For some longtime locals, this mystery may sound familiar.

Munger Road traverses nearby Wayne and Bartlett, and there’s a particularly dark stretch that runs through Pratt’s Wayne Woods Forest Preserve across railroad tracks.

The legend says a school bus once stalled on those tracks and was hit by a train, killing every child on board. If you park on the crossing with baby powder on the bumper, their ghosts supposedly push your car to safety and leave tiny handprints in the powder as proof.

This fall marks 15 years since a St. Charles native turned that ghost story into a full-length horror movie called “Munger Road” — which ended up selling out every screen at the Charlestowne 18 theater.

Nick Smith, the film’s writer and director, grew up on St. Charles’ west side and was in the first class to graduate from St. Charles North. He discussed the film at length during a 2023 episode of the “What’s Up St. Charles” podcast.

Like many other local teens and college students, he and his friends would head out to Munger Road late at night to test the urban legend (he doesn’t recommend it).

After film school at Columbia College in Chicago, Smith moved to Los Angeles and decided to write his own script. He picked a title locals would recognize, so it wouldn’t need a famous name attached.

The plot follows four St. Charles teens who drive out to the tracks the night before Scarecrow Fest. Their car won’t start, their phones die, and a handprint appears on the window. Meanwhile, an escaped serial killer is headed back to town.

The crew shot over 16 nights in 2010 across Bartlett, St. Charles, Elburn, Geneva, and Sugar Grove, on a reported budget of under $500,000. Most of the crew were fellow Columbia grads. Oscar nominee Bruce Davison played the St. Charles police chief.

The film opened Sept. 30, 2011, exclusively in St. Charles for the first week. The midnight show sold out so fast that the theater opened every screen. Smith said during the podcast interview that it posted the highest per-screen average in the country that weekend, meaning the most ticket sales per theater screen.

According to a 2021 WBEZ investigation, the crash likely never even happened.

The Bartlett History Museum’s director spent about 25 years looking for proof, interviewing dozens of longtime residents, searching newspaper archives, and inquiring with the school district. She found nothing.

Bartlett was home to roughly 700 residents in 1950, so a tragedy like that would have been hard to forget.

The actual origin story may stem from an entirely different part of the country. An archivist tracking an identical legend in San Antonio traced it back to a 1938 crash near Salt Lake City, where a freight train hit a school bus and killed more than 20 people, mostly students.

The story went out on news wires nationwide, including the Chicago Tribune, and seems to have been adopted as a local legend in more than one place around the country.

The movie ends on a cliffhanger, and Smith revealed in 2023 that “Munger Road Part 2” was in the works to be shot in St. Charles.

In August 2024, the film’s Facebook page announced that production was postponed due to a scheduling issue, with a promise to update fans when the time comes.

In 2026, 15 years later, the story remains unfinished.

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