Like the narrator’s repetition of the ghost’s greeting, the ghost’s gesture is ultimately unhelpful-Tom can’t get the signalman’s attention, so his waving arms serve only to disturb the narrator the same way the narrator’s greeting disturbed the signalman. In every haunting, the ghost waves to get the signalman’s attention at the end of the story, the engine-driver, Tom, mimics this movement right before his train kills the signalman. While the ghost’s purpose is to warn about accidents, it doesn’t seem to want to prevent them-as the signalman explains to the narrator, the ghost’s information is never specific enough to shut down the rail line (the signalman doesn’t know where or when they’ll happen), so the warnings do nothing but torment the signalman. At the end of the story, a passing train kills the signalman, suggesting that the final haunting foretold his own death. When the signalman meets the narrator, he’s being haunted by the ghost in “fits and starts.” At first, the signalman even mistakes the narrator for the ghost when they first meet, the narrator greets the signalman using the exact same phrase (“Halloa! Below there!”) that the ghost once uttered to the signalman. After the first haunting, there was a train accident on the signalman’s line after the second, a young woman died in a passing train. The ghost is a mysterious figure that haunts the signalman (or so he claims), always appearing by the red light near the tunnel and always covering its face, either with its hands or by waving.
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