The mystery surrounding the fate of 57 emigrant railroad workers from the Parish of Fahan County Donegal has long been the subject of ghost stories and a part of the local folklore of Pennsylvania where they disappeared without trace just 6 weeks after arriving in America in 1832.

However two professors of history at Immaculata University, who made a detailed study of the strange case after stumbling on a lost file in their grandfather???s attic believe that foul play was definitely involved.

The professors believe that the railroad corporation who employed the men deliberately distroyed files on the deaths to stop the truth from emerging. The 57 who were officially listed as cholera victims are still said by locals to haunt Duffy???s Cut a one mile section of railroad just outside Philadelphia.

The majority of the men came from Fahan, a picturesque but very poor parish on the shores of Lough Swilly in County Donegal 10 miles from Londonderry City, the remainder coming from the City itself.All the men arrived in America on board the ???John Stamp???. Among the 57 who set sail from the Port of Derry and landed in Philadelphia on the 14th June 1832 included men by the name of Doherty, Fullerton,Ruddy,McKinney,Elder and Magee.

Their employment records were hidden for decades by the railroad corporation and but for the diligent research of the two professors the truth might have remained undiscovered for ever.

The project became a passion for William Watson and John Ahtes of Immaculata College who made a huge search of state and national archives to uncover the men???s identities.
A Pennsylvania cemetery has volunteered individual graves for all the men when their bodies are exhumed and Irish graduate students have been recruited to investigate the men???s backgrounds.

What in all probability initially devastated the small party of Donegal labourers within 6 weeks of their arrival in the land of dreams was an outbreak of cholera caused by comtaminated drinking water provided for them by their employers. By August of 1832 disaster had struck at ???Duffy???s Cut???with a catastrophic impact. Men were dying by the day and those who were able to walk received no support or help of any kind from the local community, maybe because they could not understand their strong Donegal dialect but most likely it was that they were viewed with deep suspicion by the local Quakers.

For the ganger Phil Duffy this all had the makings of unmitigated disaster. He had set his sights on making a first rate job of this mile of railway and if the job was done right came in on time and his bosses were happy, he would have been handed much bigger contracts as the railroad made its way across America.

To have his men dying around him was just not acceptable His blacksmith a man named Harris was designated by Duffy to bury the dead and to cover up the entire episode,something Harris managed to do with contracting the fatal disease himself. Duffy never got his own hands dirty and Harris was well paid to keep his mouth shut.

Bill Watson believes however that not all the men could have died from Cholera. The nature of the disease is that while people may appear to be dead while they are in fact still alive,it is likely that Harris in his rush to get rid of the bodies probably buried some of the men alive.
In any event they went from virile manhood to walking corpses with weeks while Duffy and the railroad went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the bodies were never found.
The shantys that they lived in were burned to the ground and their personal belongings destroyed.

Cholera has a death rate of about 40%-60% and it is almost certain that all the dead men did not died from the disease. What could have happened to them?

Watson has a theory. The local Quakers would have been very fearful of this disease and it is known that they had vigilante groups, who Bill Watson believes probably shot the poor unfortunate survivors to death when they came looking for help.
He has reached this terrible conclusion from reading his grandfather???s papers.

So, for the 57 men who left their cottages in Fahan,in the early summer of 1832, with high hopes of a better life in America,it was not the land of opportunity they had dreamed of, but instead within 6 short weeks of arrival they had been either poisoned by the people who had brought them there, or murdered by those they had turned to for help in their hour of need..