Episode 52 - Haunted Roads

For hours now, the road was the only thing to keep you company. A trip like this was measured in days, not hours. And you had a couple to go.

The day had started early, with gas station food and coffee. Lunch passed in a road-side sandwich shop. And then more driving. Day faded into evening, and evening had begun to fade toward night.

Out here, on dark roads, lit by headlights and the occasional oncoming car, your eyes could play tricks on you. You could see things that weren’t there.

The shape of a hitchhiker in the dark. An oncoming vehicle that suddenly vanishes into the murky darkness. The shape of strange beasts and creatures stepping out into the road. The misshapen and impossible visage of monsters hidden in the darkness.

Anything could be out there. At least that’s what your road-weary mind had nearly convinced itself of in the darkness. Evils lurking behind trees, and in empty fields, and around each bend in the long, winding road…

Of course, it was just a trick. A lie your brain told itself… Or is it?

Along stretches of roads all over the world, there are stories. Phantasmal creatures and sightings of spirits and beasts dating back centuries and still occurring to this day. These are the phantom hitch-hikers, the ghost cars, and the haunted highways of the world. Liminal places that have become filled with strange tales and stranger creatures.

These haunted roads have inflicted fear and terror on travelers on horseback, by coach-and-buggy, and now by car.

Over 160 000 miles of highway stretch across the United States alone. 65 percent of them run through rural areas. Lonely stretches of road with few people and fewer cars. These are the roads where hours separate major population centers, and exits with fuel and food are few and far between.

On these roads, and roads like them throughout the world, a variety of stories spring up that populate these empty stretches with ghosts and monsters.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I am excited to invite you to join me as I pass Through the Veil, and take a drive on haunted roads.

One of the most common stories of haunted highways around the world are the stories of Vanishing Hitchhikers. The vanishing hitchhiker stories started as early as the 1870s. Dozens of countries have a version of this story. There are countless variations, but they all follow a basic pattern.

A driver, usually alone, sees a person hitchhiking down a long road. Most in some way unprepared for the weather or the cold. The drivers in these stories pick up the hitchhiker. Their new passenger gives them an address, sometimes asks for a coat or some other piece of clothing to help them get warm. However, by the time the driver arrives at their strange passenger’s destination, they find that their passenger has disappeared entirely. Sometimes leaving their borrowed garment behind, sometimes vanishing along with it.

In some versions, the garment is later found draped over a gravestone in a cemetery local to the passenger’s destination. Some of those expand to include the driver discovering through curiosity that their disappearing hitchhiker matches the physical description of the deceased. Most often, these people died in unexpected ways, with the most common claiming that they died in car wrecks.

The phantom hitchhiker story was studied formally in 1942 and 1943 by two folklorists: Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, who collected and categorized 79 written versions of the story.

They found four primary categories: Stories where the driver is given an address where they discover the ghostly nature of their passenger, stories where the hitchhiker predicts disaster, stories where the passenger is picked up from some entertainment, often a dance; and finally stories where the passenger is not a ghost, but some other phantom, deity, or spirit.

Some versions of the phantom hitchhiker reverse the story’s standard format. Wherein the narrator is a hitchhiker, gets a ride from a driver, and later learns through some means that the driver was in fact a ghostly apparition.

The goddess Pele in Hawaii also appears in these stories on occasion. Often traveling the roads of the islands in disguise and rewarding kind travelers or warning them of impending danger.

Although these stories are prolific, and appear across the world in many forms, they are nearly impossible to corroborate and so are often dismissed as hearsay and fiction. Who is to say though?

Roads across the world have stories. Some dating back decades or centuries. One such road is plagued by a strange and terrible creature. This is not the domain of a phantom hitchhiker, or some other benign appearance… This is a place of creature known to attack people, carry away children and animals, and terrorize any who disrupt its territory.

Shipley Hollow Road stretches from Sale Creek, Tennessee at its southern end, north through Hamilton County to Lakesite and Graysville.

The stories begin in 1775. A woman was traveling with her four children on their way home in a horse and buggy. They were out later than expected, and so were nearing home in the dark of night. As they crossed a bridge on Shipley Hollow Road, she heard something rushing toward the bridge ahead of them when a bipedal creature leapt out in front of their carriage and causing the horse to spook. The buggy flipped and the woman was sent flying.

