Being in it for the long haul isn't always a good thing, and no one knows this better than truckers who have to drive through the night to get to their destination. Anything can happen in those wee hours of the morning or in the dusk of twilight—and more often than not, it's nothing good. From the unsettling to the terrifying, these are truckers' most chilling experiences on the road.
1. It’s Coming From Inside
My mom told me a story about one late night out trucking. Her husband was sleeping in the back, and she was starting to get super tired and struggling to stay awake. She heard another trucker on the CB radio, and started chatting with him. He helped her stay awake for the run until she stopped off at a truck stop and her husband took over.
That next morning, she told her husband what happened. His face went white as a sheet. He told her the CB was broken, and that she couldn’t have talked to anyone. It was impossible.
2. The Disappearing Woman
My uncle said one night he was sleeping above his trailer bed when suddenly in the distance, he could see a small light approaching. As it got closer, he had a chilling realization. He described seeing a really, really old, wrinkly woman who held a candle, draped in dark gowns. He said her nails were so long they curled.
She walked into a cave opening, and then disappeared. My uncle said he nope’d out of there real fast.
3. Gone Girl
My cousin works at a truck stop in Kansas. She told me about some guy who parked his truck and got out, and then a woman got out of the passenger seat. It was kind of cold, so the trucker was wearing a coat and hat. But the woman was wearing summer clothes. My cousin thought nothing of it and did her whole, "Hi, welcome in".
The trucker bought a coffee, but the woman just stood there in the doorway. Now my cousin was freaked out. She didn't want to be rude, but she was a teenage girl alone in a gas station in the middle of nowhere. "Excuse me miss, do you need anything?" She asked. "Who are you talking to?" The truck driver asked when he got to the checkout".
The woman who got out of your truck?" My cousin pointed, but the woman had disappeared. She told me she had never seen a look of such pure terror on a man's face before. He just whispered a quiet "Oh no". Got his coffee and left. The woman did not get back into his truck, and my cousin couldn't find her in the store afterward.
She says it was one of the most terrifying experiences she had ever had while on that job.
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4. A Voice From Beyond
Driving through an abandoned section of Baltimore at 3:00 in the morning, my CB radio turned itself on and crackled for a bit. Out of nowhere, some voice over the radio said in a deep Southern drawl, "I ain’t got no panties on". I could see up and down the interstate for miles, and saw not one set of headlights around me for hours...
5. In Search Of Lost Time
It was summer and my dad’s birthday, so we drove to a casino two hours away to watch a boxing match with my uncle. It finishes, and we drive back the same night. We're nearing a canyon with no phone reception, so we call my mom and tell her we'll be home soon. The canyon usually takes about 30 minutes with no traffic, and it's around midnight.
So we enter the canyon and we're all pretty tired. To keep us talking, we start telling stories, most of them creepy stories. This goes on for a while and it feels like time is passing in a haze. We pass this part of the canyon and suddenly I get deja vu. I'm convinced we already passed that before. All of us have driven this canyon a hundred times and know the layout. Before long, it got more frightening.
We keep talking, and then we pass the same part again. This time, I point it out and my dad and uncle notice the time—it's 1:00 AM, and we're still not home. So we all start to freak out. We stop talking and just watch the road slowly pass by. Now that we're paying attention, though, time seems to catch up. We exit the canyon around 1:15 AM and call my mom, who is freaked out she hadn't heard from us.
We still to this day have no idea where that extra 45 minutes went.
6. Birthday Suit
A friend saw a kid, about 9-10 years old, walking at night with no clothes on, on a long empty stretch of highway 41 south, where it meets highway 285, in New Mexico. But it got so much creepier than this. He picked the kid up and called in to the local law enforcement. The kid wouldn't speak. A state trooper showed up, and according to my friend, acted like it was no big deal, like he had seen it all before.
My friend asked the officer to hold up, and what was going on. The officer said, "don't worry about it," and just turned and walked away, loading the kid into his vehicle. He tried to find newspaper articles about it in papers from nearby cities but never found anything. He looked and couldn't find anything in any missing person cases.
He told this story with a haunting simplicity and air of dread.
7. What Happens In Vegas
One time, I was driving near Las Vegas at around three in the morning. I had been following a few black SUVs along the highway for a good hour or so. They had Nevada plates that were each just single digit numbers, in order: 1, 2, and 3. Then all of a sudden, they all pulled off the highway down a dirt path. There was no mile marker or cactus that would indicate a path there.
It was just dirt. After pulling off the road, they all turned their lights off. I didn't stick around. It was creepy.
8. Over The Airwaves
I had a friend tell a story that he swears on to this day. He and his girlfriend were making the drive to Naples, Florida, late night, on a two-lane road through the Everglades, and had been in a line of cars behind an 18-wheeler for multiple miles. She fell asleep, and he was surfing for something to listen to on the radio. Only one station came in clearly enough to be tolerable, so he gave it a listen.
The DJ came on and said something along the lines of, "The stars are extra bright in the Everglades tonight. If you’re driving through there, pull off and take a look". He said he normally wouldn’t even think of it, but for some reason, he felt compelled to that night. He woke up his girlfriend. She was annoyed and didn’t want to, but he convinced her it would be worth it.
They stopped and just took in the stars for 5-10 minutes. He said it was the most amazing sky he’s ever seen. They get back on the road and drive another few minutes. Then they witness a horrific sight. They come across a massive accident. The truck they were following had jack-knifed and took out a handful of vehicles that were following it.
He said there multiple fatalities. They most likely would have been involved in the crash if not for that random DJ on the only radio station to come in that night.
9. He’s A Real Nowhere Man
The creepiest thing I’ve ever seen was somebody walking along the shoulder of the highway all by themselves when it was totally pitch black out in the middle of the night, and there hadn’t been a town for miles and miles—nor was there one coming up for miles either. I think about this incident all the time and it always makes me shiver.
10. Training Wheels
I was driving at night and the truck starts making this odd grinding noise. Like I ran over something that got stuck. It's about 2 AM. I pull into a well-lit rest stop and wake up my buddy who was sleeping. As I explain the situation to him, we get out of the car, and both hear what sounds like a kid crying. There are no other cars at the rest stop, but we frequently heard stories about child trafficking and kidnapping nearby, so we decided to check it out.
We grab our flashlights and head towards the noise, which is coming from the bathrooms at the rest stop. As we get closer, we realize it's coming from the women's bathroom, and it's a low, dull sobbing. We are prepared for the worst. We walk in expecting to see some brutalized child or something, and we see nothing.
The sound is still there, and it's still clearly coming from the room, but the room is empty. We turn on the lights—still nothing. Check each stall, the trash can. Nothing. Even start looking for where in the room it's coming from. Is it a hidden speaker? Are we on candid camera? What the heck? My buddy climbs up one of the stalls to close the lone window in the room.
He closes it, and the noise stops. Completely. He opens it again, and there's no more noise. We sit there for a few seconds, staring at each other. He shrugs. Then the window slams shut again, without him touching it. We were out of that forsaken bathroom in seconds. The noise starts up about 10 seconds later, as we get to the truck, and we're tearing out of the parking lot within 10 more seconds.
The grinding noise is still there. So, this time I pull over a few miles later at a Flying J Truck Stop, it was well-lit, and known to be occupied. A couple of truckers were there. We check under the truck. There's a red and silver piece of metal wedged between a part of the truck and the road, about a half-inch or so off the ground, so with us in the vehicle it would definitely have been grinding against the ground.
We can't remove it by hand—it's really wedged in there, so we kick at it to bend it and figure we'll remove it when we get back. A week later I had my mechanic take it out when he was doing a service, and when he told me what it was, my blood ran cold. It was part of a kid's tricycle.
11. Need A Hand?
This is a story my dad told me. He was a long-haul trucker for about 15 years and is currently on shorter runs in the tristate area. He and his older brother were tag-team truck drivers back in the early 2000s when driving times weren’t as closely regulated. They drove two trucks and would switch out when their time driving was up, to hit deadlines faster.
One night, as they were driving through Arkansas I believe, my uncle was leading with my dad behind. My father recalls a giant puff of red, much like when you hit a deer in a semi. They thought nothing of it until they pulled over for the night. When they looked at their trucks, their jaws dropped. Stuck in the middle of my uncle's grill was a severed hand.
Naturally, they freaked the heck out and called authorities. The hand was confiscated, and it was later discovered to belong to a depressed man who had jumped off an overpass and was disintegrated by my uncle’s truck. They still made the deadline, despite spending a day behind bars. They were released when they found the suicide note in the man’s house.
12. A Vengeful Ghost
My dad is a trucker. About 20-some years ago, a woman took her own life by running out in front of him. He said that every night around the time she passed, the cab of his truck would drop a few degrees in temperature and he felt a presence. He said this went on for a few weeks, until finally he spoke out to her and said he forgave her and wished that she had peace.
He said he never experienced the eeriness again.
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13. Last Chance
I was driving through the Canadian Rockies late at night and had just passed through a small town. So I’m driving through the pitch black and I need to stop to go to the bathroom. But because it’s so dark, I miss the last rest stop for the next while. No problem, the highway is completely deserted. So I pull to the side of the road.
I do my business while staring out into the dark and then stand by my car for a bit. As I’m standing there, I see the figure of a man just walking out of the tree line. I’m miles from civilization, patchy cell service, and there isn’t a soul on the road. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me and maybe it was a deer, but nope, this was a man. I knew what I had to do.
So I calmly walk back to the driver’s door and get in, locking the doors behind me. I’m keeping my eye on this guy as I nervously put my car in drive, ready to peel out, but for some reason, I just stayed put. The guy walks right up to my passenger door and knocks on the window. I crack the window and I ask "what’s up?"
He replies to me in a very, very serious tone: "I need you to call the 9-1-1". I cautiously ask why, and he tells me his heartbreaking story. He had gone out into the woods to kill himself, but he couldn’t go through with it because he had thought of his daughters right before he was about to do it. So I call the authorities while the guy quietly cries outside.
