The Kendal Crash
A Series: Jamaican Legends, Superstitions, Myths and Monsters
Many of our legends and myths arise out of actual tragic circumstances like Coral Gardens, Lewis Hutchinson, The Red Mud Lake Incident and more. The Kendal Crash is one of these.
September 1, 1957 marks the date of what has been deemed “the worst railway disaster in Jamaica’s history”. At around 11:30pm, a train carrying around 1600 passengers derailed its tracks near the Kendal Railway Station. At the time, it was the second worst railway disaster in the world. There were around 200 deaths (some instantaneous and many from being impaled by splinters from the wooden coaches. Around 700 sustained injuries. After this tragedy, the coaches were no longer made from wood. Among the passengers that day, were hundreds of people from the Holy Name Society of St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church, in Kingston.
Many of the dead were buried in a mass grave behind the site of the crash.
The legend is that after the Kendal crash, people would pick up passengers near the site or along the railway track, and when they arrived at their destination there would be no one in their car. The duppies were were just trying to get back home….
There are stories of people being picked up and then “the driver’s head raise” (they became hyper-aware of something supernatural), then they just got confused. Also stories of people trying to swerve away from someone in the road....and then crashing, only to realize there was no one in the road at all.
Have you ever picked up a duppy near Kendal?
The A.I. generated images keep getting better, I think.
Sharing my experience with the crash & survivors.
In 1977 I produced a radio documentary for its 20th anniversary & interviewed 15 of the survivors. Many were people we know today, including a well know Catholic priest. He wasn’t at the time & was on the excursion with his girlfriend. The crash killed her and the trauma and things he saw the next day brought him to the priesthood.
Spoke with first-responders like the doctor who was on duty at Hargreaves Memorial hospital in Mandeville & a nurse. The train driver wanted to be interviewed then he died the week before. Everyone I interviewed said they were still haunted by the memory even though it happened 20 years before. Couple broke down and cried. Some we contacted refused to be interviewed & there were others who said it was the first they had talked about it in 20 years even to family.
A man who said he was the first photographer at the scene, turned up at the office one morning and showed me a stack of 8x10 black & white photos. I've never seen anything as gruesome but he was very proud of his work. Still remember the look on his face and ghoul comes to mind. Don’t know what became of him or most of the photos because they aren't in the Gleaner archives far as I know, & I don’t think he was a Gleaner photographer. The Gleaner published the ones we've seen but others he showed me couldn’t be published in any newspaper.
I LOVE those images! It was indeed a terrible tragedy. We have never picked up anyone near Kendal... didn't know there was a mass grave, though. That is really sad.
Then there was the Eventide fire. That was a mass grave too... So, so sad...