The Maco Light was a supposedly anomalous light, or "ghost light", occasionally seen between the late 19th century and 1977 along a section of railroad track near the unincorporated community of Maco Station, North Carolina. Said to resemble the glow from a railroad lantern, the light was associated with a folk tale describing a fatal accident, which may have inspired tales of a similar type around the country. The light was never formally explained, but was often thought to be the result of marsh gas from nearby swamps or the refraction of lights from a highway. Legend The tale associated the light with Joe Baldwin, a train conductor who was said to have been decapitated in a collision between a runaway passenger car or caboose and a locomotive at Maco, along the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad, in the late 1800s. According to the most common version of the legend, Joe Baldwin was in the rear car of a Wilmington-bound train on a rainy night in 1867. As the train neared Maco, Baldwin realized the car had become detached from the rest of the train. He knew another train was following, so he ran to the rear platform and frantically waved a lantern to signal the oncoming train. The engineer failed to see the stranded railroad car in time, and Baldwin was decapitated in the collision. Some variants of the story added that Baldwin's head was never found. Shortly after the accident, residents of Maco and railroad employees reported sightings of a white light along a section of railroad track through swamps west of Maco station, and word spread that Joe Baldwin had returned to search for his missing head. The light was said to appear in the distance, before approaching along the tracks facing East, bobbing at a height of about 5 feet, and either flying to the side of the track in an arc or receding from the viewer. Other reports spoke of green or red lights, or other patterns of movement. The earliest stories supposedly dated from the 1870s, and until the 1886 Charleston earthquake, two lights were often reported: railroad employees said that trains had occasionally been stopped or delayed due to the activities of the light, which had even been seen from locomotive cabs. The journal Railroad Telegrapher, for example, reported in 1946 that the light had been seen on March 3 that year, and suggested