Stranger Things
Do you believe in ghosts? A lot of people do. But, although we have no statistics to prove it, our guess would be that most people don’t. Yet there are some events which even the most hardcore disbeliever finds hard to explain. You know the kind of thing: UFO sightings, reports of out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance and so on. It’s easy to write many of these incidents off as the result of hallucination, over-active imagination or some freak of nature or other, but a few aren’t quite so easy to casually dismiss. No matter how you try to explain them away, they remain . . .well, a bit spooky.
There are literally hundreds of examples such events, and you’re probably familiar with many of them. But did you know that there is whole class of paranormal events called ‘road ghosts’? These, as the term implies, are strange and unexplained happenings connected with cars and/or roads. Almost every country has a list of famous events. So, to help you fill a tea-break, we thought we’d relate a few of the UK’s better-known road ghosts – all those described below are officially recorded, and documented as ‘unexplained’.
The Hertfordhshire Cricketer
The year: 1958. The place: a road near Dunstable, Hertfordshire. The event: a
minibus carrying a cricket team crashed, killing two of the party and injuring several others. Very sad, but otherwise unremarkable. Except that, a few years later, a taxi driver, passing the spot at night, was shocked when a man in ‘white clothes’ stepped into the road. The driver tried to avoid him, but failed and ran him down. Yet no body was found when he stopped and checked around the vehicle. His imagination? Perhaps. But, since then, there have been several similar reports to the police, all by people who (they claim, but there is good reason to believe them) didn’t know either each other, or the history of this stretch of road.
The Peak District Hitchhiker
A few years ago in Derbyshire, a motorcyclist passed a young woman thumbing a lift. As it was evening, and she was dressed in leathers, he obliged. She said nothing other than to give an address in Sheffield. As they reached the boundary of the city, with the girl riding pillion, the driver glanced back only to find to his astonishment that she had vanished. The motorcyclist quickly retraced his steps, but there was no sign of her. Concerned, he reported the incident to the police, and resumed his journey. But then he had second thoughts, and decided to call at the address given by the hitchhiker. A woman answered the door – and then burst into tears when asked if she knew anyone answering the description. After recovering her composure, she told the biker that her daughter had been killed in a motorcycling accident on that very stretch of road, and the family had attended her funeral just a week ago. The description of the hitchhiker exactly matched those of the figure who had hitched a ride that cold winter’s night.
The Surrey Car Crash
In December 2002, the Surrey police received reports of an Audi A4 Sedan that had been seen swerving off the A3 at high speed, headlights blazing, into a ditch. The police rushed to the scene of the accident. And they found, as expected, a crashed car, almost totally hidden by bushes, with the driver dead at the wheel. What they didn’t expect, though, was the condition of the body. It turned out that the accident had actually taken place about six months earlier. And the headlights were set to ‘full beam’. But several people had reported the incident that very same night!
The Kent Ghost
The A229, a few miles north of Maidstone, is an unremarkable stretch of road. Except for one thing: its well-documented ghost. Who is she? No-one knows. But she’s a perfectly normal looking young lady who has a habit of running in front of moving vehicles. The drivers, unable to stop, are convinced that they have run her down and killed her. But when they stop and check under and around their vehicle, there’s nothing to be found. The really spooky thing is that this has happened lots of times, and the descriptions given to the police by the drivers are uncannily similar. The police have carried out extensive checks both of the area and of the vehicles involved in the ‘accidents’, but nothing relating to a possible accident has ever been found.
By the way, in case you’re wondering, there’s nothing ghostly about the used cars we sell here at desperateseller.co.uk. They’re very real indeed. And great value. If you want proof then check them out!
