At a rail station, an unnamed narrator cheerfully greets a train signalman by yelling down to him, “Halloa! Below there!” Though the signalman is initially stoic and unfriendly, he reluctantly allows the narrator to approach him at his post in a trench below ground. The narrator immediately notices how dismal the signalman’s working conditions are: the signalman can barely see the sunlight and has to face a red light near a tunnel all day. Because he’s newly interested in the railroad industry, the narrator questions the signalman about his job, but the signalman seems frightened—he believes he’s met the narrator before, which the narrator denies.
After this, the signalman then grows friendlier, inviting the narrator into his box (the small room he works inside near the train tracks) and describing his duties. The narrator wonders why the signalman is so well educated, and the signalman explains that he was once a natural philosophy student but squandered his professional opportunities. He has no resentment about this and explains that “he had made his bed, and he lay upon it.” After watching the signalman work, the narrator believes that he’s “exact and vigilant” in attending to his duties. However, the signalman also seems distracted, twice looking to the red light even when no trains are there. The signalman tells the narrator that if he comes back the next night, he’ll explain why.
As promised, when the narrator returns, the signalman reveals the full story. The reason he was unfriendly when the narrator first appeared, and the reason he thought they’d met before, is that the narrator’s greeting (“Halloa! Below there!”) yesterday was identical to the greeting of a ghost who visited the signalman months before. Standing near the red light by the tunnel, the ghost waved its arm across its eyes, a gesture the narrator thinks is akin to saying “For God’s sake, clear the way!” The signalman telegraphed an alarm to other stations, who replied that nothing was wrong. But just six hours after the haunting, there was a fatal rail crash.
Half a year later, the ghost appeared at the red light again, this time silently covering its face in what the narrator describes as “an action of mourning”—the next day, a young woman collapsed and died in a passing train. And the hauntings still aren’t over. The ghost reappeared a week ago, and the signalman has been haunted in “fits and starts” ever since. This explains why he was so distracted yesterday: he kept seeing the ghost by the tunnel.
The narrator, always logical, tells the signalman that the hauntings are all in his head, but the signalman isn’t convinced. Instead, he wants the narrator to help him figure out what the hauntings mean, particularly because a third accident will surely occur. He’s especially confused about why the ghost is coming to him—the warnings are never specific enough to prevent an accident, and if he sounded a vague alarm, he’d be fired. He believes it’s a “cruel haunting”: he’s forced to know about disaster ahead of time, but he’s helpless to stop it. As a result, he feels responsible for the deaths of others.
Convinced that the signalman has lost his mind, the narrator realizes that the man may be a danger to the passengers on his rail line: if he’s distracted and unable to do his job properly, an accident could occur. After leaving the signalman, the narrator decides that he’ll offer to bring him to a doctor the following evening “for the public safety.” But when he returns, a crowd of workers tell him that the signalman was killed by a passing train near the tunnel. Moments before the crash, the engine-driver, Tom, had yelled at the signalman, “Below there!” and “For God’s sake, clear the way!” Hearing these events recounted, the narrator is alarmed to remember that he’s connected to both of these phrases: he used the first to greet the signalman when they first met, and he assigned the second to the ghost’s gesture. However, he never spoke the second phrase out loud—he only thought that was what the ghost looked like it was saying. He decides to end his story without “dwell[ing] on any one of its curious circumstances.”
