Highway to Hell: Road Ghosts and Phantom Hitchhikers

Chris and Simon hit the road with tales of spectral travelers: headless motorcyclists, driverless hearses, ghostly coaches, and hitchhikers who vanish mid-ride. Highway hobgoblins leap into passing carriages and crossroads—where suicides were buried—are haunted by the devil. Chris steers the conversation to carriages as omens of death, while Simon says it’s his way or the highway, as the duo bicker over paths. Chris reveals how she almost became a Canadian road ghost on her vintage BMW R60/2. Simon maps out ghost coach routes, Chris tells of some terrifying first-hand experiences of phantom hitchhikers and the two finally agree on the uncanny habit of road ghosts in always keeping one step ahead. You’ll want to keep the car doors locked for this one.  

Transcript

Simon: So, in line with our tradition of a spontaneous banter before we begin, what about, Chris, your experiences of road trips? Have you been on many exciting road trips?

 Chris: Exciting, I'm not sure about that. I had a very interesting one that I started on and couldn't finish, unfortunately. I was on my BMW motorcycle, and I was going to go entirely across Canada. I had been at a rally in New York State, and I started from there and went up through Quebec and got as far as Toronto. And the bike had problems, and I was having problems with my health, and so I had to go home. And I was disappointed because it was like this epic journey. I had sold my business in Columbus, and I was ready to take a really long road trip and get away from it all, but didn't get as far as I wanted.

Simon: Well, so many questions, not all of which I can safely ask on this podcast. But just please give me a sense. How old were you when you undertook this insanity?

Chris: Ooh, 28, maybe, something like that. And I was by myself. I was camping. I had all my camping equipment on the bike. First thing out of the gate was, I'm getting ready to get on the freeway, and there's a stoplight, and my bike falls over. And I'm like, okay, back, because I got the BMW because it's nice and low, and my legs reached the ground. Oh my God. So somebody helped me put it back on its wheels, and off we went.

Simon: But you could so easily have become a Canadian road ghost. Ooh. And that might lead us towards our topic for today.

Chris: Well, I'd rather not be a road ghost, but that is our topic for today. Maybe we ought to define what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about road ghosts as people walking on the roads, or we're talking about ghostly vehicles like cars and waggons and motorcycles, rather than train ghosts.

Simon: Train ghosts are out. Can I also ask, though, what about path ghosts? Because in Britain, there are lots of stories about paths between rural settlements that are haunted.Dodgy, in, out?

Chris: It's a bit dodgy, but you can give me an example, and we'll see if I say in or out.

Simon: So essentially, the road needs to have yellow painting down the middle. It needs to be serious. It needs to have tarmac.

Chris: There you go. Yes. Okay.

Simon: Okay. Fair enough. Paths are out. I resent it.

Chris: You can give me an example. You can try to talk me into it.

 Simon: No, no. You will see, Chris, I have a series of resentments today I've been building up. This is just the first of many.

Chris: Oh, dear.

Simon: Now, with this, we should go on to our first reading. And with this, we come to my second resentment. Since we began the podcast four years ago, Chris has always run readings by me. And this time, she didn't. And so, I'm very curious to see what she came out with. So, Chris, over to you.

Chris: There's the element of surprise. 

Simon: I have to say, you're so much better at choosing readings than I am. I think this can only be an improvement.

Chris: This comes from 1928. On a night in December, a motorcyclist was riding along the road between Pontypool and Usk and was close to Henshire Farm when suddenly his machine was lit up by a glare and the roar of a motor engine sounded behind him. Looking back, he saw a motorcyclist coming up behind him. He rounded a bend and suddenly heard a crash. So, stopping his own machine, he hurried back on foot to see what had happened. The road was empty. There was neither motorcycle nor rider. Later, the mystified man heard that others had seen and heard this ghost, which it seems had appeared for several nights on the same stretch of road. Now, we know of ghosts of sailing ships. Why not, then, ghosts of steamers? Phantom coaches were plentiful enough. So, is there any reason why we should not have apparitions of motorcars? Facts, indeed, go to show that reports of appearances of this kind are becoming more and more common. In March 1926, a ghostly car was seen on the Great West Road. A distinguished solicitor who was driving from Maidenhead to London had just passed Hounslow when he saw ahead of him a small car travelling at about 25 miles an hour. As it appeared to be swerving slightly, he sounded his horn before passing. When he drew abreast, the little car vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle.

Simon: I think we should open sweepstakes on the earliest car ghost. I mean, how far back can you go?

Chris: Gosh, if you'd asked me that in preparing for this, I could have told you. But, I mean, we've got certainly waggons. We've got Roman chariots.

Simon: But I guess I was interested in motor vehicles because the fascinating thing there is we're within a period of excellent media. And so it would be interesting just to see what the time lag was between the first car and the first ghost.