He had a kitchen knife that he was going to use on himself, so I stayed in the car and advised him to maybe leave the knife on the ground before the officers arrived. They came and got him, but before they left with him I gave him a solid heart-to-heart and wished him well. I still think about him. I hope he was able to turn things around.
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14. Developing A Cult Following
I was coming back home from a trip to Michigan when I saw several groups of people at different times walking down the side of the road wearing matching, cult-like robes. The first time was in a town, the second on a highway, and the third in a park. Each time I passed one of the groups, the members all started staring at me.
15. Ghost Riders
This is my dad's story. He is ex British Army—so he is not scared of anything and is also super practical. He became truck driver in about 1975 I think, and this was not long after he had started. This happened at about 5 in the morning on a summer's day. It was a bit misty and bright like it tends to get early some mornings, and he was heading out of London.
He's driving, and up ahead was a young woman in her early 20s in a long blue dress standing by the side of the road. So my dad sees her and thinks she must be waiting for a ride to work. He'd never been so wrong in his life. Just as he's about to go past her, she suddenly jumps in front of his truck. He immediately slams on the breaks—sure that he must have hit her.
However, he didn’t feel a bang and, when he got out to take a look, he was unable to find her anywhere. A couple of cars stopped to see what was going on. Dad shakily explained, and the drivers kindly offered to stay while he looked for her under the truck. He looked, and she was still not there. Other drivers looked, and what they found freaked them out.
They found nothing. No body, no blood, no sign of anyone ever having even been there. They all lose their minds for a bit, and then decide that leaving as soon as possible is a great idea! He can't explain it to this day. He knows that she was there and that he hit her. He spent the rest of his driving career avoiding that route.
16. Barking Up The Wrong Tree
I had been on this particular run for a few months and found that I always got to the meet point about an hour before I needed to. It was a dark and empty dirt lot at about 3 AM, so I would stretch out across the seat and take a short nap. One night, about 10 minutes into my nap I was awoken by a barking dog. I tried to ignore it, but it carried on for several minutes and got louder as the dog got closer.
Soon, it became apparent that the dog was right outside of my truck barking at me. "Okay," I thought, either this dog is Lassie and is trying to alert me to something, or else he is just a pain in the butt and I will need to throw something at him to scare him off. The barking had been going on for a good 10 minutes at this point. So, I sat up and looked out my window—what I saw nearly made me faint.
Standing mere inches on the other side of the glass, was a man of about 35 years old. He was a large fellow, and he was barking at me. His eyes were crazy, and he was frothing at the mouth a little—the scene really held my full attention for a moment. The sheer creepiness of this struck me. Gently, and making an absolute minimum of sudden movements, I reached down and started my truck, then slowly pulled away. But it didn't end there.
He chased me, much like you might expect an angry dog to, barking all the while. Needless to say, it played havoc with my power naps from then on.
17. On The Wrong Track
I work for a railroad, and sometimes it’s just a conductor and engineer cruising along on a very isolated, fairly wooded track. I've heard a few older guys mention something about a family or a man with a suitcase walking down the track with no concerns. Constant blowing of the horn, flashing of the lights, etc., and they just kept walking down the track, then disappearing. .
18. Trust Your Gut
I have come upon some god-awful accidents at night. Cars completely under trailers with the tops basically sheared off, people laying in the road after being ejected from their car, the roads can be an awful place at night. Although, the creepiest thing I have ever had happen was this. One night I was making a night drop and kept getting the feeling like someone was watching me.
The hair kept standing up on the back of my neck, and I just felt uneasy. I decided something was off, and left to circle back in the morning. Turns out I’m pretty sure someone was watching me, because someone was fatally shot there a few nights later in an attempted robbery. That's one thing the person who trained me drilled into me, and I tell it to everyone I meet.
Always trust your gut. If something feels off, it probably is. It’s your subconscious’ way of telling your brain to pay attention.
19. Auto Pilot
I drive five hours one way to work. My shift gets out at 11:30 pm, so if I’ve got a second wind, I can usually make it the whole way home. Sometimes, though, I have to stop to nap. So, I recall getting tired shortly before Binghamton, which from work to Binghamton proper is about 1.5 hours. This exit with a gas station I stop at frequently is about 15 minutes before this.
Anyway, I stop, gas up, buy my snacks, and put up a sign in my window saying "I’m ok, I just have four more hours of driving to do, please don’t knock". I push the seat back to nap, and I have an alarm set for 20 minutes. This is now about 1:00 am. Next thing I know, it’s 6:30 am, and I’m on some back road with houses, but also fields, and I’m driving super slowly.
I have no idea where I am, and how I came to be here. I don’t have a lot of service bars, but I plug in my mom’s address and hope directions pop up. It does, and it takes me to a highway entrance in Harpursville NY. Ok...in about 20 minutes, I’m back on track. Assuming I woke up to my alarm, it would’ve been like 1:30 am, and I came to about 6:30 am. WHAT THE HECK WAS I DOING FOR 5 HOURS?!?!
How did I not hit anything (checked out the car, it was fine), how was I driving the speed limit…just...HOW?!?! Or was I asleep the whole time? The terror allowed me to complete the drive.
20. Don’t Look Now
I used to work as a field technician in the oil industry, so I spent a lot of time driving through remote areas of Canada at odd hours. One very strange and eerie experience sticks with me. I was driving late at night when I noticed a very large black shape on the road in front of me. Thinking it was a moose, I stepped on the brakes, coming to a stop only a few feet from it.
Despite being so close and having my headlights shining directly on it, I still couldn't tell what I was looking at. It was vaguely the shape of a four-legged animal, but very big, probably about six feet tall. Aside from that, it was completely featureless. I couldn't make out any details whatsoever, no shine from its eyes, nothing. But then I noticed something even more terrifying.
There were more of them in the ditch on both sides of the road. Five or six, or maybe more, all the same as the black shape on the road in front of me. None of them were moving. They didn't look like physical objects or living things. More like just large patches of absolute darkness. After I got over my shock, dread started to set in, and I drove around the thing on the road and sped off.
21. Chain Gang
My dad was once hauling logs on a truck in Idaho and was coming down from near the Coeur d'Alene area during a snowy winter night. He was putting on chains before heading down a steep hill and said that all of the hair suddenly stood up on his body. It felt like there was something watching him. He looked back and, halfway down the switchbacks, he saw a large figure standing on a 20-foot tall embankment.
As he got closer, it jumped down and revealed that its shoulders were as tall as the cab of his truck. In a single bound, it leaped down and then leaped over to the other side of the embankment. At the time, he thought it must have been a Sasquatch. Now he says it was probably a "demon" trying to make him crash. He didn't stop to remove the chains until he was well away from the mountain.
22. Cheshire Grin
I've spent the past four years driving every night for work. I was in a fairly rural part of Mississippi somewhere between Clarksdale and Greenwood, where it’s all two-lane highways the 250-mile drive home. The weather had turned pretty sour as I was leaving Clarksdale. I called my wife told her there were high wind advisories and very possible tornado threats, and I'd call her as soon as I made it to a safe area again.
I had already been working for 14 hours when I got in the truck, so I ate dinner and grabbed some coffee to stay awake and alert. Now. If you’ve never driven through flat farmland at night for one hundred miles, it's very fatiguing and spooky even without bad weather. I had driven maybe 30 miles out into the farmland when hail started bouncing off my truck.
In July, hail means tornado, and I knew it. I pull off to the side, with no one around me, and start looking for the storm or tornado I believe is approaching. I rolled the passenger window down and shone a bright flashlight off into the night. Nothing there. I turn to the driver's side—and I had to muffle a shriek. This guy has his face pushed against my glass. Grinning from ear to ear.
It was a tall male, very, very pale white, eyes were sunk back quite a bit, but that grin is what truly got me. It was corner to corner with crooked teeth like the Cheshire cat. Then I screamed, and he was gone. I slammed the truck in drive and took off at the highest speed I could go. Now, my company has a camera installed in my truck.
So even though I called my wife and didn’t tell her about this guy or the hail, I made darn sure I checked my SD card the moment after I hung up. I promise you, this guy never popped up on my front or rear cameras. I’ve always played it off as my imagination, but I will say I don't drive through the delta in the dark anymore if I don't absolutely have to.
23. Golden Tickets
I work as a customer service representative for a trucking company in Omaha. This one happened shortly after I started working there. We dispatch local and long-distance drivers. One evening, just before shutting down for the day, we start getting multiple calls from people in the California area headed west, and they're all about the same trucker.
Motorists are reporting that one of our drivers is speeding, cutting off people, not signaling, and just being a reckless driver all around. We manage to identify the driver in question so we call him up, and the guy is inconsolable. Then he made his dark confession. Turns out his sister had been slain at her apartment, and he was literally racing to get back home as fast as his truck could take him.
My boss told him to park the truck immediately, and bought two plane tickets. One for the driver to fly back to Omaha, and another ticket to fly a volunteer out to California to pick up his truck.
24. Stay Put, Comrade
Picture the Soviet Union somewhere near Omsk, back in the 60s. There was practically no traffic whatsoever, and a trucker could drive for hundreds of miles without seeing a single car. This is the backdrop for a story from my grandfather’s friend that was an experienced trucker, who was training a young recruit, bringing him along where he went.
So, it’s mid-winter, and they are driving through a snow desert stretching for as far as the eye can see. It’s the middle of nowhere, and there was not a soul for literally hundreds of kilometers around. While they were driving, an immense blizzard hit them, reducing the visibility to a 1-meter maximum. They kept on driving until they went off the road, and got stuck in the snow. This was a total disaster.
Again, with no passing cars, their situation was desperate. There was little food, no heating, no other supplies, and the blizzard could potentially continue for days. After six hours of what I imagine was very uneasy waiting, the fear and panic got the better of the young and inexperienced fellow. He insisted that they should walk along the road, and try to find help.
Keep in mind, there were no towns or cities for hundreds of miles around. The older fellow tells him to calm down and wait. If they went, they would most likely die from exhaustion or exposure, and their best bet would be to at least wait for the sky to clear. There was not much hope at the moment, but at the least, better visibility would give them a slim chance to reach safety.
