A Bowler Hat in the Underground: Ghosts, Automation, and the City’s Unseen Hands

The platform hums, the doors blink, and a familiar phrase cuts through the noise—only this time, the voice belongs to a person with a life, a marriage, and a memory that refuses to fade. We follow the thread from London’s Embankment Station, where a widow hears her late husband’s announcement restored to the speakers, to the New York subway, where a bowler-hatted figure slips through crowds and leaves tragedy on the tracks. Along the way, we confront a deeper question: what happens to our humanity when cities run on automated ghosts and crowds that obscure more than they reveal?

We unpack how urban automation strips personhood from everyday rituals, why abandoned stations become perfect hosts for hauntings, and how legends grow in the gaps left by relentless change. Drawing on philosophy, transit history, and first-hand accounts, we explore the uneasy overlap of safety, memory, and myth—where a cautionary announcement turns into a love story, and a faceless killer becomes the embodiment of urban dread. From Bigfoot’s many names to the Mothman’s migrations, the conversation opens portals to the folklore that helps us make sense of what cities forget.

What emerges is a call to pay attention: to the voices behind our systems, to the faces in our crowds, and to the stories that keep us awake underground. If the rails are going to carry us forward, they need to carry our names, too. Ride with us as we search for what hides in plain sight, question the legends that won’t let go, and learn how to mind the gap—between train and platform, between efficiency and empathy, and between myth and the lives we’re trying to protect. If this moved you, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening, Customs, and Tease of Relic
• 1:36 Trains, Memory, and The Bowler Hat Man
• 4:00 Cities, Ghosts, and Automation
• 7:18 The Voice at Embankment Station
• 10:03 Abandoned Stations and Urban Myths
• 13:02 The Killer in the Long Coat
• 18:24 Portals, Monsters, and Open Questions
• 20:24 Listener Stories and Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Hey everybody, it's Dr. G's fair tales and magic. I hope this finds you well. It's a little after 730 in Phoenix, holding it about seventy-seven degrees, which is chilly for the folks that live here. We've sparked a lot of interest about the man in the top hat, or some people say a bowler hat. A couple of things I wanted to mention this evening. If all goes well in the next day or two, I'll be getting a package from Spain that has a very interesting old object in it. We'll cover more about that if it arrives and doesn't get lost in a shuffle somewhere with the some of the new custom rules, which I have some friends who work CB customs and border patrol. You know, their job is hard enough. And I know some of the people that listen to this are people who have a whole lot more pool than I do. Adding another dozen things to the things that those people have to do and making them collectors of tariffs on things that are ridiculous to have tariffs on. I guess you've never heard the expression the more valves you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to clog up the pipes. Let's worry about the things that are coming across the borders that should not be coming across the borders. And no, I don't always mean people. There's a TV show called Seized at the Border. Spend a couple of days watching that. And you will better understand the, pardon my expression, shit that our brothers and sisters of customs go through on a daily basis. And as many of you know, especially if you're longtime followers of the podcast or the show or the previous podcasts that were before this one, I have this fascination with trains. Started when I was a child. And if you go back through the episodes of the podcast, sitting in my office in front of a closet door, and I use it in the show, is one of the lanterns that came my way from my first encounter with a caboose man from very long ago. So I get a story from someone in New York, and I wish that they did not want to remain anonymous. I understand why you're doing that. But I also understand if I were you, I would be all over this thing. I would claim it, I'd jump up and down, I'd add it to my business. Um, but that's just me. You have to think about that for a little bit. I made you a couple promises decades ago that you and I's relationship, which is kind of a weird friendship, uh, doesn't go public unless you say it's okay. And I understand the pressures of being a star because I wasn't always where I am now. A train pulls into London, Paddington. A disembodied voice announces the name of the station to the passengers that are on board the train, the lights on the doors blink. The voice sounds again and says, Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. And an ocean of people pour out of the characters. They step over the gap with little thought, but practiced instinct. There is a phantasmagoric characteristic to this everyday site. London's innumerable ghosts peek out of the minded gap and are stepped over with little thought and practiced instinct. Most metropolises have become known for being overrun with ghosts, from New York to London, Mumbai to Shanghai. You know, a simple Google search throws up an encyclopedia worth of ghosts and ghost stories. I would know that for sure. Based on things that go bump in the dark, yet, personally, when I speak of ghosts, I don't mean the horror story variety. Our lives in cities are shaped by invisible hands, bodiless voices, and an eerie automation of infrastructure. A French Jesuit philosopher, I believe it was Michael de Courteaux, hope he didn't mess that up, wrote that cities are in a constant state of decay and transformation, constant demolition and constant rebuilding. And this repeated change that makes cities very fertile for ghosts and hauntings. In the practice of everyday life, which I believe was 1980, he wrote that haunted places are the only places people can live in, as the human psyche is too intertwined with memory and familiarity to let go of things past. The mind, he says, comes up with creative forms of resistance, if you will, to cope with the pressures of modern life. And ghosts are one of them. The automation of cities has the effect of alienating people from a state of personhood. If there is a tacit shadow self, urban life produces, to better understand how this happens, consider those mind the gap announcements. The announcements were first introduced on the London Underground in 1968. The breast caution has become a bit of a stock phrase, that is up until 2012. Many stations used 40-year-old voice recordings. After four decades or so, a number of the original voice artists behind those announcements had passed away. So in 2012, the railway announcement system became digitized, and the voices of the dead announcers were banished from the platforms. This is typical of the way that labor networks evolve. As new forms of automation become common, some labor will be created, but some also must be made redundant. If cities are indeed in flux, and that is the heart of the city dwellers, alienation. Change in cities is routine, and the exorcism of London's railway went largely unnoticed, except if you travel fourteen minutes southeast from Paddington and pool into embankment station, where the mind the gap announcement is distinct from anywhere else in the city. Perhaps because it's still the voice of a ghost. The BBC would later report that her panace query stated, That was the voice of my husband. It is, you see, all I have left. Margaret McCollum is the widow of Oswald Lawrence, the actor that had recorded the original announcement. It's easy to forget that being projected over all the audio systems every two to four minutes. The announcement voices originated in a real person with a real, complex life.

unknown: 9:48

Mr.