Chris: I will look at that and we can put that on our Facebook page.

Simon: Our Facebook page. This is the panacea to all our problems. I'm very curious, though, to see what that would be. Well, Chris, I was going to talk a little bit about road ghosts to start with. Really, given my various resentments, I will be trying to provoke you today. And why do we see so many ghosts on roads? My explanation is a little bit eccentric and it's very much rooted in someone who studies the British 19th century. What I've learned about supernatural landscapes in Britain in that period is that if you have a village, say, you have three areas in supernatural terms. You have the village itself, you have the immediate surroundings of the village, and you have the open countryside. Ghosts and indeed supernatural beings in general cluster in the middle region. They're particularly associated with the areas around settlements. And it's more than that. They're not just randomly dropped on the map around the village. There are choke points around the village. Now, what do I mean by choke points? Choke points is really a military term. And these are the kind of places that if you were defending the village from attackers, you would put soldiers at these points. So it might be a bridge. It might be a junction on a road. It might be a point on the road where the road narrows or perhaps hills rise on either side. Or there's a very dense avenue of trees. It might be something as simple as a gate across a road in the 19th century. This was still an issue. And if I can sneak in my beloved paths, I know that you're not a fan of paths. But it could also be styles where paths cross a hedge into another field. When you're thinking about the regularity of supernatural beings on roads, what it comes down to in my experience, and I'd love to know what the American answer is to this, is that it's these choke points that invariably happen to be on roads in and out of settlements. And in my hopelessly romantic way, I like to think of these supernatural spirits as sentinels around the settlement. They're guarding the ways in. And of course, to the terrified locals, it might not feel very protective, but that's how I see them. And so I think in some ways we're almost getting it backwards talking about road ghosts. They're these choke point supernatural spirits around settlements.

Chris: I would say that in the States, things are very different because we have longer stretches of roads between settlements or villages or towns. Now we've got, of course, the freeway system, which also has its own set of ghosts. And it just doesn't seem like they're sentinels at all. It just seems as though what we have over here is people who die in accidents, who are walking along the road or their car is seen driving along the road, that kind of thing. It really seems to have to do with tragedies more than location, I would say.

Simon: I suppose the other tragedy we could throw in with road accidents, trying to get the longer picture here, is of course crime on the road. Because before motor engines were a thing, if you were going along the road, it was there that the highwayman came. It was there that the bandits stepped out from behind the rock.

Chris: But I'm trying to remember how many ghosts I've read of in, say, England, where somebody was murdered by a highwayman or a bandit. And I don't recall a whole lot of them.

Simon: I think you're almost coming at this the wrong way. The typical one isn't the robber that did that. It's the peddler who's going between communities and has drowned in a pond or stays in a barn and is killed by the farmer, this kind of thing. But they are often associated with roads.

Chris: Yes, and we have a lot of dead peddlers over here. 

Simon: Really? 

Chris: Yes, loads and loads. And it's like one of the cliches of American ghost lore. And it triggered spiritualism. The dead peddler supposedly buried in the basement of the Fox family's house.

Simon: Oh, I didn't know that.

Chris: Yeah, he was supposed to be a peddler, and they excavated and found a tin box, like a peddler would, and some bones.

Simon: Oh, it's CSI and the Fox family. Clearly, like you say, it's a cliche for you, but it's a cliche we had first. It's one that's crossed over the Atlantic. It's fascinating.

Chris: What about crossroads? Do you find those seem to be more haunted than other places in the road?

Simon: So crossroads around the world have this association as being a place where you can meet diabolical spirits, where you also can cast various magic spells and where you meet spirits more generally. And this has been particularly worried along in Britain by the fact that from about 1500 through to the early 1800s, it was a legal requirement to bury suicides at crossroads. This did nothing but add to the mystique of crossroads in supernatural terms. And there are many places still in Britain today where there are what are called roadside graves, where there are the traces of these poor men and women who ended their lives. Of course, what used to be termed self-murder. And so they were buried outside the community in this in-between area I was talking about before.

Chris: I was reading about a place in Dartmoor, a grave by the side of the path, and it was called Jay's grave. She hanged herself and was buried there.

 Simon: It's one of the best documented of these suicides graves. And what's interesting, actually, about these suicides is they're not particularly scary supernatural presences. And lots of them have these beautiful legends about flowers being left by unknown hands. And with Jay's grave, since the Second World War, we have claims that it was the pixies that left flowers on her grave. 

Chris: Who was the blues guitarist who met the devil at the crossroads? Robert Johnson. So yeah, he made a bargain with him at the crossroads again. Well, I find it interesting you're talking about roadside graves. Here we have a custom of people putting up crosses and artificial flowers and little tokens with the person's name and date of death written on it where there's been an accident. And you find these all over the area. You can buy these little white wooden crosses and you paint the person's details on them and then stick them at the side of the road.

