure of the Pennsylvania Railroad for about a century, is the museum's home. Its exhibits focus on railroad workers and on Altoona's railroad heritage, and the collection has included The Loretto, Schwab's private car, and the K4 locomotive No. 1361 acquired in 1985. The museum also runs a second site at the Horseshoe Curve with a small museum, visitor center and viewing area. Because the collection and exhibits change, check what is currently on display.

Visiting

The Railroaders Memorial Museum is a public museum, so a visit is legal and straightforward when it is open. As of November 2026, the museum's site is railroadcity.org (the older railroadcity.com is a placeholder); it posts admission details and refers visitors to its Facebook and Google listings for hours, so check those before you travel. No current ghost tours are known; the Halloween ghost tours are documented only for 2003. Come for the story of the people who built and ran Altoona's railroads rather than for a ghost hunt. The Horseshoe Curve site makes a good companion visit, and the Mishler Theatre, the other stop in the 2004 Ghost Hunters episode, is also in Altoona.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Railroaders Memorial Museum — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Pittsburgh, PA 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Altoona, PA 1920 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1920 · Public domain (USGS)
4. Ghost Hunters Season 1 episode guide — TV Guide — TV Guide
5. Official website
6. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.