(Pope Lick Trestle Bridge, home of the Pope Lick Monster)
An Ohio woman was fatally struck by a train Saturday night while she and her boyfriend were searching for a “goatman” from an urban legend.
Raquel Bain, 26, and her boyfriend originally traveled to Louisville, Kent., for a haunted house tour at the Waverly Hills Sanitorium. But upon hearing of the “Pope Lick Monster,” they decided to spend the hours before their tour investigating the story.
Legend has it that the Pope Lick Monster is a murderous satanic beast that appears when someone travels across the eight-story-high train trestle bridge that passes over Pope Lick Creek. So the intrepid couple decided to climb the trestle and test Kentuckian lore, despite all the warning signs.
Denise Harris, a Louisville local, said her nieces and nephews have also climbed the trestle while seeking the legendary creature.
“The Goatman, when they climb up on the trestles and they cross it, he’s supposed to come out,” she told WAVE 3.
Despite being up in age, the trestle is still very much in use. By the time the couple realized a Norfolk Southern train was approaching fast, it was far too late to run to the end of the trestle.
Their only option was to drop from and cling to the sides of the tracks. Bain’s boyfriend, who hasn’t been identified, was able to make the split-second decision to hang from the edge. But Bain wasn’t able to react in time, and was struck by the train before falling nearly 100 feet to the ground below.
Bain isn’t the first person to be killed while illegally traversing the trestle, but her death is the first to be explicitly linked to the monster.
Bain’s absence from the haunted tour didn’t go unnoticed by the staff at Waverly Hills Sanitorium. They posted to Facebook sending their condolences to Bain’s family and begging all other ghost and legend enthusiasts to “follow local laws, danger warnings and no trespassing signs.”