Simon: My understanding is it's something that wasn't really a thing in the United States before the 1980s, say.

Chris: That's probably right.

Simon: It's certainly the case that it's something that's arrived in Europe in recent decades, certainly within my lifetime. And various studies have suggested that it actually came out of customs from Latin America. It was perhaps a Mexican idea that crossed the border.

Chris: I think you're right about it being custom from Mexico. That just makes a whole lot of sense from what I've seen.

Simon: So I thought we could start, if you feel up to it, Chris, with some vehicle stories.

Chris: Absolutely.

Simon: But before you get going, I thought that given you didn't want to ask me about readings, that I would actually start off with a mini reading of my own, if this is OK. And then we'll launch you into the vehicles. And I just happened to run into this today. And I thought that Chris and I hope the listeners will enjoy this. This piece is by Paul Devereaux, who is a curious writer who I've gradually been finding more and more interesting in the last couple of years. And this is a chance experience that he had on the road one day. It was the wee early morning hours one day in 1980. I was driving southwards on the M6 a bit north of Birmingham. The road was well lit by sodium lighting. Only one other vehicle was on the road at that hour. A Thames Trader van on the inside lane up ahead. As I approached the slip road, I saw a mini pickup truck, not that common a vehicle, coming rapidly onto the motorway. I pulled over to the central lane to let it come on. And as I passed it, I was unable to see anyone in the cab at all. Strange, I thought to myself. That driver must be driving in a real weird posture for me not to be able to see him. I drove ahead until I was alongside the Thames Trader. I glanced in my rearview mirror to see what the mini picket was doing. And there was a completely empty motorway behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck literally bristled. Not a pretty sight. And I put my foot hard on the accelerator and got out of there. 

Chris: Classic. 

Simon: So what about you with vehicles, Chris? Before you were talking about Roman chariots. You were talking about waggons. You were talking about motor vehicles, motorbikes.

Chris: Well, we're just spoiled for choice when it comes to phantom vehicles. One of our first episodes was actually on a headless motorcyclist in northern Ohio, where the headlight is said to be seen on a rural road. Anyway, there's all kinds of carriages, coaches. I mean, it's the death coach or the phantom coach with the headless horses or the horses snorting flames that's running around the British countryside. We'll get into that in a little bit. But sometime in the early 1860s, for example, a phantom carriage pulled up in front of the home of the spiritualist Eddy Brothers. And this was an old-fashioned open carriage drawn by plumed white horses. And a lady sat in the carriage dressed very nicely in scotch plaid and furs. They were very specific. And she bowed to the family who'd come out to see who was there. And she said nothing. The driver, who was muffled up to his chin, wore a thistle cockade in his hat. And while the family watched, the woman, the driver, the carriage, and the horses began to fade. And the whole thing had vanished in a moment. They believed it was a portent of someone's death. And two months later, Mrs. Eddy's mother, Mrs. McComb, died. And they believed it was some sort of ancestress of Mrs. McComb who'd come to give the news. Then there was a ghostly Conestoga waggon. I find this to be really odd.

Simon: Sorry, what is that, Chris?

Chris: Oh, I'm sorry. It's a Conestoga waggon. It was also called a prairie schooner. It was the waggon with the big bowed top with white canvas over it that the pioneers took going west. And this was in Richmond, Texas in 1892. And this thing started creaking through the streets. And people thought it was a real waggon. And they hailed the driver who didn't respond. So they ran forward and tried to pull up the oxen who were pulling the waggon.  The waggon just disappeared and then reappeared some yards ahead of the men, just plodding along as it was before. It kept appearing night after night. And nobody could tell whether the driver was a man or a woman. They stretched barbed wire and ropes across the street. Two police officers stood in front of the phantom waggon and commanded it to halt. They fell down and the waggon passed over them and through the barriers. And the policemen were shaken, but they were unhurt. And one said that as he fell, he saw a number of dead faces in the waggon. And the driver was a skeleton with burning eyes. So what's the explanation for this? Well, one of their first settlers in Richmond said that in 1847, this same phantom waggon drove through the village for seven days, heralding an outbreak of yellow fever that killed hundreds. And it was believed that it was a waggon of pioneers who'd been taken with the fever. And they were sick. They were dying. They'd passed through the village, but they weren't allowed to stop, even to bury the dead or get medicine. But they were forced to keep driving. The waggon came back in a few weeks, just hauling their load. But the waggon was filled just with dead and decaying bodies. So they were certain that this phantom waggon means some evil thing is about to happen. And to be fair, I think the next influenza pandemic happened about that time.

Simon:Both of your cases, both vehicles suggesting something foreboding, that something bad is going to happen. This reminds me of the British death coach, which is this carriage that travels to places where there's going to be a death. Sorry though, Chris, back to you.

