Thank you all so much!
Adam Selzer cites what may be the first mention of the ghost train in newspapers in his
Mysterious Chicago Blog entry for February 22, 2014.
"Many books that mention the “phantom train” have quoted from an Albany newspaper that described the ghost train. Lloyd Lewis quoted about 200 words of it in his seminal Myths After Lincoln, and other sources since have been paraphrasing Lewis’s excerpt. None of them ever seemed to give the actual title or date of the article, so it took a little bit of searching, but I eventually did track it down. It turns out that the story was published in the Albany Daily Evening Times on March 23rd, 1872. 1872! Not quite seven years after the actual train had rolled through. This makes it a very early source for Lincoln lore, most of which wouldn’t start to be published for a couple more decades."
http://mysteriouschicago.com/lincolns-ph...d-in-1872/
Selzer has since published
Ghosts of Lincoln: Discovering His Paranormal Legacy.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Lincoln-Di...bc?ie=UTF8
There's a fascinating retelling of the legend by A. E. Schlosser in her
American Folklore blog.
http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/201...train.html
"Ghost Train" story in Cricket
