Crazed With Grief for Husband's Death, Woman Jumps from Train

1878

A Lady Jumping from a Train

A lady who was accompanying the remains of her husband from Florida to her home in Akron, Ohio, jumped from a rapidly moving express train on Friday night, just before she reached the end of her journey.

She was crazed with grief and a morbid apprehension that she would be blamed by his friends for having taken him away to die. When the train left Cincinnati she seemed to be calm, and the family physician, who accompanied her, thought she would sleep after so much exhaustion. Worn out with watching and anxiety he went to sleep himself in a berth opposite to her. When the train neared Akron, early in the morning, the physician arose, and, to his horror, found her berth empty and the window open.

Search was made all through the train, but she was nowhere to be found. When the train stopped the poor physician was almost speechless. How could he give to the sorrowing friends the dead body of Mr. Phillips, and tell them that his wife had committed suicide? The telegraph was used at once to get tidings of the missing woman, but it was several hours before any response came, and then it was announced that the woman was lying at a house in a little village some distance off the railroad, not far from Mansfield.

A train was chartered and friends hastened to bring her home. They found her in bed, conscious, but almost exhausted. The people said that she knocked at their door a little while before daylight, and when they opened the door they found her all covered with mud, and unable to tell her name or anything about herself. She explained that after she went to her berth she could not sleep. She finally opened the window and looked out. It was raining, and the feeling that she was rapidly approaching her home brought an indefinable dread and a powerful impulse to escape it. With this feeling she threw herself out of the window while the train was in full motion. She fortunately struck upon a sandbank, and was thus saved from immediate death, as well as from severe injury.