Chris: Well, coming up to more modern times. In 1915, there was a phantom auto seen on a road in northeastern Ohio. This mechanic, his name was Harley, oddly enough, encountered the car. And he was willing to swear that the driver was the recently deceased Carl Brown, who was a test car driver for the B.F. Goodrich company. They made tyres. He was killed on a test drive a couple of months before this. But this fellow named Harley heard an auto approaching at a tremendous rate of speed, and he drove his machine to the side of the road to avoid a collision. The speeder slowed down to pass him, and the driver looked at him, and he almost fell out of his seat. He said he was so like Brown, the man who'd been killed, that he was willing to swear that it was his ghost. And even more modern, 1930, a phantom lorry truck was said to be causing a long series of fatal accidents on the Manchester-Sheffield Road near Hyde and Cheshire. Papers reported that there were two men on a motorcycle who were found unconscious there. And the survivor said they were hit by a lorry backing out of an opening that didn't exist. And the coroner noted that since April 1927, there'd been 18 accidents involving cars, lorries, motorcycles, and pedestrians, for which no satisfactory explanation could be given. Kind of a paranormal black spot. 

Simon: That might explain a lot of road ghosts, that if for whatever reason you have an area where there's a black spot with accidents, it must be very easy for a local community to start to explain them by some kind of malevolent influence. 

Chris: Right, yes. And there's that story, what is it, The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor?

Simon: Yes, yes. 

Chris: Where the hands wrench the steering wheel from the person driving and cause fatal accidents.

Simon: That's a story which is also quite modern. If you read the accounts of it, it's supposed to go back to the 1500s. But the hairy hand would attack people on coaches. But I think it's only after the Second World War or perhaps the 1930s that we get the first references. 

Chris: Well, my heart really belongs to the phantom hearses, though. They almost, of course, inevitably mean death. And I'm not sure we can class these with phantom funerals, which are things heard on the road because they seem to have a sort of a separate life of their own. Let's see, this was in 1889. A woman who insisted that she was not at all superstitious declared that a few days before her mother's death, she saw a hearse roll up to the door drawn by white horses. And she told other people about it and said, somebody in the family is going to die very soon. And she had also seen the same hearse shortly before the death of her husband some years previous. So people see these things. There was a farmer in Indiana returning home late one night, and he saw the apparition, what he thought was a buggy. And he looked again, and he saw it was a hearse, and it was driving around a haystack on his property. He checked and couldn't see anything. But when he got back to his house and looked across the field, there was the hearse driving away. And he watched it for several minutes before it vanished. And next day, he got word that his nephew had died the night before.

Simon: My goodness. I was hoping with road ghosts, we could avoid death. But with you, Chris. 

Chris: No, it's inevitable. So here's a provocation. Hearses carry coffins.

Simon: But what about motorised hearses?  One would expect the supernatural being the supernatural, that when hearses time were done, we would go to cars carrying coffins, funeral directors' cars, you know, these long black limousines.

Chris: Do you have any examples of those as ghost cars? I don't. I'm sure there must be some out there somewhere. I haven't run across them. I look at it more as the same reason that fairies are seen in archaic clothing. It's like we're still seeing the same old omens of death, the horse-drawn hearse. That's just one theory.

Simon: So by that logic, our 23rd century descendants will see our funeral cars.

Chris: The motorised, yes.

Simon: There's always this lag.

Chris: Yes, there is. There always is a lag. You don't just get hearses for telling death, you get carriages. What is it? Littlecoat Hall in Wilshire? The ghostly wheels grate on the gravel and you see nothing when you open the door. My favourite is the Hastings coach. It's heard but not seen, driving up to the door when death comes to some member of this family. And this woman, Lady Victoria Kerwin, who was sister of the last Marcus of Hastings, who died in 1868, age 27, she described that she was dining with her brother and she heard the wheels of a carriage passing the windows and a ring at the doorbell. Lord Hastings heard it. Servants didn't. So he got up abruptly saying he'd go see who it was. Guests sitting there just waited. He came back and looked around his guests with a white face and a smile which his sister at least perceived to be a painfully forced one and said, I'll bet anyone in the room 1,000 to 30 that I'm dead in a month. It was the phantom coach they'd heard. They only heard it. It's only heard by those of the family. And a month later, the Marquis was dead.

Simon: Something I'd like to add to the whole question of haunting vehicles is the way that particularly some of these coaches have routes that they follow. I know, for instance, that Anne Boleyn's father in Norfolk is supposed to go around a circuit which includes eight different bridges. I think it's once every six months. Must be a rather miserable experience. And here I'm going to give you a quotation from one of our favourite authors, Jeremy Harte. And Jeremy describes here the circuit of a well-known ghostly coach in Dorset. Another phantom coach, Tarrant Gunville, has a route as complicated as any country bus appearing on Gunville Down. Isn't it lovely? Appearing on Gunville Down, it proceeds eastwards to the road junction at 927.127 then heads on up the drive to Eastbury House, picking up the ghost of a suicidal steward en route and returning to the main road. Turning sharp right, it carries along the Iwern Minster Road and is last heard of rattling along at Stubhampton. This question of routes becomes interesting. And with this, and with your permission, Chris, I'll pass on to the question of individual ghosts on roads.

