Londoners are pretty hardened to boards at train stations sending a chill down their spine—the words ‘cancelled’ or ‘delayed’ usually have something to do with this—but on Halloween? It’s a different ball game.
In fact, some of the trains on Thameslink today promise to transport you to an altogether more spooky-sounding location than the one you booked.
If you were intending on spending a day by the beach in Sussex, you might turn up to your board reading ‘Frighton’, or if you’re heading out of London and have an aversion to spiders, ‘Creepy Crawley’ is probably warning enough.
Don’t worry, you won’t actually find yourself on a one-way journey to Count Dracula’s mansion (unless your name is Professor Van Helsing, and you know something we don’t… again); it’s just a bit of All Hallow’s Eve spirit from the train service.
Other Halloween destinations on the Southern, Thameslink and Great Northern services include ‘Witchmore Hill’ (Winchmore Hill), ‘Chillinghurst’ (Billingshurst), and ‘Hauntingdon’ (Huntingdon).
Speaking about the spooky initiative, Mark Pavlides, Chief Customer Officer at Govia Thameslink Railway, said: “We know that Halloween is a real hit with families, so we’ve decided to have some seasonal fun by renaming selected stations across the network. We’d love people to get involved by sharing pictures if they spot one of our ghoulish tricks when travelling today!”
Take it from me: the scariest thing at the end of most of these destinations will most likely come when each passenger opens their door, hangs up their sodden rainjacket, and loads up Halloween (1978) on Netflix for an evening watching a Michael Myers rampage. But reading those names is sure to make any bleary-eyed commuter break out into a grin as they step onto their journey (spell)bound for Witchmore Hill.
When the clocks strike midnight, these creepy locations will simply disappear into the night, never to be seen again (at least not until the next time they’re summoned again for a Halloween celebration…)