The lad, however, was extremely nervous and they began to argue. It escalated and the younger one grabbed a wrench threateningly. My grandfather’s friend had a knife in his hand but decided not to risk it. His partner got out of the truck—being barely able to open the door, and stumbled away, knee-deep in the falling snow.
My grandfather’s mate waited there for another day, and in the morning, he was rescued by the army who were sent to look for them guessing that they got stuck in the snow. He and a group of men left the truck there and continued along the road. In a few kilometers, my grandfather’s friend saw a small black object, barely visible in the sea of white. His heart stopped because he could guess what this was.
He yelled at the men to stop the car. Upon inspection, what was buried in the snow was his young partner. The black object that he’d spotted was his partner’s cap, which could easily have been missed as deep as he was under the snow. The body was sat upright frozen, and rigid as stone. The trucker told my grandfather that the cold had perfectly captured the expression of profound despair and horror on the young and boyish face of the lad.
That fellow blamed himself for the rest of his life for not stopping him, and for failing to convince him to stay.
25. Dream Catcher
I was crossing the Navajo Nation on my way to Colorado in the 90s. It was around 1 am and I was really tired, so I pulled over between Gallup and Ship Rock. I had a nightmare that evil looking faces were coming at me out of the pitch black darkness, screaming. I woke up, started my car, and discovered that a coyote and jackrabbit were sitting about 10 feet apart right beside my car.
I have never had a nightmare that freaky before or since. I have traveled that route a few times since, but never stopped after dark again.
26. The Dark Beast
I was working the overnight shift from Friday night into Saturday morning at a gas station. At about 6:00 am, a semi pulls into the fuel aisle. The driver gets out and almost runs into the store, clearly shaken. His face is completely white and he is obviously upset. My first thought was the poor man had hit someone on the road, since we get a lot of people walking across a four-lane highway in front of the store.
So I ask what's wrong. He looks at me for a second and is like, "I'm not crazy". Now I'm thinking "Great, I'm here all alone and this guy is losing it". I say of course not. "I just saw something huge on the side of the road". "Like a deer or bear? We had a bear get in the dumpster last week". His next response made me shiver. "No, bigger than a bear on its back legs".
"Maybe a big person?" "It picked up a lifeless buck on the side of the road and carried it over its shoulder into the woods". I can only stare at him. My brain cannot deal with this information this late in a shift. A local comes up to the counter to get his usual and the guy tells him the story, too. The local says, "Oh, that's the Big Foot that lives near the county line".
The truck driver and I are both looking at this guy like he has two heads. He has to be joking. This trucker pays for his fuel at record speed and leaves, never to be seen again. The local still insists it's Big Foot. I just don't go in the woods now, because I don't know.
27. Near Miss
My great uncle drove big trucks. Living in the middle of nowhere, sometimes people would leave trash on the road. And since he had a big truck, he’d just smash into said boxes or paper and continue on. Well, one day he was coming up on a cardboard box and just had the urge to swerve and miss this one for some reason.
He misses it and passes by with no incident. Then he looks in his rearview, and out of the box pops a kindergarten-age little kid.
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28. A Rude Awakening
I think the worst creepy thing that ever happened to me was when I was heading from Arizona to Utah. This was a few years ago, and the main highway had been taken out in a flash flood. It was under construction, so I had to take a weird detour through the mountains in lower Utah. It was getting late and I was getting tired, so I pulled off onto the shoulder and went to sleep in my bunk.
Now, this was in the middle of nowhere. The closest town was like 40 miles away, so it is completely pitch black outside once I turn the lights off. Around 4 am, I wake up because I'm hearing something messing with my truck, like playing with the air and power cables between my cab and the trailer, which is literally 6 inches from where my head is at on the outside of the cab.
Then I feel something climb onto the landing that's on the back of my truck. It shakes my whole truck, so I'm guessing something around 200 hundred pounds was climbing around back there, I'm thinking like a mountain lion or a bear. At this point, I'm wide awake and I want to get this thing away from me, so I slam my hand into my cab wall trying to scare whatever is out there. The reply made me jump out of my skin.
I hear someone, a male, scream, and I hear them fall off the back of my truck. I then hear about 15 other people all around my truck yelling. I climb up front, turn on my lights...and illuminate a squad of Army Reserves doing their midnight march and capture drills. Turns out, these guys were supposed to go find an "abandoned" truck and "secure" it for their midnight drills.
That truck was three miles back down the road. They were not expecting me to be sleeping there, and thought I was part of the drill. I'm a veteran myself, so after explaining I was not part of their test and was just there out of coincidence, we laughed it off. They had to radio to their commanding officer and tell him not to have the other squads bother me.
29. One Big Creepy Family
I've seen some rather screwed-up stuff over the years. I was driving across Kansas on I-70 headed west. There is a pretty long stretch out there that's just a couple of little towns and not much else. As the night wore on, I realized I had been passed several times by this beat-up old motor home. In it, several people sat with their noses almost pressed to the window, watching me with creepy interest as they passed. Every time.
Also, I never noticed where I re-passed them at. A couple of times, I swear they passed me twice where there were no rest areas or exits to pull off at. I would have seen them stopped somewhere, but yet, here they were passing me again. They all looked like some variant of Charles Manson or some other freaky type. Had me pretty uptight by the time I got to the truck stop and stopped for the night.
Almost every driver I know has seen stuff late at night that just can't be explained. Maybe it's fatigue...or maybe not.
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30. The Missing Car
I used to be a tow truck operator. Once, I got a phone call from my wife, who was picking me up at 1 am. She calls me, frantically screaming that there’s been an insane accident, but she only sees one car. My shop was a block away. I get to the scene of the accident to light it up with my emergency lights and block the scene for first responders.
I’m at a six-lane bridge the goes over the thruway, and there’s only one car in sight. The car is missing its entire front half, with the engine visible, shoved into the firewall of the vehicle. I get out and start talking with this guy who is in absolutely total shock shock. I ask him, were you hurt? His answer only made things more eerily confusing.
He says, "No, I pulled over because I thought I had a flat tire. I got out and walked around the front to look at the passenger's side tire, and soon as my foot hit the curb, I heard a loud bang. I turned around and my car was gone!" My next words were "What did you hit?" He said nothing at all. Now I’m even more confused and point out that the front of his car is gone. And then it got weirder.
He says, "Nope that’s not my car". So, I start looking around and there aren’t any other cars on the road, and there’s nothing within eyesight. I can clearly see a quarter of a mile, and there is nothing anywhere. Some lady comes walking by and he says it’s her car. She’s hammered as heck. The fire department get there, and for about 15 minutes they are looking for the car with me.
A cop radios in, and says he found the car. It revealed the whole, bizarre story. It went over six lanes and a median, down then up a thruway ramp, up a hill, through a fence, then bounced off four parked cars into a pole half a mile away. This thing had its parking brake on. The car’s rear bumper was squished against the front seat. They estimated her speed at 100+ mph.
This guy had pulled over to check a flat tire, and an inebriated driver had crashed into his car and launched it half a mile. If he would have taken just a tenth of a second delay stepping on that curb, he would have been beyond gone. I was off the clock, but I helped the officers secure the scene until accident investigation showed up. Neither of the involved people were hurt, and both cars were totaled.
31. Bright Lights, Big Mystery
I got to test drive some rigs and trucks for my job. I was driving down south along the Sea of Cortez with a buddy at night. It was this 4-hour dirt road to Gonzaga, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere in the desert, and we see the lights of a car behind us coming down fast and now effectively tailing us. The jerk had bar-mount headlights on top, which are super bright.
It’s normal for locals to party in the nearest spring-breaker town and then go down this particular road super fast to "test" their rigs, since there are no authorities there. So I try waving him off to get the guy to keep the lights low since he’s blinding us, but he isn't slowing down a bit or turning his roof lights off. Again, this was a dangerous, super dark road.
Finally, I found a spot to bail off the road without crashing, and we see lights passing by us super fast and going straight toward a curve. We were like, "that’s it, he is going to crash down to the sea," But that’s not what happened at all. Sure enough, the vehicle goes off the road.
But the lights didn’t fall. They kept going straight into the beach, and the sea, and then pitched up abruptly to the night sky and disappeared. We didn’t say a word for a minute or so, and then my buddy goes, "Did you see it?" I say, "The freaking flying truck?" We didn’t’ talk about it anymore, as it simply didn't make sense to talk about. I still don’t understand.
32. The Whisper Men
I’m a FedEx contractor, and I was in one of those big box trucks. I finished a long delivery day, and I swear to whatever gods you believe in that I was hearing voices in my cab. It wasn’t the radio, it wasn’t my tinnitus, it wasn’t my subconscious. I was hearing whispering voices in my right ear that were coming from the passenger seat.
The voices continued even after I had gotten back to my hub, clocked out, and hopped in my own car to go home. They only stopped when I left the parking lot. It only happened that night. I still have no idea what the heck it was because I had ruled everything else out.
33. The Unwelcome Guest
I was driving a flatbed and picked up a load of construction material. I strapped everything down, put a tarp over the load, and left. About five miles down the road, in the middle of nowhere, I notice my tarp flapping in the wind. I found a wide shoulder and pulled over to fix it. I realize that I did a bad job tarping this load the first time and decide to re-do it on the side of the road.
I undo all the bungee straps, drag the tarps off, roll them back up, climb up on the load, and start unrolling the tarps again. That’s when I see a guy walking down the same side of the road I'm on, coming towards my truck. I don't think anything about it other than to keep an eye on him, because I'm in the middle of nowhere, and continue what I'm doing.
About the time I have the tarps set in place and am climbing down to start hooking the bungee straps back on, this dude is getting close enough that I'm now paying more attention to him than I am to tarping my load. I grab my winch bar and set it on the trailer where I'm working just in case. The guy gets to me, and the first thing I notice is his hair.