Chris: Right, yes. I'm fascinated though by this notion of these very, very complicated routes. I mean, there's the question of corpse roads. And I've actually got a guidebook that tells you exactly where you can walk to walk on certain corpse roads where people were carried to cemeteries. So I've never run across anything like that in the United States. They're not that complicated.

Simon: We have a couple of writers in the UK who've written on this. John Billingsley from the South Pennines is one. I think Alan Cleaver, who is in Cumbria, is another. And I'm not at all an expert, but as you were saying, these were the roads that the coffins were brought along. And of course, this gave them a supernatural cachet.

Chris: Yes, Alan Cleaver, that's the book I've got, The Corpse Roads of Cumbria. Yes, good book.

Simon: I'm just going to read you out here. This is me, Chris, getting my own readings. Now you've gone all freelance. But in all seriousness, I really like this reading because it's from one of my favourite ghostly counties, Bedfordshire, just north of the Thames. And this was from a letter written in 1890, but describing an experience some 20 years before, written by a woman who had the experience with her daughter. And she's very articulate in what she writes. Time, summer's evening, towards the days wane, but still quite light. Place the broad plateau of a high hill between Willesden and Ravenston on the road to the town of Bedford. Year either 1873 or 1874. The road unusually wide with deep margins of grass on both sides. I was being driven by my daughter in a low pony carriage when I suddenly saw a figure dressed in black from head to foot advancing. It appeared to glide along, that word that we are so used to in ghost accounts.  I said to my daughter, oh, do look at that strange figure. It passed on the left side of the carriage on the grass within two yards of us. As it did so, it turned its face directly our way. And of all the fiendish faces, it was the most horrible you can imagine. Its garment seemed to train behind it. I imagine that's a spelling mistake for trail behind it. My daughter looked back after it as it passed us. She says it turned its face over its shoulder and looked towards us. I myself turned around immediately. It was gone. I told people in the county what we had seen, but could never learn any history beyond the saying of the people that part of the road was supposed to be haunted. The figure passed about three quarters of a yard beyond the roadway. And I think that is a nice, typical English road encounter with a ghost. Someone is travelling along either on foot or better still in vehicle because it makes the disappearance all that much more striking. They come up against someone walking towards them. So they see the figure really very well. And as we've already seen in many of your accounts, Chris, it's the disappearance that shows them that this is actually a supernatural entity. Now, it also seems to be a deeply unpleasant supernatural entity. But there you are. And this particular report was taken up by the Victorian Census of Hallucinations. Do you remember that great project? And what's wonderful about that project, the reports that got into the book were taken very, very seriously, perhaps a little bit too seriously by the editors. And so they wrote a separate letter to the daughter who also sent a report confirming her mother's experience. It was all done very scientifically.

Chris: Yes, it's almost like your fairy census, very specific categories of date and time and location, very, very carefully notated.

Simon: Actually, when I was reading that, I remembered an account from Ireland in the fairy census where a man is driving along and he sees a very small woman walking towards the car. And I think he waves at her and he's very surprised because she doesn't wave back because, quote unquote, everyone waves in Ireland. And he drives past and he says to his wife, wasn't that strange? And she said, I didn't see anybody. And so this is a type of supernatural encounter, this brief moment where you meet someone on the road and they vanish from sight.

Chris: Discussing the fairy census, you made the observation that people who are driving seem to have more supernatural experiences or visions. What do you make of that?

Simon: The example that's often given by neurologists or psychiatrists is that when people drive, they often have this experience that I'm sure, Chris, you're familiar with, that you're travelling A to B. Let's say you're going from your house to the supermarket, something that you do maybe 20 times a year. And you get to the supermarket and you realise you can't remember the last couple of minutes because effectively your brain has just gone into autopilot. It's these repetitive journeys combined with the repetitive actions as you're driving. And of course, it's not just driving. Presumably, whipping a horse along was a very similar experience. It's a rather predictable process. And I think in this way, it's very easy to enter a trance state. Another thing that's similar to that is perhaps watching television in a certain state. Are you not sympathetic?

Chris: Not with television, but I can certainly under the driving, yes, especially if you're on a really long, boring highway. 

Simon: If you were going for a road trip in Canada on a motorbike and your motorbike fell over when you got to a stoplight, there's not going to be a trance state. But if you're in a big 4x4 and just driving to the supermarket... 

