Overview
The Cohoke Light belongs to a lonely rail crossing in King William County, Virginia, near West Point, where since at least the early 20th century watchers have described a light appearing down the straight track after dark — white to yellow, swinging as if carried, approaching before fading — Tidewater's contribution to the American ghost-light canon. Its telling is the genre's own: a railroad man decapitated in an accident who searches with his lantern, or in another thread a lost train of Confederate wounded that never arrived, versions unanchored to documented events; explanations from headlights to marsh gas have been argued and never settled, and generations of Richmond and Peninsula teenagers made the drive to park and watch, sometimes in such numbers that patrols dispersed them. The crossing is a working rural road at an active corridor's edge: park lawfully and clear of the rails, respect the surrounding farms and timberland, and keep visits brief and quiet. Present the Cohoke Light as regional folklore in the classic pattern, hedged and undocumented.