I also added a dark blue marker showing the driveway to the new parking lot for the Moonville Rail Trail, and a dark blue path showing the route to the new footbridge. The distance between the two stream crossings is a little less than a half mile. The horizontal, red path shows the portion of the Moonville Rail Trail that sits between two stream crossings (on the left, Raccoon Creek, and on the right, Hewett Fork). Below is a screenshot that shows a GPS trace of us hiking to the tunnel via the Moonville High Water Trail (the top, vertical red path).
There are still a couple of ways to hike to Moonville Tunnel: either park near the trailhead for the Moonville Rail Trail and walk across Raccoon Creek on the new footbridge (about 500 feet to the tunnel), or park just off of Hope-Moonville Road near the spot where the road crosses Raccoon Creek and hike in on the Moonville High Water Trail (about a quarter mile to the tunnel). However at TrekOhio, we are all about hiking, so for the remainder of this article I’m going to focus on the trails and the natural setting of Zaleski State Forest in the vicinity of Moonville Tunnel. This graffiti inside the tunnel depicts one the ghost stories There is graffiti within the tunnel which portrays one of these incidents. Five or six people have been killed when struck by a train while walking on a bridge or in a tunnel. However, there are supposedly a number of tragic accidents associated with the old railroad. I think the abandoned town’s unusual name, Moonville, contributes to the area’s spookiness. I have included links to a few websites describing Moonville’s supernatural history in “ Additional information” at the end of this article. If I do another web search and add the search term of “Moonville” to “Ohio” and “haunted,” I still get an impressive 11,400 results. If you wander into a local bookstore, you are likely to find a number of books about Ohio’s haunted places. When I tried this at Google, the search engine returned 559,000 results. If you fire up your favorite search engine and look for “Ohio” and “haunted,” you’ll find hundreds of stories. There are many, many places in Ohio that are said to be haunted. The abandoned tunnel is now located within Zaleski State Forest. All that remains of Moonville is a cemetery and Moonville Tunnel. The buildings are gone, and even the tracks for the railroad have disappeared. Years have passed since both Moonville and Hope were abandoned. During the course of its construction, it was also necessary to build bridges over creeks and to excavate Moonville Tunnel to pass through a nearby hillside.
To connect the two towns a railroad was laid. Moonville’s nearest neighbor was the town of Hope, but even Hope was many miles away. The last family in Moonville left in 1947. Its population peaked in 1870 when about 100 people lived there, after which it declined. Moonville was a coal-mining town founded in the middle of the nineteenth century in Vinton County.
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