Maco Light Site

For nearly a century, a mysterious light appeared along the railroad tracks near Maco Station in Brunswick County. The phenomenon was famous enough that President Grover Cleveland stopped his train to hear the story in 1889, and Life magazine featured it in 1957.

The Maco Light is one of North Carolina's most celebrated ghost stories, centered on a stretch of railroad fourteen miles west of Wilmington at what was once a small rural station called Farmer's Turnout, later renamed Maco Station. The legend begins in 1867, when conductor Joe Baldwin was riding in the last car of a wood-burning train along the Wilmington and Manchester line. The car became uncoupled from the rest of the train, and Baldwin, realizing a second train was approaching from behind on the same track, grabbed his lantern and waved it frantically from the rear platform to signal the oncoming locomotive to stop. The warning failed. The collision killed Baldwin and, according to the legend, decapitated him. One witness reported seeing Baldwin's lantern fly clear of the wreckage, land in the adjacent swamp, right itself, and continue burning as though held by an invisible hand.

Shortly after the accident, a flickering light began appearing regularly along the tracks near the site of the collision. The light would emerge from the darkness, hover, swing back and forth as though carried by someone walking the rails, and then vanish. Over the decades, the phenomenon grew so well known -- and so frequently mistaken for an actual signal -- that it disrupted railroad operations. To prevent engineers from confusing the ghost light with a real signal, the railroad adopted a unique two-lantern system at Maco Station: signalmen used one red light and one green light, the only station on the line to do so. In 1889, President Grover Cleveland's train stopped at Maco to take on wood and water. Cleveland noticed the unusual two-signal system, asked about it, and received the full story of Old Joe Baldwin.

The Maco Light attracted attention from beyond the railroad community. In the spring of 1964, parapsychologist Hans Holzer traveled to Maco to investigate and authenticated the phenomenon, though he could not explain its source. Over the years, various theories were proposed -- swamp gas, automobile headlights from a distant road, atmospheric refraction -- but none fully accounted for the light's behavior, particularly its appearance along the same short stretch of track and its resemblance to a lantern being swung by hand.

A historical footnote complicates the legend: a search of newspaper records conducted for the Wilmington Railroad Museum found no record of an 1867 accident or of a conductor named Joe Baldwin. However, the records did reveal that a conductor called Charles Baldwin had been killed in an incident in January 1856 near the later site of Maco Station, suggesting the legend may have its roots in an earlier and somewhat different tragedy.

Sightings of the Maco Light continued for more than a century, drawing generations of curious visitors who parked near the tracks on dark nights and waited. The phenomenon greatly diminished -- if it did not disappear entirely -- after the railroad tracks were removed around 1977. Whether the light was the lantern of a headless conductor searching for his missing head, a natural phenomenon tied to the specific conditions of that stretch of track, or something else entirely, the Maco Light remains one of the most thoroughly documented and widely witnessed ghost lights in American history.