The Collapsed Tunnel

July 20, 1900

This story is one that I have kept locked away in the deepest parts of my heart for a long time. After the incident the town was shut down and the mine closed, and I thought I had no reason to share this with anyone. But I realize now that I do, and after all of those years the truth has been slowly eating away at my sanity.

Survivors guilt, most will say.

You see, fourteen men and one woman was killed that day. Who knew that only ten or so out of a few dozen support beams had been put up properly. Not those miners. Not anyone.

Fifteen people died and it was my fault.

The miners watched as boulders fell from supposedly sound supports and crushed them.

The woman in the mines was my daughter, and had it not been for Lewis she never would have been in the mines that day. No one should watch as everything is falling around you, death everywhere, and yet you somehow survive. I was trapped underground for three days and three nights, staring at the corpses of my daughter and her lover. When a rescue team pulled away boulders blocking the way out I shouted out to them that I would never, ever, again pick up a piece of coal or be forced to go down a mineshaft again.

When I was finally free of the prison of my own making, I took my distraught wife and we moved away, to a place where I would never have to hear the words ‘mine’ and ‘collapsed’ again. Now that Eliza has joined Alice and Lewis in Heaven, I must come to terms with the fact that it was my fault that tunnel collapsed that wretched day.

I never laid the supports right.

-John Miller