Indeed, the phenomena is not new. There have been eerie tales of coaches stopping for ghosts dating back to the 1600's.
This story is an oldie-but-goodee. I can't find my original version, so I've pinced Toms'. He won't mind
'During the early hours of a rainy autumnal morning in 1958, a long-distance HGV driver named Harry Unsworth was driving his vehicle along the A38 motorway towards a depot in Cullompton, Devonshire, England, when he noticed the silhouette of a man about three hundred yards in front of him, standing in the middle of the road.
Unsworth slowed down his vehicle and stared beyond his busy windscreen wipers at the figure ahead. The stranger was middle-aged, with a mop of curly grey hair, and he wore a saturated grey raincoat. The man produced a torch from his pocket and flashed it at Unsworth, who responded by pulling his lorry up. Unsworth wound his side window down to get a better look at the hitch-hiker.
The man stood there on the road, looking up at the driver with a dripping, expressionless face.
"Come on then!" Unsworth shouted, impatiently.
The man climbed into the driver's cab, and in a well-spoken voice he asked Unsworth to drop him off four miles down the motorway at the old bridge at Holcombe.
The lorry drove on into the night down the deserted motorway, and the hitch-hiker suddenly started to chuckle. Unsworth glanced at him while he laughed, but the stranger turned his face away and looked out the passenger window, sniggering to himself for no reason.
Unsworth asked him what was funny, and the man suddenly turned to face him. His face was contorted with an eerie smile.
"Did you know there was a real tragic pile up here a few years ago? Arms and legs everywhere." said the hitch-hiker.
And he continued to recount grisly stories about all the traffic accidents that he'd witnessed on the stretch of motorway. Unsworth had seen a few disturbing crashes in his time, but the gruesome blow-by-blow accounts of the fatalities told to him by the hitch-hiker really turned his stomach. Unsworth told the man to shut up, and was only too glad to be rid of his morbid passenger when the lorry reached the drop-off point at the old bridge.
Three days later, Mr Unsworth was driving his lorry through the dead of night along the same section of the A38, when he came across the same hitch-hiker again.
As before, the man stood in the middle of the road, flashing a torch and waving his arm.
With an impending sense of deja-vu, Unsworth pulled up beside the man, and again, the hitch-hiker asked to be dropped off at the old bridge at Holcombe. This time the man said nothing throughout the journey, but kept smiling and looking at Unsworth out the corner of his eye. This behaviour made the lorry-driver veryuneasy. When the man got out at the bridge, he didn't offer a word of thanks. He melted away into the darkness.
A month after that, Unsworth was again heading along the A38 to the lorry depot - when he saw the dreaded hitch-hiker again, standing in the road on the same stretch of motorway as before. The weather was even the same as it had been on the two previous occasions; torrential rain.
And the hitch-hiker's request?
To be dropped off four miles down the road at the old bridge. Understandably, Mr Unsworth was rather reluctant to give the man a lift, but decided to take him to the confounded bridge for the last time. Once more, the hitch-hiker remained silent during the journey, but occasionally burst out laughing. Unsworth believed the man to be suffering from a mental illness, so gave him the benefit of the doubt.
On the following night, Harry Unsworth was on the same route to the depot. As his vehicle neared the section of the A38 where the strange man had a habit of appearing, he anxiously scanned the road ahead. But on this occasion, the hitch-hiker was nowhere to be seen.
Three months later, Unsworth was whistling in his cab as he drove along the stretch of the A38 where he had first set eyes upon the hitch-hiker. He remembers smiling as he thought about the crazy man with the torch, and he also remembers the sight that wiped the smile off his face.
Standing in the pouring rain in the middle lane of the motorway was the grey-haired man waving his torch frantically.
Unsworth braked by the lunatic, and was astonished to hear the same hackneyed request from him. But Unsworth was now more intrigued than scared, and he dropped off the man at the bridge again - but this time the hitchhiker broke the repetitive pattern by asking Mr Unsworth to wait for him whilst he went to 'collect some suitcases,' because he wanted to go to a destination further down the road this time.
But the man didn't return to the lorry after twenty minutes had elapsed, and Unsworth, who was running to a tight schedule and couldn't afford to wait, started the vehicle up and drove on.
Three miles down the road, the lorry-driver's heart jumped when he saw the hitch-hiker waving his torch in the middle of the motorway. Unsworth was baffled as to how the man could have travelled such a distance in so short a time. The man obviously hadn't hitched a lift, for no vehicles had passed along the deserted motorway, and this fact gave Unsworth the creeps.
He tried to drive around the sinister man, but the hitch-hiker dived head-first into the path of the heavy-goods vehicle!
Unsworth slammed on the brakes and almost jack-knifed his vehicle. He leaped out of his cab and looked for the body of the madman in the road. He expected to find a flattened corpse, but there was none. Forty feet away stood the hitch-hiker, swearing at the lorry-driver. He started to jump up and down with derision and waved his fist at Unsworth. And then he simply vanished.
Unsworth ran back to his vehicle and drove off at high speed. He never encountered the A38 apparition again. But others are still seeing the solid-looking ghost.
In December 1991, a woman driving to Taunton via a stretch of the A38 was rounding a bend near the village of Rumwell when she saw a man in a grey raincoat flashing a torch at her in the middle of the road. The woman couldn't brake in time, so she was forced to swerve her vehicle into a ditch. She left her Vauxhall Astra fuming, ready to give the man a piece of her mind, but she was amazed to see that the road was completely deserted in both directions. The man with the torch had mysteriously disappeared.'
Oooohhhhhhhhh..........it's a bit creeeeeeeeeeepy innit? If I ever - EVER see some old geezer in a mac with a torch, I'm just gonna floor it!
Hammy x x x
next time we're there, I'll have to tell the family.