It's like a mullet, but it's patchy. Like he tried to cut his own hair and had a seizure in the process. The next thing I noticed were his eyes, which I can only describe as "off". Like they were clear and he seemed sober, but they also gave me the distinct impression that the elevator didn't go all the way up. His clothes were dirty and not well maintained, with dirty white tennis shoes.
I remember he didn't have laces on one shoe and the tongue was noticeably out of place. He stops by me, waits until I acknowledge him. His words made me shake. He just says, "I've got a long walk". I'm like "Yeah man, you do, we're in the middle of nowhere". Making it clear there's no ride to be had here. He nods, starts walking by me continuing on his way.
Then he stops at about the driver door on my truck and turns around, comes back to me, and repeats himself. "I've got a long walk". At this point, I explained explicitly that I can't give him a ride, insurance and all that. I apologize for not being able to help him out, and he seems to accept this, turns around, and leaves.
I wait for him to get a little ways away from my truck and start working on finishing the tarp job. I still keep an eye on him and he's moving away from me. As I'm putting on the last of the bungee straps, I look over to check where he's at…and he's turned around heading back towards me. He’s now about 100 yards in front of my truck and coming back my way.
It looks like he's talking on a cell phone. He has his hand up to his face and I can barely make out his mouth moving. Meanwhile, his other hand is waving like he's having a conversation with someone. I finish with the straps, grab my winch bar, and am climbing into my truck as he's about 10 yards away now. Soon as I'm in the cab, I lock the doors and set the winch bar on the passenger seat just in case.
I look at the guy and realize he's not talking on a phone, he's just talking to his hand. Now I'm really nervous, because he doesn't look like he's having a nice pleasant chat, it looks more like an angry conversation. I crank the truck up, put it in gear, and just pull out, didn't look for traffic or anything. As I pass him, he's just looking at me, still holding his hand to his face and just staring at me. It gave me the creeps.
About the time I hit fifth or sixth gear, I look in the mirror…and there's no one there.
34. Things That Go Bump In The Night
I was parked at a dirt turnout in the Arizona desert for the night. This is out in Navajo country. At about 2:00 am, I woke up to scratching at the window of my sleeper, and it went on for about 15 minutes. I'm sitting there in the dark, scared to bones, and wondering what the heck is happening with my a knife in my hand.
After it ended, I waited another 15 minutes or so before I opened my curtain and looked out the windows. I couldn't see anything outside, and I was still the only one parked there. Got out the next morning and all I found were some footprints coming to the truck and eventually walking back into the desert. Haven't parked there since; I always stop at a small truck stop nearby now.
Pexels
35. The Phantom Touch
I was driving through eastern Washington on some state roads. There were no rest stops or cities, but I had done the route enough to know there were these massive dirt areas every 40 miles where you could park safely away from the road. I decided to call it a night and closed my blinds and laid down to watch something on my phone.
After roughly an hour, I hear someone try to open the driver’s-side door. I haven't heard any vehicles on the road the whole time I'm parked, but I get up to peek out the curtains. As I'm looking out into the blackness of the window, I hear them try the passenger side door. I peek down from the top of the curtain but can't see anything, so I start the truck and kick on the lights.
I'm fairly freaked out at this point so I'm still not opening the curtains but peeking through gaps. Nothing. Nobody is standing near either of my doors or parked within sightline. I take a deep breath and close the sleeper curtains too, because for some reason that's going to make things better, right? But the worst was yet to come.
After laying back down and convincing myself that something blew against the truck and it only sounded like the doors, I hear what sounds like someone trying to pry open the vents on the sleeper. The door handles start clicking again and the truck starts shifting like someone is climbing on it. I hit the little alarm button in the sleeper hoping to spook them off.
It does nothing but add to the noise of door handles, fingers tapping on windows and chassis, and the hiss of air coming out of the suspension. Then suddenly it stops. A few moments where I can only hear myself breathing and my heart pounding before I hear another truck approach and then drive by. I spent the next few hours waiting for whatever it was to come back, but it never did.
In the morning, I couldn't find any footprints or damage to my truck…but on every window were tiny human-looking handprints, like a toddler had licked their hand and stuck it to my window over and over.
36. The Hills Have Eyes
My friend was driving on a Mexican road at night. He felt the call of nature, so he parked on the sideway and jumped off the truck. He walked to relieve himself and while doing that, he felt a presence beside him. He pointed his flashlight at his side and saw, standing beside him, a small deformed person. It had no clothes on and had both its head and face bloated.
He was standing just there. My friend ran away to his truck, jumped in, and drove away from there.
37. The Woman In White
My Costa Rican tour guide told us a really scary story that happened to a former employee of his who would drive a truck filled with construction materials. They were building miles away from the nearest city, since a lot of Costa Rica is preserved jungle. Anyway, this dude was the first (not the only) person to have this happen to him.
He was driving behind a line of construction trucks on their way to the site late at night. He saw a white pale woman throw herself in the way of the trucks in front of him. He yelled into their radio to stop and check for her, but when they stopped they didn’t find a body or blood and no one had even seen her except for him.
This happened again, and yet again when they stopped, they couldn’t find the girl and no one except the guy who called it saw anything. The other workers thought he was losing it or something. One other time, he had to go out to the site by himself, at night. It had been some time after the incident with the pale woman, so he didn’t think it was a big deal.
He exited the car at one point to take a leak near a clearing, and that’s when he felt it start to get really cold. He turned around and peering out from a tree in the distance he saw the same pale woman staring at him. Dude booked it back to his car and got in the driver’s seat, turned it on, and was about to speed the heck out when he took one last look at his left-side rearview mirror.
He saw her mmmmuch closer and still looking at him. He kept that story to himself, thinking no one would believe him…until a new worker claimed to see the same thing and told my tour guide, who was their boss at the time. When the boss told the truck driver what the new guy saw, the truck driver told him about the second encounter with the woman in the forest. Creepy, creepy stuff all around.
38. Jesus Take The Wheel
My father was a truck driver and he was driving through a smaller town in northern California hauling tomatoes. Suddenly, he got incredibly tired. He wasn’t low on sleep or deprived at all, but he ended up passing out at the wheel. Last thing he saw was the light of the town in front of him. He woke up about two hours later on the other side of town, perfectly parked on the side of the road.
He swears something was looking out for him that night.
Pexels
39. An Unseen Presence
Reno, NV. A place on the north side of town, way off the freeway towards an old road. I got there early at like 1:00 am, and the place I was going didn't open until 6:00 am. The facility was closed, so no one was around, and I just pulled into the lot and parked off to the side. I went to sleep and was woken shortly after to someone knocking on the door.
It was so forceful, the truck shook. I jump out of bed, thinking they are there already and want to offload me early. I get to the door and no one is there, so I step down thinking they are behind the trailer. No one around. I look under the truck and around…absolutely no one. No wind or bad weather, not another person around.
I jump in the truck and pull out of there as fast as I could and went and parked in a nearby truck stop. Still can't explain it, I mean I guess I can justify I could have imagined the sound, but the truck shaking was definitely real.
40. Queen Of The Road
I was a 23-year-old girl. My new husband and I had decided that driving as a team would be a fun adventure after college, rather than jumping right into the 9-5 lifestyle. I was down in Arizona on my own one time, driving down a long stretch of nothing at about 4 in the morning when a guy pulled up next to me waving his CB radio in the air.
I never left mine on, because I found listening to all those guys all the time to be irritating. But, this guy obviously had something he wanted to tell me, so I turned it on. Upon turning it on, the guy told me that I had blown a tire. I thanked him for letting me know, figuring that I would stop at the next truck stop to take care of it. But the story wasn't over.
For some reason, the guy kept harassing me for the next 40 miles, telling me to pull over right away and check my tires. I finally got to the next town and stopped at the first possible chance I had. I got out and checked my truck. There were no blown tires anywhere. I have no clue what that guy would have done to me if I had pulled over on the highway—but I am so glad that I trusted my gut and didn’t stop.
41. You Don’t Know The Half...
This happened to me when I was 15. My dad ran a wrecker service for over the road truckers. Late one night, we got a call that a truck had run off the road and struck a tree 20 miles south of town. So, my dad and I fired up the wrecker and headed south. When we arrived on the scene, we saw that the truck and trailer had run off the road to the right, and smacked a tree head on.
It was one of those, 100-year-old oak trees. The truck was still running at an idle, and the door was closed, but no driver was seen from the driver’s window. The driver’s windshield was busted, and there was a large hole in the middle of it. The trailer was loaded with sheets of steel, a quarter-inch thick. Of course, it was pitch-dark and you couldn’t really see things that well when we first got there.
Our impression was the driver smacked a tree, hit his head on the windshield and was already getting treatment somewhere. We were so wrong. My dad set up the wrecker to hook onto the trailer and he wanted me to open the cab in order to release the brakes. When I opened the door, I was greeted with the lower half of a body.
When the driver hit the tree, a single sheet of steel broke free, and cut through the cab, cutting the driver in half. The upper half of his body went through the windshield. I found the other half in a cornfield, about 40 feet from the truck. He was still grabbing the upper part of the steering wheel. It looked like he was frozen in time still driving the truck.
This is one of many experiences I had growing up in a wrecker service family.
42. The Sixth Sense
My uncle said he hired a guy from town to help him drive late shifts at night with him on the road. The story was, the guy had somehow managed to burn a house down as a kid, and has since claimed to see ghosts. He would occasionally swerve on the roads at nothing, or worse, my uncle said he would be sitting around, and the guy would say, "I see a little girl on the swing".
My aunt confirmed it, said he would say things like that often. Apparently, he learned to live with it.
43. The Truth Is Out There
A few years back, I was driving home after a shift. It was 3 or 4 am, and I was tired but not exhausted. It's a deserted state route in the middle of nowhere, and it's pretty common not to see a single car during the 30-mile trip. I drive this road multiple times a week. It's mostly open fields and some farmland through this 30-mile stretch.
This particular night it was cold, but the sky was clear. Like no clouds or anything, and I actually love nights like this because you can see the stars so well without light pollution. Anyway, about halfway back home, I come over this hill to a 2- or 3-mile straight stretch. That's when the terror hit me. A huge, dark object about the length of a pickup truck, but far rounder and thicker, catches my attention.