Chris: Yes, absolutely. Because on the motorbike, you have to be aware because somebody's going to try to kill you repeatedly. So you have to be super, super hypervigilant. Now, you mentioned a little woman on the road, and I've got a similar story from Mississippi, for heaven's sake. This guy was a milkman, and he was driving his waggon to town very early in the morning, and he saw almost under his horse's nose a little woman hobbling along the road. And the horse saw her also, and he snorted and backed up and tried... He could hardly hold him. But there she was, just still walking along in front, and he couldn't see her face. But from her walk and humped figure, I could tell she was an old woman, he said. She was holding her hand up to her head as if it hurt her, and I could hear her moaning to herself, and it made my flesh feel mighty creepy. He called out to her and said, you know, if you don't want to ride, let me pass you. I'm in a hurry. I need to get around. She didn't respond. Well, when he finally pulled up beside her, he said, she turned around and gave me a look, and I'll never forget that sight as long as I live. That old woman's face had the awful greenish, corrupted look of a person that's been dead a long time, and across her throat there was a dreadful cut from which, as I am a living man, the blood was still oozing. So he was staring at this awful apparition, and his hair standing up, and she vanished right before his eyes as if the earth had opened and swallowed her up.

Simon: Now, you talk about vanishing before your eyes. We've come across this so often. I want to introduce another similar motif which also manages to communicate that there is something supernatural in front of you. Someone is walking along, and they see a strange figure, 50, 70 yards ahead of them, and for whatever reason they start to worry about this figure, and so they begin to walk faster to catch up to see who this figure really is, and the figure always stays at the same distance from them, and at this point the person begins to run to catch up with the person, and yet still the individual in front of them is at the same distance. They cannot close the distance, and at that point, in the same way that disappearance warns you that this is a supernatural being, this is another clue, and I've come across lots of these examples, and I'm really bitter with myself that I didn't collect them more methodically because it's one of these things where it's probably too late to make a collection now, but over the years I must have seen, what, 15 or 20 of these.

Chris: Oh, yeah, there's loads of them out there, and it's also with the creature or the entity behind you, and you're waiting for them to catch up, and you're walking slower, and they're just always still the same exact distance, so I wonder what that motif is about.

Simon: I wonder where it comes from, yeah. I think the best example I know involves a pathway in the Welsh mountains, but I know you have strong feelings about paths, Chris. 

Chris: No, please, please tell me.

Simon: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, my resentment continues. The path embargo has been put down, and I will respect it. I will respect it, but I will enforce my own embargoes in future episodes.

Chris: So passive-aggressive. 

Simon: I'm trying, I'm trying. If we can move on from figures on roads, I know you wanted to talk about a really weird hybrid form, but a very exciting one, which is figures on roads that get in vehicles. Is that correct?

Chris: I mean, you've got your classic urban legend is the phantom hitchhiker. They give an address where they'd like to go, and then they disappear, and the people at the address confirm that the hitchhiker is a dead relative or something like that. There's also the ones who prophesy some disaster, and some of these seem to be angels or even claim to be Jesus, and the classic one, of course, is the pretty girl who hitches a ride and later is met at a dance, and she borrows the guy's coat and then disappears, and the coat's found later draped on her tombstone. So that's the classic phantom hitchhiker story.

Simon: Can I just ask you a question about the phantom hitchhiker? I recently gave a class to American University students about urban legends, and I started, I led with the phantom hitchhiker. This is a class of 25 intelligent kids. Not a single one of them had ever heard of it.

Chris: No!!!! 

Simon: Isn't it amazing? 

Chris: That's really bizarre.

Simon: I was blown away. They loved it, but...

Chris: It must be because it hasn't been in a horror movie. That's all I can figure, or a TikTok video. My goodness, I would have expected that would be the one that everybody would know.

Simon: Because it's the emblematic one, isn't it? It is. Look, I got in your way. Sorry, back to you. No more obstacles from me.

Chris: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was told a story about a hitchhiker on one of our freeways in Ohio. It's called the I-71, and it was just north of Medina, Ohio, so it's sort of northeast. A fellow named Rich, he's a Cleveland newspaper reporter, and he was driving home late one night when he saw what he thought was a person wearing a light-coloured coat walking on the berm. And he hadn't seen any cars parked on the road for miles, but there was this guy walking along the highway. And all kinds of things went through his mind. You know, you don't want to pick up strange people late at night, but if he needs help, you know. And he thought, man, I've got to make a decision. I'll bet he's going to try to hitch. So he got about 300 feet, maybe closer, and his headlights picked up the guy who started to turn and put out his thumb. He said, I never saw his face. Where his head was seemed to be dark, blanked out. And I was real close to him when the headlights went through him. He looked suddenly transparent all over. I could still see him, and then he faded and was gone. So he freaked out, you know. He sped home, and he stressed to me that it wasn't a hallucination. He hadn't been drinking or ingesting anything else. He wasn't overtired. He was just concentrating on getting back home. And he met a friend the next day and said, you'll never guess what happened. I was driving home from Medina to Berea on I-71, and I saw, and his friend stopped him. He said, don't tell me you saw the I-71 hitchhiker. And he told him that the police and the sheriffs have many reports about this disappearing guy.

