There is an old photograph, yellowed and half-melted by time.  

It shows a small ticket booth at the far end of a deserted platform.  

Inside the booth stands a girl—barely more than sixteen—wearing a uniform no railway has used for a century.  

Her expression is clear, but her eyes are overexposed, two white flares where light refuses to leave.

No one knows who took the photograph.  

No one remembers where it was found.  

Yet every few years, it surfaces again—online, in antique shops, in the backrooms of train museums—each copy slightly different.  

In some, the girl’s head is tilted left; in others, her mouth almost smiles.  

And in the oldest prints, a faint reflection in the glass behind her seems to show a train waiting on a track that does not exist.

The first person to claim he met her was a man named Kordell, a traveling salesman from the 1930s.  

He told the story many times in bars before dying in his sleep.  

He said he’d boarded the wrong train one foggy evening and woken when the carriage stopped in total silence.  

The lamps outside burned with a color he could not describe—“like someone remembered gold.”  

Through the window he saw a ticket booth, the glass glowing softly from within.  

Behind it stood a girl with pale hair pinned under a conductor’s cap.  

She was reading something, lips moving silently.  

When she looked up, he felt the world tilt slightly, as though gravity had lost interest in him.

He stepped onto the platform, meaning to ask where he was.  

But when he approached, the girl raised her hand as if to stop him and slid a ticket through the opening beneath the glass.  

It was blank except for a single printed word: **TERMINUS.**

“Where does this go?” he asked.

She smiled, almost shyly.  

“Everywhere you’ve forgotten,” she said.

Then the train doors closed behind him without sound.  

The lights dimmed.  

When he turned around again, the booth was empty.

Kordell claimed he kept the ticket for years, though he never showed it to anyone.  

On his deathbed, his daughter said he tried to speak, but the only word he managed was *“Terminus.”*

Decades later, another story appeared—this time from a university student studying folklore.  

She dreamed she was lost in a city of fog and railway lines.  

At the center stood a glass booth glowing like a lantern.  

Inside, the same girl waited, but younger, as if time around her flowed backward.  

The student asked for a way home.  

The girl wrote something on a slip of paper and pressed it to the glass.  

The word read: **WAIT.**  

When the student woke, she found a small piece of paper stuck to her palm, damp as if from rain, the word smudged but still there.

More accounts followed.  

A retired engineer on a night train saw the girl reflected in the window beside him, though there was no booth outside.  

A child waiting for her parents described “the lady behind the window who sells dreams for one coin.”  

A woman in therapy sessions began drawing endless sketches of the same face: soft eyes, conductor’s cap, and behind her a sign marked “0.”  

None of these people knew each other.  

All used nearly identical words.

One stormy spring, the booth itself was reportedly found—by a pair of urban explorers who followed a disused line through the woods.  

They filmed everything: tunnels carved through rock, collapsed sleepers, wild vines swallowing metal.  

Then they reached a clearing where the rain fell straight, as though something above had parted the clouds just there.  

A booth stood under the skeletal frame of an old roof.  

Its paint peeled in layers the color of old sea shells.  

Inside, through the clouded glass, a figure moved.  

The explorers froze.

“Are you seeing this?” one whispered.

The camera shook, zooming in.  

A young woman looked up.  

Her lips formed a question.  

Then the feed cut—no fade, no distortion—just gone.

Authorities searched the site the next day.  

They found no booth, no tracks, no sign of disturbance.  

The video was uploaded once to a private forum before being deleted.  

The only surviving frame shows rain striking something invisible, drops flattening in mid-air.

Those who study railway folklore noticed something strange: every witness who claimed to see the girl later vanished from digital records for exactly seventeen minutes.  

Phone logs, emails, GPS trails—all missing the same window of time.  

When the data returned, their devices displayed a single message unsent from their own accounts:  

> “Ticket issued. Please remain where you are.”

No sender. No recipient.

The stories persist because they are gentle, almost kind.  

The girl at the ticket booth never threatens, never traps.  

She simply offers what people already long for—a destination, a reason, a last chance to belong to the rhythm of trains that never end.  

Those who remember her describe her voice as warm, steady, practiced.  

As if she has said the same farewell for centuries and still hopes someone will answer it correctly.

An old conductor once said, “Every station needs a heart.”  

Perhaps that is what she is—the pulse inside the concrete, the dream that keeps the doors from rusting shut.  

Perhaps she was never alive at all, only the echo of every promise the rails have ever made: *to take you somewhere else.*

If you ever ride a night train and the carriage halts without reason,  

if the lights flicker and a faint warmth glows through the window ahead,  

look carefully before you step down.

There might be a booth at the end of the platform, its glass breathing faintly, a girl waiting behind it with a ticket already printed.

She will meet your eyes.  

She will smile, small and almost grateful.  

And she will say, with the patience of someone who has watched entire lives pass through her window:

> “Next stop—still waiting.”