It's just hovering about 50 feet in the air, over a farm field. There's a very bright red light coming out of the side or bottom. I couldn't tell exactly where it originated from because it was so bright. As I was going about 50mph past it, I only had a few seconds to look at it, but the image is burned into my mind. I have no idea what it was.
I wanted to turn around, but I was freaked out. I'm sure alien life exists somewhere, but as for visiting our planet, I don’t know. But if I ever had to paint a picture of what I think a UFO could look like, I'd paint whatever the heck I saw that night. I haven't seen anything odd over that area since that night, but that was odd enough for a lifetime.
44. Field Of Nightmares
I parked off an exit ramp at about 3 am. The moon was full and high, and I spotted an unmistakably human figure in a nearby cut cornfield. A little spooky, but I just wrote it off as an old-timer putting up a scarecrow for the grandkids. I started watching a few YouTube videos before turning in, and out of the corner of my vision, I thought I saw movement.
I shut my lights off to get a good look, and saw the figure but nothing else. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like maybe it was in a different spot. Maybe a little closer even. I was definitely feeling a bit spooked. The highway was devoid of anyone besides a car passing every ten minutes or so. I didn’t want to, but I had to jump out to go to the bathroom.
I considered a bottle, but I told myself I was being childish. I took a look at the figure and it was right where I figured it should be. I hop out, walk between my truck and trailer, and start going. Every fiber of my being wanted to look. I told myself again I was being foolish, but I couldn’t help it. I looked out... the field was empty, and the figure wasn’t there.
My stomach dropped. I finished up and jumped back in. I took off down the highway. Stopped 40 minutes up the road at a well-lit and very full store. Haven’t stopped on a ramp since.
Pikrepo
45. Lord Of The Flies
My uncle was driving between Great Falls and Helena at around 3:00 am. He had his high beams on, as it was a lonely drive and a quiet highway. In the distance, he saw something cross the median and started to slow his approach, thinking it was a deer. As he got closer, he realized it was standing up and slowed down to about 30 mph. Then he realized what it was and started to panic.
It was a man in blue coveralls with a pig’s head. Not a mask, but literally the head of a pig on his shoulder. My uncle moved to the left lane and as he passed, Pig Head lunged at the truck. My uncle didn’t stop to check if he’d grabbed on until he was in the safety of Helena. Nothing was out of the ordinary there, but on that stretch of road now, he doesn’t slow down for anything.
Flickr
46. Looking For A Good Time
My buddy was stopped at this rest stop somewhere in Ohio. He was outside of his truck, checking something near the rear trailer wheels. A car pulled upside him and the driver rolled his window down. The driver was a middle-aged male and creepily asked my buddy if he wanted to have a good time. My buddy responded, "Nah, leave me alone".
The guy driving the car sped off. Around two hours later, my buddy went back outside to check something near the rear wheels again. As he was bent down, he heard this car approaching quickly. He looked up, and his blood ran cold. It was the same man he had encountered earlier, and he was about to do something totally drastic.
The man attempted to hit my friend with his car, at probably 25mph but was unsuccessful as he quickly jumped under the trailer. The driver of the car stopped about 30 feet from the trailer and put his car in reverse. As he began to back up, my buddy grabbed his tire iron and threw it at the car. The tire iron smashed through the rear window of the car.
The driver sped off immediately. My buddy didn’t get a plate number, description of the vehicle or of the perpetrator himself, as it all happened at night.
47. The Bad Samaritan
Driving home through the outskirts of town, a young woman ran through the street waving at me and yelling something. She was wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. There are a lot of homeless people in that area, so I just kept going. It's fairly common for women to flag a car down and distract them while a bunch of guys scramble out of the bushes to take your car.
About a mile down the road, though, I realized she didn't really look homeless. I felt guilty for not stopping, and the ethical thing to do was risk the carjacking for the possibility the woman was in danger. Bad people shouldn't turn everyone else into bad people with fear. But when I went back, the woman was totally gone.
I had only passed one car when I flipped around. A blue, 99s Toyota. There are no stores or houses. Just sand, dirt, rocks, brush. Later that night, it occurred to me that she may have been running from the man in the blue Toyota. I hope she was a carjacker.
48. In The Nick Of Time
There’s a driver where I work who tells a story about driving through the desert in Arizona back in the 80s. With nothing around for miles, he broke down in the middle of the night. It was an easy fix—his fuel filter was clogged, so he drained it a little to free up the fuel and got the truck running about 15 minutes later.
He took off down the highway when he saw a man that was out of breath on the side of the highway that was staring at him as he passed. He said it looked like the guy had been running toward him until he got his truck running and drove away. He said if he had been there a few more minutes, the guy would’ve been able to walk up on him with his head in the engine bay.
He said the look on the guy’s face gave him chills and telling the story, it was clear that it still creeped him out.
49. Femme Fatale
My father has told me this story maybe a thousand times. My family went on a trip from Mexico City to Acapulco when I was barely a year old. On the way back home in the middle of the night, the car broke down and a patrol car quickly came to our help. There were three officers in the car, and the chief offered to take my dad to the nearest gas station.
The officer told him he could find a mechanic there, and he told the other two officers to stay with our car. My dad says they seemed absolutely not pleased with the order, until the chief told them, "Don't worry, there's a woman and two children". That seemed to calm the two men, but it definitely gave my dad and mom a bit of a pause.
Driving to the gas station in the car, my dad asked the chief what that was all about. The chief told him that there had been many accidents in that part of the road, and all of the accidents involved young men traveling without any women or children. Those who had survived told a completely eerie tale. They said that they crashed because they could see a very beautiful woman next to the road.
However, once they came close to her, she turned out to be just a rotting bodby staring at them, and they crashed because they were paralyzed with fear.
50. The Silent Watcher
I used to have this regular delivery place that was out in the boondocks, miles away from civilization and smack dab in the middle of two large towns. I would drive this route maybe once a month, and would always pass at least one car driving towards me due to the sheer length of the drive. There was a small group of old houses on this route that were really broken down.
I had never seen anyone around them in six months of driving the route. Always assumed they were vacant because they didn't look liveable. Well, I was driving out to this customer one autumn afternoon. I’d been driving for a very long time without seeing a single car drive towards me. Finally, I drive past the abandoned houses, and there's one old lady in her front yard pushing an old manual grass cutter.
She stops in her tracks as I drive towards her. I took it as a sign I was speeding or something and slowed down. I take a quick glance in my rearview mirror after passing by, and she was just staring straight at me. She dropped the grass cutter and turned 180 degrees to do this... It was just very odd and definitely set off my spidey sense.
Never saw her again, or anyone else on that route by those houses in the 10 months I drove it.
51. Oh Deer
This was a trash route in a pretty rural area. We were at a stop loading trash when a pickup stopped behind us. A petite woman in scrubs that were covered in blood got out and asked directions to Lake Jack Nolan. She said there was a deer that had been hit by a truck and she had been sent to remove the remains. She never said who sent her, but she wasn't moving a deer anywhere at her size.
Still, we gave her directions and sent her on her way. We all said we wondered if she was going to dump a body or something like that. She was already covered in blood in a nice truck and was supposed to be on her way to move roadkill that was far to heavy for her to handle. It really disturbed me at the time, and I still think about it.
Unsplash
52. Beasts Among Us
I used to drive a truck in northern Manitoba, Canada. You can drive for several hours and see very few vehicles. This road is quite flat and straight in stretches. Of course, this is deep in the bush. One day, I saw something cross the road in the distance. Very large, easily past the hood on my truck. But not long, like a moose or elk. Just tall.
It disappeared into the bush and as I drove by the spot, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I heard days later a tow truck driver describing on the radio his encounter with a similar creature, only he was much more clear he had spotted Bigfoot. This guy went to some length to explain he didn't want people thinking he was crazy. But he was sure what he saw.
I asked an aboriginal client of mine in a nearby community, and he said the Elders spoke of them as commonly as they spoke of the other animals. I don't know what I saw that day, but I'm certain it wasn't a bear, moose, deer, or elk. I just don't know what the heck it was.
53. A Daring Feat
Driving southbound on I-75 in the winter in Ohio, I witnessed a compact car like a Cobalt or similar get on the on-ramp to merge in to I-75 North and then completely lose control. They went sideways, fell at least six feet off the ramp and onto the shoulder of the interstate, landing on all four wheels. They then spun 360 degrees, and proceeded to merge into traffic like it was nothing.
Blew. My. Mind. The CB radio was going nuts for about five minutes. "OH MY GOD WHO ELSE JUST SAW THAT?" etc.
Pexels
54. Chill Out, Man
One night I'm driving at around 3 AM, and I see this bright light about two miles behind me. Not only is it super-bright, but it is on the interstate and it is hauling butt. It's big too, and it's moving faster than anything I think I'd ever seen. Now, earlier that day I had called the guy who taught me how to drive, and he is really, really superstitious about life on the road.
He would tell me stories about how a green apparition chased him in Florida when he was pulling too many miles, all kinds of stuff. I was already spooked from that conversation earlier, so looking into my mirror and seeing this giant light flying towards me made my butt clench onto the seat. This thing closes the distance between us, and flies past me, probably doing around 120 mph.
I had the window down and as it went past me, I felt this massive amount of heat. When it passed me, I could finally tell what it was. It was a hay hauler, a truck that hauls a trailer designed for hay, and the entire load of hay in the back was ablaze. I jumped in the CB radio and screamed, "DRIVER, YOUR TRAILER IS ON FIRE!"
The driver comes back in a surprisingly calm voice with, "I know, I'm just letting it burn off. I figure if I go fast enough, I can keep my cab from getting burned".
55. The Night That Never Ends
Myself and two friends had to drive from Laredo, TX to Baton Rouge, LA one night in my Ford van. It was about 2:00 am. There is a particularly long and dark section of highway just outside Laredo...no buildings, towns, or lights for about 50 miles. I was in the right lane coming up on a truck and pulled out into the left passing lane.