Simon: So this is an unusual case where you've not read about it, but someone has actually been with you face-to-face and talked to you about it. Here, I must apologise to my students because I was talking to them about friends of a friend. But forget friends of a friend. This happened to the person you were talking to.

Chris: That's what he claimed.

Simon: But is this someone you know quite well?

Chris: I did know when I was working on my Haunted Ohio series. We talked about various local cases, yes. 

Simon: And so when did this happen to him? 

Chris: I don't have a date. 

Simon: But the decade, sorry. In the 80s. 

Chris: 80s, 1980s. Yeah. What was interesting to me was when I started writing about the ghost lore of Ohio, I was like, oh, I'm not going to bother with phantom hitchhiker stories because they're all just urban legends, and I don't want folklore. I want actual experiences. So I was happy to have this.

Simon: I mean, there is another related legend to the phantom hitchhiker, and I'm not sure that I'll be able to give you actual experiences here. It's a story that is usually titled The Body in the Car. And it's usually someone gets into a car and they begin to spout messianic nonsense, frankly, saying, I don't know, Donald Trump or Joe Biden are about to die. And they seem to be absolutely crazy. And then at a certain point, they'll say, as dead as that person around the corner. And the car goes around the corner and they see a dead body. And the driver looks back and the person who was in the seat behind us vanished. And this story goes back in Britain anyway, into the mid 19th century. But it'll certainly, certainly be older. We have a version from Staffordshire where a man is riding in a car and a person gets onto the cart with him. And at this point, a white horse rides alongside them. And the man on the white horse, who's clearly in retrospect, an angel, begins to prophesize. And he says, there will be so many dead Christians in this area next year, and they will all be as dead as the man next to you. And the driver of the car looks at the man who got in and he's keeled over and he's dead. So the death, it cements the story. And I think I'm right in saying the oldest European version is a Swedish version from the 17th century. And there are stories about Hitler in the 1930s that Hitler's about to die and that this angel in a car said it. There are lots of, I think, hippie in car stories from the US that are quite similar.

Chris: Right, right. The long haired hippie who turns out to be Jesus or something like that. Yes, I'm blanking on the famous musician. It was some country Western musician. And the phantom hitchhiker says, yeah, there's going to be a dead man in your car before so many hours. And either the guy in the back seat died, or they passed an accident. And they were asked to pick up the victim and take him to hospital. And he died on the way. So yeah, it's not uncommon over here as well. One variant of that is the hobgoblins or ghosts that jump into buggies with people or carts. This was in Cheshire, Connecticut, 1886. This guy was driving his buggy past an old mine and his horse shied and nearly tipped things over. Out of the mine or by the side of the road, what they described as a most undescribable hobgoblin came up to the buggy and climbed in. It was misty, faintly resembled a human being. It rode with him half a mile. And when the horse stopped, it alighted and vanished into thin air. He said he'd encountered this hobgoblin before. And the springs of the buggy never sagged because the ghost had no weight.

Now, of course, the newspaper made a snarky remark about the witness having a reputation of being on very friendly terms with that variety of spirits that usually materialise in the neck of a bottle. Ohio also has a man-faced dog that jumps into people's buggies and carriages. It haunts a place called Stumpy's Hollow. And he climbs up behind riders like England's Shug Monkey. He jumped into a doctor's carriage once when the doctor was on his way to a patient late at night.

Simon: Really curious cases again there, because, of course, these are very well attested in the UK. And I imagine that this is another cliche that crossed the Atlantic with European settlers. But usually in Britain, the idea is that the supernatural being that jumps either into the cart or onto the horse is actually incredibly heavy. And so the cart is typically going up a hill when suddenly it just it can barely move. And the idea is that this spirit is got on top or sometimes it jumps on behind a rider and the horse either spooks or find it very difficult going. And it's, let's say, a minority report in British folklore, but it is there still in the 19th century. And I've been talking to Chris about I've been writing this book on British mythology in the 19th century. And I never in the end wrote a chapter on this type of supernatural being. But there is a short chapter to be written. And if I ever get to write a follow up, it will be in there.

Chris: Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. They're just so, so common. And I hadn't thought about the weight, the burden on the on the rider or the driver.

Simon: This has been for me a lovely conversation. I've learnt lots as always with you, Chris. I'm still smarting from the whole pathway business, but we'll let this go with time.

Chris: We can do a whole episode on pathway posts to mollify you.

Simon: Maybe next month. It will be my revenge. We'll get to the paths. We'll get the paths and the bridle ways. This is it. But what about extra reading? I have a couple of aces up my sleeve, and I think I might be able to outflank you this time. So I invite you to go first. Just know that over here in Italy, I'm rather smugly listening.