The creature opened the buggy, reached within, and carried her youngest children away into the woods faster than it could be followed.

The woman was gravely injured. With the help of her remaining children, she made it to the nearby town, but she later died after sharing her story.

The legend grew from there. The creature, most commonly referred to as an imp, has been reported ever since. Stories along the road continue to trickle in over the centuries. Saying the imp will leap in front of buggies, trying to spook horses and people, and even some that say it has charged cars and other motor vehicles traveling along the road.

Although no other deaths are commonly attributed to the creature, the imp has become quite the terror in the region for those unfortunate enough to see it.

Over the course of more than 200 years, one detail has become clear, there is a pattern to the stories. You are most likely to encounter the imp while traveling on the third Sunday of every fourth month, most commonly just after midnight.

In Peninsular Malaysia, the E8 Expressway, or the Kuala-Lumpur-Karak Expressway, is a 60 kilometer, approximately 37 mile, highway that runs south-west to north-east.

The E8 serves as an important pipeline for people between several population centers in and around the Genting Highlands. It is also purportedly “one of the most haunted highways in the world.”

Although there is no evidence of otherworldly manifestations, people are seemingly constantly reporting sightings along the road late at night. Most commonly they describe strange, impossible creatures. Young children that mysteriously disappear, and Pontianak: a kind of vampire spirit.

Some of the road’s most gruesome stories involve the pontianak. In one story, a married couple and their infant child were driving through a tunnel along the E8 when their car suddenly broke down. The husband, finding his cell phone had no service, told his wife to wait in the car with their child and lock the doors. He went to get help from the tunnel control center.

Shortly after he left, something started banging on the roof of the car, heavy blows that terrified the woman and the child. She tried to flag down cars, but as each slowed down to check on the stopped vehicle they would suddenly speed away. Until a police car showed up and shined a powerful spot light on the car, and the thumping stopped. The officer told the woman to grab her child and run to the squad car as fast as she could. When she looked back as she ran, she saw a Pontianak hiding from the bright light holding the head of her husband.

Not all the stories are so grim. Some reports from the area include descriptions of a consistent phantom vehicle - an antique, yellow Volkswagen Beetle that seems to appear from nowhere, drive a stretch of the road, and just as suddenly disappear.

This short stretch of road is traveled every day. After its completion in 1977, and its renovation in 1997, it has become a vital thoroughfare, and while its stories are not well-documented, they are numerous.

The E8 is not the only road in the world to feature ghostly cars. Phantom vehicles are common in urban legends. They generally are vehicles without any clear driver, that can appear or disappear in ways that suggest a supernatural origin. Cars are the most common of the modern phantom vehicle stories. Witnesses claim they have seen cars that blast off of bridges, or over bends in the road, only to have the wreckage vanish impossibly. Others report seeing vehicles start themselves and roll uphill without anyone ever getting in.

Some of the most common phantom vehicle stories are attached to particular stretches of road. For example, a curved road in Ladbroke Grove, London, was haunted by a phantom bus for many years. The bus’ appearance caused several accidents, one of which was fatal. Eventually, the road was straightened, and the appearance faltered and died out.

Phantom vehicles are not always cars or trucks. There are several common ghost train stories. The Stockholm city Metro system has a ghost of its own. Called the Silverpilen, or Silver Arrow, this is the ghost of a train that has long since been decommissioned that nonetheless is still sighted roaming the tracks of the metro late at night.

Another phantom train is the Funeral Train. Running from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois; this train is sighted on the days surrounding the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death, causing watches and clocks around its route to stop as it passes.

Many of us spend a good portion of our lives on the road. They are built for travel, to get us from one place to another.

So it makes a strange kind of sense, that they are filled with ghost stories. Stories of things and people and phantoms that are impossible. Spirits that have not made it to their destination, still haunting the road, trying to get there. Trains and cars just rolling on the road or track they know. Creatures and demons plague roads because they are often places of isolation. A place where we are often alone, with only our destination ahead.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, myth, and magic.

Music this week was: Night Drive by Sage Chow

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.As always, thank you, for listening.