As I was slowly overtaking this long truck, my peripheral vision caught a sudden movement of this big truck toward the right shoulder. I saw the truck was swerving to avoid hitting a person dressed in all white, with a white face...whose arms were folded across the chest and eyes were closed as they walked across the highway.
I swerved to the left and barely missed this ghostly-looking person with my passenger mirror...I can still remember seeing that their eyes were closed...that's how close we came to hitting this person.
56. Super Grandad
My grandparents were truckers. One time they were driving along in British Colombia, Canada, and came across a fill station. They filled up and started to head down the road, when they see a camper just sitting on the side of the road with smoke coming out of it. They stopped and investigated, and it looked as though the camper was on fire.
So, my grandpa, being the crazy man he is, wrapped his hand in a cloth and opened the door. It was a really good thing he did. When he opened the door, he found out the awful truth. There was a family trapped inside. So, he got them out, brought them back to the gas station, and went on his way. No idea what happened to the family, and they never took my grandparents’ names.
57. Closed Room Mystery
I drove by a marsh every night when I was going home from work. One night, I saw a car pulled over with hazards on. Dude was head to toe covered in blood. No crash, no injury, just covered in blood.
Pexels
58. The Great Unknown
My dad has several stories from hauling logs in Idaho and driving trucks through Utah and Nevada. He once said there was a light keeping pace with him out in the desert on a moonless night. It kept pace for a minute before it disappeared and his truck turned off. He pulled off at the next diner, and the folks in there called it a common occurrence.
Needpix
59. Mystery: Solved
One time on a long-distance drive, I started seeing white spots about a foot in diameter on the road. Probably 30-40 over the span of a mile or so, and I couldn’t quite figure out what they were. Eventually, I came to a pickup truck with a large cage built onto the back and pulled over on the side road. That’s when it all became clear.
The door to the cage was wide open and it was completely empty. The man driving it was staring at the empty cage and scratching his head. The white spots were apparently just his lost chickens!
60. Aiding And Abetting
My great uncle was a long-haul trucker, and he swears that one time he was driving down the road, only to see two guys pull a rolled-up carpet out of the trunk of their car and throw it in the river. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it’s still creepy nonetheless.
61. Losing It
A few years ago, I was driving back from Georgia to Arkansas. The trip usually means I cross into the northern part of Alabama, where I normally take a wee nap at this one rest area. One day, I take my nap, go to the bathroom, and get a Red Bull from the vending machine. I get back in my car at 1:30-2:00 am and start driving again.
The highway was completely deserted except for me. I found it weird but shrugged it off. The next thing I know, it's nearing 6:00 am and the sun's coming up. My gas tank was near empty (at the rest stop I had 3/4 a tank), and my odometer shows I've driven like 250 miles, but my GPS showed I was only about 10 miles from the rest area.
I have no recollection of the time lost. It’s just gone.
62. Light Up The Sky
I was driving through a brush area with these weird rock walls. No plants or anything, just rock and sand. It was monsoon time, so it was raining cats and dogs, just pouring so hard you could barely see going 20mph. Thunder and lightning just rocking the car. Sometimes turning into hail and pounding you. Just a nasty storm.
I came around a corner, and it looked like the whole countryside was legitimately on fire. Like 20' tall flames, hundreds of yards in all directions while pouring rain at dusk. Just rocks and dirt wildly on fire in the pouring rain. I just slowly drove on; it was totally freaky and surreal. Honestly, I thought I may have hallucinated it. But then I found out the truth.
I checked the news and discovered that a propane truck had slid off the road going way too fast and apparently busted open pretty violently and lit on fire. Never saw the truck, it must have been behind something. Felt a bit bad after about not stopping...
63. Ghost Town
I have one weird story from when I was a kid. My parents always took us on long road trips every summer, and my dad liked to take meandering routes through rural towns to see all the tourist traps. One trip, we passed through a little town in Illinois, the kind you miss if you sneeze. This one had one bizarre feature: mannequins.
Every house and business was only populated by mannequins. I don’t remember seeing any people. Everything looked maintained and clean, so someone was at least caring for the place. There weren’t any signs or anything indicating it was for tourists. Just a convenience store and bait shop with a sign reading, "Eat here. Get worms".
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64. Rude Awakening
My dad is a trucker. One night as he was taking a nap, he woke up to a chilling realization. There was someone looking through the front window watching him. He was on a bed in the back and got startled. Then he noticed the window was open a little bit because it was in the middle of summer in Australia, and saw this stranger's hand reach for the keys to unlock the car.
My dad yelled at him, which thankfully scared him away, and drove home immediately.
65. Alarm Bells Ringing
I was cruising down Highway 212 in the middle of the night in Southern Montana. About 2:00 am, I'm pulling through the only town on the lonely stretch of highway. One stoplight town and I get stopped at the only red light. Hadn't seen a vehicle on the road since I had hopped off I-90 about an hour prior, and there wasn't a single person outside in the town.
Sitting at that red light, a loud siren starts sounding. Loud enough that I don't see how any person in the town or within a few miles could've slept through it. It reminded me of the siren from the movie Silent Hill. I gunned it through the red light and away from that town as fast as my little four-cylinder Malibu would go.
It may not seem that crazy, but just imagine the most haunting sound you've ever heard, in a place you've never been, several hours separated from seeing a person last. I'm sure there's an innocent explanation for the siren, but it still sends chills down my spine just thinking of it.
66. A Deal With The Devil
My friend told me a story about riding with his father in his truck as a kid. They were in the middle of nowhere, and they were coming up on a person lying in the road with no one else around, no cars, etc. His dad blew the horn. They didn’t move, so he blew it again. As he got closer, they still didn’t move. So he did something horrific.
He told my friend to put his head down and cover his eyes…and he ran the person over. When they looked back, a bunch of people who were previously hiding were running out of the woods. Basically, his dad had suspected it was a setup for something and wasn’t chancing it with his child in the car. I think about that story ALL the time.
67. A Higher Calling
I was in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Texas and getting tired. There were absolutely no lights anywhere around me but the stars. I guess I kind of messed up a turn at one of those forks in the road, because out of nowhere a calm voice came in quite loud over the CB: "DRIVER, LOOKS LIKE IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO PULL OVER AND GRAB SOME SLEEP".
So I did. I’m not ignoring Invisible CB Jesus.
68. A 14-Ton Alarm Clock
I used to drive buses, and I did what we called the "first sign on" shifts that started between three and four in the morning. One morning with a workmate at the depot, we go out into the yard to start up our buses. I hear him scream, and then I see him come bolting out of his bus. This scared the heck out of me, of course, but I tentatively went over to investigate.
Turns out there was a homeless man asleep on his bus, and when he started the bus it woke him up. The homeless guy did not say a word and just walked down the bus to get out, scaring the heck out of my co-worker when he was right behind him. We used to have a good laugh about it after the fact, but at the time it was scary as heck to experience. I thought someone was trying to kill him at first.
69. A Game of Chicken
One night, I was hauling sulfuric acid from the rail siding to the mine site. Normally I do three loads a shift, so it was pretty full on. I'm on my first load of the night, and I get overtaken by a car full of hooligans. Now, country Australians will recognize the type. No windows because they're all smashed, only one headlight, no tail lights, and a stream of empty cans falling out.
I drive a few more kilometers down the road, and they're stopped off the side of the road trying to flag me down and I think, sure. It turned out to be a huge mistake. As I pull up to the car, someone leans out and says, "Hey brudder, we got no petrol! Can you gib us some?" Well, actually, no. I run on diesel, you need petrol. He responds, "Nah brudder, dat's ok. We only going to Laverton".
Yeah, nah, it ain't gonna happen. Sorry guys. I take off again, warning everyone about the carload of hooligans right on the side of the highway. Now I’m heading back after the first load, and as I pass the broken-down vehicle for the second time, they start jumping on to the road, trying to make me stop. Not happening guys.
I pull on the air horn and drive straight towards them. Sure enough, once I’m about 200 meters away they run off the road. I got back to rail, rang the authorities in Leonora, and they promised to send a car out. Then I head out on the second load, and the coppers overtake me before I get there, so no troubles when I went past.
Coming back from the second load, the coppers are just leaving, the hooligans have gotten a fire going, and they had pushed the car well off the road. Third load, and by now it's nearly 3 AM. I figured it'd be a nice, quiet run. Not likely! Now, for a bit of information, I’m driving a fully loaded, triple trailer road-train, grossing 147 tons, and coming in at about 40 meters long. Say 325,000 pounds and 130 feet for our American brethren.
I'm doing 90km/h approaching the broken-down car, the fire's burnt low, and it looks like they're all asleep. Then I notice a dark patch in the middle of my lane. I figure it's probably a lifeless kangaroo, so I move over to the opposite lane to avoid it. I kid you not, this dark pile jumps up out of my original lane, runs over, and lies down in the middle of the opposite lane, directly in my path!
So, I move back to my correct lane. Then the pile jumps up, runs over, and lies down in his original spot! I start slowing down, spotlights shining, and grab ahold of the dang air horn cord again. I slowly start to swerve into the oncoming lane again, and a second dark pile jumps up off the side of the road, runs out, and lies down in this lane!
So, now I've got 2 lumps to avoid. I just gave in to the inevitable. I took my foot off the brakes, slammed the throttle to the floor so hard I nearly punched it through the firewall and aimed for the gap between them. I pulled, and never let go of the air horn, it was just screaming to the world that I was coming. Well, dang, that didn't work at all.
There's not enough room between them for me to fit through. But I'm committed, there's no way I can stop in time. So, I just screwed up my eyes and kept rolling. Thank the lord these boys gave in. Right at the last second, they both bailed off the road and disappeared into the bush. But, I'm willing to bet they never tried that stuff again!
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70. One Wrong Move
I worked at the Nevada nuclear test site decommissioning old buildings. One of the creepiest days was when I was sent with an end dump load of non-hazardous material to the landfill, which I had never been to before. Somehow, I missed the turn and ended up at an armed gate with machine guns pointed at me. Very uncomfortable.
