Highway Ghost Story

[Cufflink]

There are many examples of `highway ghosts', spirits that people have encountered while travelling, such as phantom hitchhikers.

The following is an account of a true experience that happened to my father.

In the late 1960's, my father was a coach driver, ferrying holidaymakers to and from their destinations. It was while returning from one such job that this story takes place.

The coach was empty, and my father was heading back home to Manchester. It was the early hours of the morning, and he was making his way down an unlit country lane, somewhere in Yorkshire.

Dangerously, he was starting to fall asleep at the wheel.

Suddenly, from nowhere, a woman stepped right out in front of the coach, dressed in a long white dress, waving her arms for him to stop.

Shocked awake, my dad slammed on the brakes, but as you can gather, big vehicles don't stop on the spot.

He went over her.

With the coach now stationary, my dad leapt from the vehicle, panicking at what he had done.

He checked the road behind the coach, and in the gloom could see nothing. Gingerly he checked beneath the vehicle.

Nothing.

Perhaps she had somehow been thrown aside. He got a torch from his tool kit and checked everywhere. Nothing.

No blood, no clothing, no sign of the woman.

So he'd been dreaming, he suggested to himself. He started to calm down, reasoning that there had been no woman.

Just then, something made him glance to his side, in the direction of a farmer's field.

Hundreds of yards away, somehow visible in the dark stood the woman in white. And she was waving her arms.

My father jumped into the coach and drove like the devil himself was after him.

He didn't sleep that night. According to him, every time he closed his eyes, he could see the woman.

My father was an arch-sceptic on things ghostly until that night, but privately, from then on, he wasn't.

I've never been able to track down the exact bit of Yorkshire where this took place, nor does the account match exactly some of the famous highway ghosts that roam Britain.

[Bizarro]

my mother in law has a highway ghost story. she and my sister in law were driving through an intersection one night when they saw a woman standing in the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to traffic. she was wearing out of date clothing and looked to be out of place and confused. they decided to pick her up, as it was late and a young woman shouldn't be out alone. when they pulled off to the side and looked back to where she was standing to signal her to get in, she was gone. it totally freaked them out and they still talk about it years later.

[Cufflink]

That's the really creepy thing about the whole phenomena.

Haunted houses, graveyards, battlegrounds etc you can choose to stay away from.

But you're coming home in the car, and suddenly, there's the ghostly hitchhiker.

Nasty stuff.

[loganXman]

awsome stories

does anyone have more. i like to hear highway ghost stories. i havent been on in a while but its good to take a break from skool and stuff and read bout this. if not, did we already do this topic and if yes, where can i read it?

[whitewitch173]

Wow thats amazing! My ghost experience is something I'm only just starting to talk about to my counseller - i thought this site would help me talk about it a little bit better - but i'm still having trouble. Feel free to message me whenever - I like making new friends - everyone at my uni are scared of me lol

[Cufflink]

Welcome to UM whitewitch173.

Glad you enjoyed the story, though I suspect my dad didn't.

By the way, if you're number 173, I take it there are at least another 172 white witches out there?

Now that would scare your friends at uni.

[jimmah]

*parp*

gosh, now i have to keep checking behind me to make sure im not being watched!

[babyforrest]

Whitewitch, would you like to tell us your ghost experience? It might make you feel better.

I'll go first if you like. I used to live in a haunted house when I was 8 years old. Mostly it was just feelings of dread in specific rooms of the house. One night in perticular would be terrifying to me now as an adult, let alone being a child. I was trying to get to sleep (it was always a challenge there because of the feelings of dread) and my bed shook. It shook for a couple of minutes (which felt like hours) before it finally stopped. My cat was also on my bed and the shaking woke her up and she looked annoyed by it, but beyond that it didn't appear to bother her.

There's one of mine. I have plenty more for later.

[dancin'hamster]

Thought you may be interested in this story from the UK

'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 declerated 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 sidewindow down to get a better look at the hitch-hiker.

The man stood there on the macadam, 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 automobile 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 he stood in the middle of the motorway 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's flesh creep. When the man got out at the bridge, he didn't offer a word of thanks. He walked 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.

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 oddball 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 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 was running to a tight schedule and couldn't afford to wait. So he 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 suicidal jaywalker 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.

Psychical researchers who have investigated the case say that the A38 hitch-hiker is probably the earth-bound spirit of one of the numerous people who have perished on the stretch of motorway in car accidents over the years.'

Hammy x x x

[SpaceyKC]

This is equally weird ~ I was replying to this story and it ended up posted after the vampire story!

Anyway, I thought it was chilling and I don't think I would have picked him

up again after the first encounter.

[Thistle]

Tooooooo creepy hammy!!!!!!!!!!! Well I will never pick up another hitch hiker again thats for sure lol

[dancin'hamster]