The Historic Train Depot

Flagstaff exists because of the railroad. The tracks arrived in 1882 and the town grew up along them, and the red sandstone depot that still anchors downtown went up in 1926. Today it houses the Flagstaff Visitor Center, which means it is one of the few haunted places in this book you can walk into for free, seven days a week.

Railroading was dangerous work. The yards and crossings around the depot took lives for decades, including a brakeman crushed between boxcar couplings near the site in the depot’s early era. The men who worked the line did not always leave it.

Visitor Center staff have reported doors unlocking themselves and figures seen and heard after hours. The signature story is the phantom conductor, a uniformed figure still keeping schedule on a platform where the timetable ran out long ago.

Unlike the hotels, the depot’s stories come mostly from the people who work there, told reluctantly and usually after closing time. That is exactly the kind of account a historian can do something with.