SPEAKER_00: 9:49

Collum returned personhood and disembodied voices took it away. Eventually, Transport for London restored Lawrence's voice to the embankment station. An American author I believe was David Foster. I believe he goes by David Foster Wallace, actually, um wrote that every love story is in fact a ghost story. But not all ghost stories are love stories. Rather, they are tales of definitely abandoned, but not quite forgotten. Which brings us to New York. Now I have spent perhaps not as much time as residents of New York, but not a complete stranger to the New York subway system. In some future podcasts, we'll discover an urban story about a couple of mentalists who made a train car full of people disappear in the subway. And I have to say at this point I have no knowledge of any such thing. New York City has about a dozen abandoned subway stations. Paris has a number of the same kind of stations. In Berlin was a tangible reminder of the separation of East and West Germany for Soviet area commuters. Transport within cities is dictated by economic and sociopolitical shifts more than anything else. And in New York, it was inveritable that there will be stations that trains no longer stop at, places of, let's say, disuse that become the home of ghosts and shifting phantoms, the stuff of legends and ghost stories. It's said that the industrialization of society will ward off ghosts. And yet, in my opinion, the very opposite has taken place in a number of settings. There are often places that have modernized, at least infrastructurally, but still hold tight to cultural stories in iconoclasms. Which brings us to our friend who works for the New York City Subway. Actually, that's not true, who used to work for the New York City Subway, but probably hasn't been in the subway in a long time unless he just feels like being nostalgic at this point. But anyone who has ever rode the New York City subway knows there are some, shall we say, interesting characters down there. We've got doomsday prophets to people claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, colorful folks that can make the most entertaining or the most obnoxious part of your day. I myself being no stranger to the New York City subway, I would agree. I would also agree with this man when he says most of them are harmless enough, providing you follow the golden rules of the underground, which he would say would be stare off into the distance till they go away or till you reach your stop. In general, that should do it. But sometimes he says, he feels obligated to warn tourists about the truly dangerous undergrounders, the malicious ones. After about a year with the MTA, he notices a man in a long overcoat in what he describes as a bowler hat. He claims that he never got a good look at his face. It was always seemed to be stone-typed and a hard look, but it seemed like he was on an automatic pivot. And every time somebody tried to look him directly in the face, they would be unable to describe his features to anyone other than generalities. Whenever anyone was asked, they would say they did not even notice him till the commotion began. And once that happened, it was impossible to notice him in the crowd. He was on to say that the first time he sees him is in July, and that he did not take much notice of him. After all, when you work here, again, there are many strange folks in the subway system, and after a while you will become a little numb to such things. He did make a small mental note about his clothing, about how the man must have been really hot, overheated wearing such a long coat and hat in July in New York. A moment later the man pushes a lady into the path of a train. He spent a minute or two listening for the train and used one of his long arms to hit the woman in the back, causing her to fall on the tracks. A second or two later, the train hit. Some of the witnesses reveal that as she fell, her arm landed on the live rail. So it may be that she was dead from electrocution and never felt the train hit. The platform erupted in chaos, and even though the engineer hit the brakes, it takes a very long time for Metro to slow down and a longer time for it to stop. You would think that the guy would have been caught right then and there. But nobody can recall getting a good look at his face. And even though the area was swarmed with police officers and bystanders eagerly willing to help, no trace of the man would be found. Six months later, he saw the long overcoat going through a turnstile, and he ran to catch him. He didn't see it happen, he just heard the chaos. This time, it had been an elderly man that was killed, pushed into the path of the train. While that would be the last time our friend would see him, he would appear at least three more times in the next four years, where he killed two women and one little boy. Three years later, the woman he pushed acted quickly enough to scramble back to the platform. She immediately swung her purse at the man who pushed her, but he wasn't there. He was last spotted three years ago when he pushed a young man directly into the path of an oncoming train, killing him instantly. Our friend tells us that he hasn't been seen in the New York City subway since. That's our man in the long coat and what some people call a bowler hat. Some people call it a top hat, a short top hat. As the month of October rolls on, you're going to hear more about that man, sightings of him. And if you heard the podcast yesterday, we talked about Bigfoot names in every state in the union. We're going to cover that list too. Now I only mention that because Bigfoot, or whatever you want to call it, has been seen all over the place. Then we have our friend the Mothman. The Mothman has been seen in many other places, other than Point Pleasant. Is our Talpat friend one of those alleged beings that can travel through portals or time and space? Does he show up occasionally just to do bad things? Is he a warning or a curse? Time may tell. Or it may not. There's indeed a world I've seen. A world that exists all around us. All the time. And every now and then. For whatever reason, we catch a glimpse of it. And the debt get in. Keep sending your stories and your emails. We thank you so much for all of them. Give us a share, give us a like, follow us. No pun intended. Help us to move this train along. Hopefully, without our man in the top hat. Good night from Phoenix.