Once I explained my mistake, I was quite hastily turned around. Still not knowing exactly where my turn was—I was looking for a very non-descript desert road— I headed back. I turned on the next dirt road I came to, and had to take a break. My hands were still shaking from the run-in with the armed guards.
71. Creepy Crawlies
My mom is a trucker, this is her story. She was driving through Arizona, when she saw what she thought was leaves blowing across the road in the distance. This puzzled her since there's mostly pine trees in northern Arizona. When she finally got to the "leaves," she realized what they really were and had to stop herself from screaming.
They were actually migrating tarantulas, thousands of them. There were so many of them, that her truck was sliding on their guts so she had to slow down. She stopped at the first truck stop, and told her co-driver to fuel up—he was sleeping at the time—because she wasn't going to step foot outside after what she had just seen.
Her co-driver was angry since it was technically his time off. He thought she was crazy...until he saw the tarantula guts and legs caked in the inside wheel well of the truck.
72. The Corner Of Your Eye
I was driving through a national park in the middle of the night, going through a slow stretch. Every so often, I think I see something out the window and beside me. Just a glimpse of movement. When I look, though, I don’t catch it. Finally, on about the third time, I whip my head around really fast—and this time I recognize it.
It’s a huge black wolf following alongside my truck just off the highway. I only saw it for a few seconds before I had to focus back on the road, but it was absolutely lovely yet unsettling.
73. Satan, Take The Wheel
On the I25 south of Albuquerque, there's a huge dip in the road that goes straight down one side of a canyon and up the other. I'm a very cautious driver, so I took the downgrade slow and crawled up the other side with my hazards on. Looking in my mirror, I see headlights from another truck at the bottom, then two jets of flame shooting like 20 feet into the air above it.
This truck runs past me doing 80 miles per hour up the slope. I didn't even know it was possible to put nitrous into a semi; I thought the devil himself was riding up on me.
74. Clowning Around
In the 90s, I lived in a logging camp in northern British Columbia. It was a big one made up of trailers and had about 300 people living there including families. I drove a water truck on weekends when the camp had days off. When driving on logging roads, you radio your kilometer markings with the name of the road to avoid collisions".
Empty on Windfall 10" to say you were 10 clicks on the Windfall road heading away from camp, and "Loaded on Windfall 10" to say you were coming back. Anyway, being that is was a weekend, I didn't expect anyone to be hanging around except a skeleton crew. I had no idea that there was a kid’s birthday party up on the top end of the windfall road. I was in for a nasty surprise.
It’s beautiful up there with a clear landing and a pond, so why not. The family hired two clowns from a nearby town for the kids. Apparently, the clowns wrapped up their show and were heading back to camp, but they were not using the radio. I'm on the road in a big water truck doing 50 kilometers per hour, and they come speeding around a corner doing 50 in a freaking clown car, and we almost collide.
I blasted the horn as this car with a plastic star on its roof goes whipping by with two screaming clowns inside, and I could just not figure out what the heck had just happened.
75. Dinosaur Screams
While driving on the 80 East, I saw a semi two truck-lengths in front of me drift, bounce off the median barrier, then regain traction, tip, and slide on its side. The entire load was all over the freeway. It was the most god-awful noise I've ever heard. It's what I would imagine a T-Rex getting shot, and then dying, sounds like.
76. Have You Seen The Trailer?
My dad is a truck driver. About 13 to 15 years ago, while resting at the side of the road, he woke up in the morning to find that his entire trailer had been robbed empty. My dad has never been a heavy sleeper, and his cargo could not possibly have been taken without at least a forklift. My dad suspects that they must have used a pump to get some kind of chloroform into his cabin—to make sure he couldn’t wake up.
77. Who Let The Dogs Out?
I was once driving along I-15 in Idaho. There was a stray dog walking down the road. He stopped, sat down, and began to stare right at me as I approached. I then suddenly got this strong, ominous urge to pull over, so I did. He jumped right up into the cab and I rode off with him. I then pulled into the nearest truck stop, where the dog got out and wandered off.
Sometimes, I wonder if it was a ghost pup of some sort, or if maybe some trucker had forgotten his dog and the dog figured out that the best way to find his owner again would be to look for a truck—or perhaps the dog was simply hitchhiking. In any case, the sensation of feeling like I just had to pull over for that dog was definitely the weirdest thing I've ever felt in my life. He did have a cute little bandana, though, so maybe that was part of it.
The whole thing made me feel like I should get a trucker dog to keep me company on the road—but it's a rough lifestyle, so I wouldn't wish on anyone.
78. Poor Horse
My dad has been a truck driver in the Netherlands for about 30 years now. He was leaving our town around 3 AM for store deliveries. He drives off with a colleague, and a kilometer outside my town he hits the brakes because there's a horse walking on the road. His colleague behind him stops as well and is informed about the situation over the CB radio.
The two trucks, which look the same—both yellow-blue Scania box trucks with an additional blue trailer—are standing still on a quiet road in the middle of the night. A guy pulls up behind them in an Audi A6 station wagon. He, of course, did not know what was going on, and after a few minutes—the horse wasn't moving—he got very annoyed with the trucks standing still. It would be a choice he’d come to regret.
He floored it to get past them. He crashed into the horse, slaying it and totaling his car. The guy ended up going to the hospital, and this all happened in front of my father’s eyes. Pretty terrifying stuff. The guy ended up surviving, but my dad was pretty messed up about it.
79. No Laughing Matter
While driving near the north end of mainland Michigan one time, I saw a car stopped on the side of the highway. We hadn’t seen a car for a while, as it was 2 AM. I commented to my buddy, "poor sucker!" But as soon as we passed the car, its lights came on and it got back on the road. Odd timing, right? And then, it began gaining on us.
I told my friend to speed up, and he did. He sped up more and more as the car kept closing in. We were doing 120 and this guy was catching up to us. We saw an exit with a hotel, so we took it and drove right in front of the building—where it was well lit and we could see the front desk clerk clearly. The car got off at that exit, too. It drove into the hotel parking lot right behind us.
Then, it turned around and got back on the highway. I’ll never know what that guy wanted from us—and I’m more than fine with that remaining a mystery.
80. Mountain Man
My friend was hauling logs in Idaho and was coming down during a snowy winter night. He was putting on chains before heading down a steep hill, when he said all of the hairs suddenly stood up on his body. It felt like there was something watching him. Halfway down the switchbacks, he saw a large figure standing on a 20-foot tall embankment.
As he got closer, it jumped down and the shoulders were as tall as his cab. In a single bound, it leaped down and then leaped over to the other side of the embankment. At the time, he thought it was a Sasquatch, now he says it was probably a "demon" trying to make him crash. He didn't stop to remove the chains until he was well away from the mountain.
81. Prized Bulldog
One night after completing his water delivery, my grandfather stops at a roundabout to let another car go through. It doesn't, and soon people hop out with knives and tools, while they yell at him to cut the engine and to hop out of the truck. He guns it, smashing their car out of the way, goes around the roundabout and drives to the nearest authorities. to tell them what happened. The reason behind the ambush was strange.
He thinks they were trying to take the bulldog hood ornament from his truck because the only way to get it is to take it or buy a Mack truck.
82. A Shadow Of Doubt
The company I drive for picks up cast iron pipe at a place not far out of town. I've had to pick up there several times after dark when no one else is there because it's a 24-hour place. Every time I've been there after dark, I can hear groaning sounds behind trailers and the sound of something tapping on the trailers. The second time I loaded there at night, I noticed the same thing, but this time there was a dark silhouette of somebody standing between two trailers while I was throwing straps.
After that, I quit throwing straps at night if there are no other drivers hooking up. I also park in the street outside right under a streetlight and wait until daybreak. I don’t know what it is, and I'd rather not find out.
83. Like A Deer In The Headlights
My dad used to drive for a commercial grocery store back in the day, this was probably around 1975 or 1980. The route he drove took him past a hospital for the mentally ill. Apparently, the place wasn't known for its security, because my dad said he would pass people walking down the road in varying levels of nakedness.
He said he would see about one or two escaped patients a week, and eventually, it became a pretty normal thing. He told me the creepiest part one day. He said that sometimes they would look at the headlights the way a deer or wild animal would, and he was terrified that one day they would just run out in front of the truck.
They never did though, just stared and watched him drive by.
84. Zombie Moose
My friend who works as a trucker once passed a completely totaled car on the side of the road, with a seemingly lifeless moose in front of it. My friend got out to help the guy, and out of nowhere, the moose rose up screaming in its moose tongue, then ran away.
85. Cool As A Cucumber
Former trucker here. I was driving north through the mountains of Colorado towards Pueblo, and it was my first time dealing with anything like the Rocky Mountains, so I was taking it nice and slow with my hazards on and in the right lane. This was in the spring, and there wasn't much snow on the ground aside from a light dusting.
I remember passing another truck pulled to the shoulder on my way up, nothing out of the ordinary. However, as I was heading down the mountain, which can be scary as heck in an 18-wheeler, I saw the same truck I passed earlier, fly past me in the left-hand lane. Now being passed on the left going downhill in the Rocky Mountains by another tractor-trailer is crazy enough, but what really makes this story? This guy's trailer brakes were on fire.
He was pulling a load—I could tell because the trailer was sealed. If you know anything about trucks, you know there's only so much braking you're supposed to do before they overheat and worst-case, catch fire. This guy's truck looked like a streaking comet as he sped down the mountain, at what I thought was a surely a deadly pace.
I grabbed the mic to the radio and called out to him, "Hey driver! Your brakes are on fire! I mean literally on fire!" This rough and weathered sounding voice comes back over the speaker of my radio and says, cool as a cucumber, "I know". Then he disappeared around a curve. I never saw any wrecked truck, emergency crews, or even mention of an accident over the radio.
I did see a discarded fire extinguisher on the ground at the base of the mountain though.
