By Richard Senate –
While giving tours on Ojai Day, sharing the town’s rich history and ghost stories, one of my guests shared a chilling experience of his own. After moving to the community of Oak View, he swore he heard the unmistakable sound of a train whistle late one night—a sound he’d known well from his youth. However, he was puzzled, as he had never heard it in Oak View before. What he didn’t realize was that a spur line once connected the Ojai Valley to Ventura, with the last train running on those tracks in 1955. Always eager for a new ghost story, I listened intently to his account.
In fact, I found other references to phantom trains along the route from Ventura to Ojai. One woman in 1982 saw the light of a train’s headlamp, accompanied by the sound of a steam engine. Another in 1987 heard the bell ringing on Fox Street in Ojai. It seems there might be something to the legend of a ghost train after all. Naturally, I turned to the library to delve into the history of the old train line.
In 1887, the Southern Pacific Railroad completed a station in Ventura, connecting cities and towns across Ventura County. However, due to the difficult terrain, the Ojai Valley wasn’t included in the original plan. Seeing the potential benefits of a spur line to the Valley, Ventura residents formed an organization to fund its construction. The Ojai Valley, which had been established as Nordhoff, was named after the writer Charles Nordhoff, who had written about California’s mild climate and health benefits. People came to Ojai seeking recovery, often facing perilous stagecoach journeys through rough terrain and the threat of mountain lions, which were locally known as “Catamounts.”
Finally, in 1897, crews began to grade the tracks for the long-awaited spur line. The most difficult section was a rugged area called “Devil’s Gulch,” what we now know as Oak View. Despite the challenges, the 16-mile spur line was completed, with the first train running on February 24, 1898. The line carried oranges to market and transported passengers until its closure in 1955. Flooding was a recurring issue, requiring frequent track repairs. The journey to Ojai, which had been renamed from Nordhoff in 1917, took two hours and cost sixty cents.
During World War II, the line was used to transport soldiers and marines suffering from battle fatigue to the Ojai Valley Inn, which had been converted into a convalescent hospital. Despite its importance to the local community, the line was never a priority for the railroad, which assigned outdated steam engines to the route. Southern Pacific even gave the line the catchy name “The Hummingbird,” but locals, in their irreverence, dubbed the aging trains “The Buzzard.”
The line was officially shut down in 1955, and the tracks were severely damaged in the flood of 1969. Today, the right-of-way has been repurposed as the Ojai Valley Trail and Ventura River Trail, serving as a lasting memorial to the Ojai Spur Line that helped Ventura County grow. But as I wonder about the echoes of long-forgotten trains, I can’t help but ask: are there others out there who still hear the distant whistle of the ghost train along the old route?