Chris: Well, The Evidence for Phantom Hitchhikers by Michael Goss, The Field Guide to Haunted Highways and Bridges by Dale Katsumara, Headless Brides and Devil Dogs, Exploring Southern Ohio's Haunted Roads and Bridges, which I absolutely adored. And of course, there's Jan Harold Brunwald's The Vanishing Hitchhiker, which is about the urban legends. And I've got a lot of blog posts on road ghosts. I've got some chapters in some of my Haunted Ohio books, and we'll post some of that stuff online. There's a whole genre in the Arcadia publishing house. They do all these ghosts of Ohio sort of thing, and they've got the ghosts of Route 66, and they've got other haunted state routes. And again, we'll list some of those on the Facebook page. And as I said, I've got the Corpse Roads of Cumbria by Alan Cleaver. So over to you.

Simon: Well, I'm rather sad because you got a couple of mine. So I've already crossed off. One that I'm a big, big fan of is Jeremy Harte's Haunted Roads, and this appeared in The Lay Hunter. It's a short article, but a very interesting article. And Chris, I only actually remembered it today, and I'm going to send it to you after, and I think you'll enjoy it a lot. 

Chris: Oh, I'm sure I will. 

Simon: So it was Lay Hunter 121, 1994, and it's pages one to seven. And as with everything with Jeremy, it's a superb read. But Jeremy Harte, for me, is second to none, the finest English folklorist, well, in a long, long time, particularly on supernatural folklore. And what I love about his articles from the 1990s is he published them in these really quite obscure anomalist UFO, in this case, ley lines. I wouldn't say journals, but newsletters. And they are often superb. And this article is really quite eccentric in part, but a very, very good read. I also want to throw out a little bit of publicity for our dear friend, Rob Gandy, who often writes in Fortean Times.  And he, over the years, has specialised in road ghosts. He's written a number of articles about experiences on roads. So if you go to caches of Fortean Times and look for Rob's work, you should find stuff.

Chris: There's also Paul Devereux's Spirit Roads, an exploration of otherworldly routes. And he also wrote a book called Fairy Paths and Spirit Roads. 

Simon: Paths! Yes. You're breaking your own rules, Chris. I've discovered Paul Devereaux in the last couple of years, as I said before. I think he's a really interesting writer. I've enjoyed going through his stuff. What do you make of his writing, Chris?

Chris: I find it difficult. I'm not well-versed on Earth energies and ley lines and things like that. And it just kind of goes over my head, I think.

Simon: I find that the early couple of books that he wrote on Earth mysteries, as he calls them, are in some ways the most exciting. Not least because at the base, there is a personal experience of his own. And it's one of these cases where someone's life was changed by a supernatural experience. And I think you've got to respect that. I do get what you mean about some of the writing being a little bit abstract in the later books. But I found gems in there too. And so with this, I think we should come to the final reading, Chris. I really enjoyed this episode. So thanks a lot for taking us down this road.

Chris: This path.

Simon: This ‘way’ to choose a more neutral word. And I'm very curious to see what you're going to play us out.

Chris: This story is an abridged version of one from my book, Haunted Ohio 3. And it was told to me by my late friend, Rick Crawford, to whom it happened. Let me give a little background. The place is known as Dead Man's Curve. It was a dangerous, narrow, two-lane road with a long history of fatal accidents. And authorities decided to widen and straighten the road, finishing the work in September of 1969. Just a month later, five people died in a car crash there. And Rick was the only survivor. Ever since that October night, the creature they call the Faceless Hitchhiker has haunted Dead Man's Curve. It is a dead, black figure of a man. A three-dimensional silhouette, as Rick described it. He and his friends saw it at least six times in 25 years. A friend of Rick's, I'll call Sherry, was driving her mother's station waggon along the road early one morning. The black thing ran out of the woods and threw itself in front of her car, trying to block it. She hit it and felt both sets of wheels lift like running over speed bumps twice. My God, I'm a nurse, I could have killed somebody, she said to herself and started backing up. As she looked in her rearview mirror, she saw the thing putting a foot on the trunk, grabbing the luggage rack to climb up on top of the car. She floored it. The thing fell off the back, and even now she gets the shakes when she talks about that night. The Faceless Hitchhiker's spell extends even beyond Dead Man's Curve. One night as Rick and three friends, Todd, Andy, and Paul were headed east on 275, Todd described how a two-door 1968 Impala, the same make and model of the car that caused the deadly accident that killed Rick's friends, came right up on our tail with its high beams on. He backed off a little, then did it again. I thought he was going to ram us. Then the car passed and swerved towards us. I'm over six foot, and I got a good look into the driver's seat. There was nobody driving that car, said Todd.