18/08/2026
On Friday 18 August 1865, with the memory of the week’s horror still hanging over Leicester, Coroner J. Gregory, Esq., sat at the Swan and Rushes Public House in Infirmary Square to hear the evidence concerning a death from which the Glenfield Tunnel would not soon be freed.
The woman had been found half a mile within that long, black passage, lying close against the single line of rail. She was young, respectably dressed, and frightfully injured. Still insensible, she was carried from the tunnel’s mouth to the Leicester Infirmary, but whatever life remained in her was already slipping away. Soon after her admission, she died.
The tale began on Monday 14 August, beside the mouth of the Glenfield Tunnel, where Joseph Moore, a plate layer for the Midland Railway Company, lived with his children in a small cottage. That morning, at about twenty minutes to eleven, his daughter Elisabeth saw a young woman moving along the railway line, gathering blackberries as though the day held nothing darker than summer fruit and dust upon the track. A few minutes later, the stranger came to the cottage and asked for water. Elisabeth gave her a glass, and the two sat together on the steps, the tunnel brooding nearby like an open grave. The woman said she was from Leicester and had miles and miles yet to travel before reaching her journey’s end. Then, although she claimed she was going back to Leicester, she rose and walked towards the tunnel instead, taking the very road that led away from safety.
Elisabeth and her two little brothers ran after her, calling for her to come back, for a train was coming. From the far end of the tunnel came the movement of wagons, the first dull warning of iron on iron. But the young woman only answered, “I shall be all right,” and stepped into the darkness. The children screamed and begged her to return, yet still she went on, running up the middle of the track into the black mouth of the tunnel, as though something within it had called her by name.
A few minutes later, the loaded wagons entered after her. The tunnel swallowed the train in smoke, thunder, and darkness, and when the noise passed on, the young woman was gone from sight.
For nearly a quarter of an hour, the children waited while smoke drifted out of the tunnel’s mouth. When it thinned at last, they peered inside, but saw nothing. The passage was so narrow that no living person could safely stand within it while a train passed; and yet, somewhere in that blackness, the stranger remained.
At half-past four, another empty wagon train from Leicester passed through the tunnel, its wheels carrying the sound of the afternoon deeper into the dark.
Elisabeth could do nothing but wait beside the cottage, unable to leave her younger brothers alone. The tunnel gave no answer. When her older brother Edward returned from work, she sent him into Leicester to fetch their father. Joseph Moore came back with William Adcock, and when Elisabeth told them what she had seen, the men took a light and entered the tunnel.
Joseph Moore and William Adcock went some six or seven hundred yards from the mouth, the small light carrying poorly against the darkness. There, in the four-foot way beside the rail, they found her. The young woman was still alive. In her pockets remained the blackberries she had gathered that morning, a terrible remnant of the ordinary world she had left behind. Joseph went back for a trolley, while Adcock hurried to the station master at Glenfield to stop any further trains. With the station master accompanying them, they carried her to the Infirmary in Leicester. She never spoke. Shortly after reaching the hospital, she died.
Mr. J. C. Macaulay, Assistant Surgeon at the Infirmary, gave the medical evidence. She had suffered a compound fracture of the left leg and right arm, a severe scalp wound, and bruising across different parts of the body. Though semi-conscious, she uttered no word. The injuries, he said, were such as would be caused by the train passing over her body, the bones being completely crushed. Death came through shock and excessive loss of blood.
The dead woman was about 25 years of age, dark, with a swarthy complexion, and some believed her to be of gypsy origin and a travelling woman. She was about five feet two inches tall and slightly built. She wore a red-coloured dress with two flounces; its bodice trimmed with red composition buttons and narrow black velvet; a black buff shawl; black and red striped stockings; elastic-sided boots; a crinoline; a bonnet; and the usual underclothing. There was no ring upon her fingers. Her description was sent to every common lodging house in Leicester, but no one had seen such a woman. No one claimed her. No name rose from the town to follow her into the grave. She remained, in death as in life, a perfect stranger.
The jury returned its verdict: “That the deceased was knocked down and run over, but whether she went into the tunnel for the purpose of self-destruction or not, there was no evidence to show.” So the inquest ended, but the story did not seem to close so easily. What remained was the image of the unknown young woman walking calmly away from Leicester, pockets filled with blackberries, and disappearing into the Glenfield Tunnel as though the darkness itself had been waiting for her.
The unknown woman was buried in a common grave at Welford Road Cemetery on 18 August 1865, one of the first two souls laid in that plot. Beside her that day was a stillborn child, the child of Mary Burdett of Humberstone Road. In time, seven more infants would be placed there with her, their brief lives ranging from stillbirth to only three months; among them were twins. For sixty years the grave remained a shared and nameless resting place, until in 1925 it became a freehold family grave when Thomas Yale, aged 75, was buried there. It lies in the un-consecrated section of the cemetery, facing University Road; a quiet patch of earth where the stranger from the tunnel rests among children, her name still lost, her story still lingering like smoke in the dark.
Friends of Welford Road Cemetery Leicester