86. Sliding Into My Nightmares
A few years back, I was driving up an icy hill in the middle of winter after a snowstorm, when another semi coming down the hill towards me started to jackknife, sliding back and forth across the road. His trailer swung out sideways, blocking the entire road at around 50 mph, giving me nowhere to go and no choice but to stop.
I tried to back up as quickly as possible, to give him a little more space to get his trailer to tuck back in behind him. Thankfully it did about 50 feet in front of me. The whole time, all I could think of was "I really hope he's empty because this is gonna hurt".
87. Feathered Friend
My dad was coming back from a route one night, when he hears a loud thud that sounded like it came from the front of his truck. He pulled over and finds that he had hit a huge owl and that it was lodged in his grill. It also turns out the owl is still alive. This happened at around midnight, so my dad had a great idea and decided to buckle the owl up in the passenger seat. It turned so, so bizarre.
For the first hour, the owl was unconscious, but at around 1 AM my dad hears the seat belt move, and he turns to see one angry owl staring at him. One of the owl's eyes was hanging out, and the owl knew that it was my dad’s fault. The first thing my dad now notices are the talons on this owl, and how they could have easily torn him up.
Even so, the owl seemed content to stay put, probably because he was pretty beat up. So, my dad just turns his head back to the road, and they both have an awkward ride. He pulled over at the next gas station and called the authorities. He was pretty much at the border, so it took a while for both state departments to decide who had to pick up the owl. After that, my dad decided that he has a newfound respect for owls.
88. White Out
The most frightened I have been while driving a truck was going over Donner Pass one night, on the I80 toward Sacramento. I had stopped in Reno, and checked weather reports. It was early May or late April, can’t remember now, but there was still a chance of bad road conditions up there. The weather reports only called for light snow flurries, so I went on my way.
I got up to the top of the pass, and suddenly the sky just dumped a blizzard. It was almost total white out conditions. I was past the chain up areas and the rest areas, with no real safe place to stop. I could just barely make out the tracks of the truck ahead of me, and I slowly followed them, praying that they did not run off the road.
The worst thing about it was the wind; It was blowing hard, making the snow swirl violently in my vision. That caused me to experience this weird vertigo, that I have not experienced since. I began to feel like my body was losing which way was up. Fortunately, it did not last very long. I got down to a lower elevation, and it suddenly became heavy rain.
I was never so happy to see a rain storm on a mountain that I can remember.
89. Seeing Red
A friend who is a truck driver told me this one. He was driving through the edge of some bushland on his way back to Perth, Western Australia when he hit a kangaroo. He stopped the truck, grabbed his flashlight and knife in case he needed to dispatch it, and got out. He went over to the kangaroo. It needed to be dispatched, as it was alive and in immense pain, but he got this weird feeling that he was being watched.
He flashed his light around and saw dozens of pairs of red eyes watching him. A whole mob of kangaroos was just standing there watching him kill one of their mates—kangaroo eyes reflect red. He quickly dispatched the kangaroo, bolted back to his truck, and took off. He said it was the creepiest thing he had ever seen on the road.
90. Loaded Cargo
I was a transportation broker for a number of years. One of those years, we obtained government contracts for the transfer of "undisclosed hazardous materials". We were under restrictions to keep everything about these loads confidential; from the trucking companies, to whom we brokered these loads with, to their specific locations.
Every single day, we had to give hourly updates to an internal agency about the status of our drivers. Each load required a team in order to minimize stopping time. These trucks had specific instructions to not stop for more than a half-hour throughout the itinerary, nor to open the contents of the trailer. Their location was constantly monitored by a GPS coupled with a timer to ensure these conditions were met.
We had many of these contracted loads, without any notable issues. However, one day was different. That day, one of our truckers was stopped by DOT (Department of Transportation). The officer demanded the drivers open the trailer to reveal the unidentified contents. Our drivers cited our contract with our client, stating that we could not open the trailer under any circumstances.
However, the DOT was persistent and broke the electronic seal himself. Our systems at dispatch were frozen immediately. To the officer's surprise, the trailer contained Tomahawk missiles used by the Department of Defense. Two Apache helicopters were scrambled from the nearest air force base and the DOT officer was taken into custody—he was later released.
It turns out that the transportation of dangerous contents like this are quite common. Since they are concealed in a dry van, however, the public is completely unsuspecting.
91. Lights Out
My dad was a long-haul trucker from his teens until his mid-30s. He never told us a lot of stories—except the one about how he knew it was time to get off the road when the pills he was taking to stay awake made him see giant rabbits on the road—but his favorite was when he was about 19, when he went across a bridge in the middle of the night, then was surprised to be pulled over.
Turns out the lights on the bridge were all wired together over the roadway—and his trailer had been high enough to catch the wires, very efficiently pulling down every single light pole. How he didn't see or hear what was going on, is probably due to how much attention he was to paying to those aforementioned road bunnies.
92. Quake Your Time
Once back in 1994, I had delivered a load down near Riverside, CA, and dispatch told me to lay over in a hotel for the night at company expense, a rare treat. Halfway through dinner and a movie on the TV mid-evening, they called again and told me to run the empty trailer to Salt Lake City for a morning pickup. It sucked to hear, but okay.
I pulled into a truck stop to fuel up. I put the hose in the tank and jacked it so that it would run fuel into the tank without my help. I stood there waiting for the first tank to fill, when all of a sudden, the hose jumped out of the tank and sprayed diesel all over me. Perfect. I finished fueling, got my shower ticket and cleaned up, washed my clothes, and went on. I didn't know then how crucial this moment was.
I got there and found out that I'd missed the Northridge earthquake by a couple of hours. I don't know if that's what made the hose jump out of the fuel tank in St. George, but I figure it must have been, as that was the only time it ever happened to me.
93. Noble Truckers
It was the worst day of my life, but also the one that convinced me that there are good people in the world. When I was young, my family had a dog named Mackie. He was a runner. You had to be careful when you opened the door to the house, because Mackie would take off. When I was in the fourth grade, Mackie made it out the door when we were being babysat.
I chased him out the door, but he was too fast. I followed him out of the neighborhood, and out to a country road nearby. As I ran after him, Mackie paused in the middle of the road. A red hatchback came zooming up the road and hit Mackie right in front of me. They didn't stop. They didn't swerve. They didn't even slow down, they just kept on driving.
Mackie was left in the middle of the road, still alive. I was beside myself. I tried to move him out of the road, but he bit me on the hand. Thanks, Mackie. A semi-truck slowed and stopped for the sobbing boy in the road. Two truckers got out. One asked me my name, what happened. I can't remember the specifics, but I remember them asking what vet we took him to. I couldn't remember.
One of the truckers wrapped Mackie in his red and black flannel shirt, and they took him to a vet. I can't remember if they took me home, or if I walked. I don't know how they found a vet—this was in the late 80s, and no one had an iPhone then. Mackie didn't make it. He had to be put down. I never forgot the kindness of those truckers to stop and help out a boy grieving over his wounded dog. As far as I'm concerned, they were heroes.
94. Bad Teleportation Method
I was once at S.A.D.D. meeting, and the guest speaker was a long-haul trucker and recovering alcoholic. He told a story of stopping in Indiana and picking up a handle of his favorite stuff, drinking it, and basically blacking out completely. He said he woke up at a truck stop in Texas, with no recollection of the last three states he drove through. Now that story freaked me out.
95. Don’t Talk To Strangers
When I was about 12 years old, our family vehicle broke down on the side of the highway. The two adults present asked me and my 10-year-old cousin to go walking and find a payphone because one was heavily pregnant and the other was disabled. We walked for about two miles when a trucker pulled over and asked what we were doing.
We explained the situation, then he said to get in the truck, and that he would take us to Walmart. He was an older black man with a gray beard and a heavy foreign accent. As we climbed into his truck, he told us we should never, ever get in the truck with a strange man because it's extremely dangerous, but we did it anyway.
He took us to Walmart, and we called somebody to come help us. Any random truck driver could have kidnapped us (or worse) easily. But thankfully, this one didn't!
96. What’s In A Name?
My uncle was a long haul trucker. The night that his father passed, he had been traveling from Ontario to Florida. When he got the call from my mother to inform him of the news, he pulled into the next available truck stop to try and process the news. That was when he noticed that there was a bar right beside the stop—and the name of the bar was my grandfather’s exact first and last name.
He even took a picture of the sign and sent it to all of us. It was truly surreal.
97. A Dog’s Life
I was driving across the country once, and everything was going well—that is, until things started to suddenly get spooky shortly after I entered Louisiana. I saw a whole bunch of cars stopped on the side of the road near a swamp. I kinda felt the swamp calling to me, as if it wanted to pull over for some reason. Going about 60 MPH, I crossed over a short bridge and suddenly saw a little golden retriever puppy calmly lying in a little dog bed at the side of the road.
It freaked me the heck out. I’m a dog lover, but there was no way in heck I was stopping to find out why that one was there!
98. Suck On This
My uncle was a long-haul trucker back in the 90s. He mainly did international runs from Canada down into the US and back. He had a nice new Kenworth that had one of those maximum size sleepers on it. It had a built-in toilet and the works. He decided that the small tank that came with the toilet was a pain in the butt to have to empty so frequently, so he converted half of his passenger side diesel tank into a septic tank.
A few weeks after converting his tank, he just so happened to pull in at a truck stop somewhere in the States and parked for the night after driving longer then he should have. When he woke up at 5 AM with the dawn just starting to get bright, he climbed out to see something that makes him laugh every time he tells the story.
On the ground to the right side of his truck, was a 5-gallon jerry can, and a siphon hose with one end in his tank and the other laying on the ground. Next to this was a puddle of puke, and some puke footprints. Another few feet away, there was another puddle of puke, a trail leading away from his truck. Some dumb unfortunate fellow tried to siphon his septic tank in the middle of the night.
99. Mystery Woman
My dad drove a truck between Edinburgh and London and tells this story often. He was driving down the motorway and looked to his right, only to see a woman with a severe bun staring at him with a terrified expression from a car next to him. Before he really knows how to react, the car pulls off at the next exit and my dad, although shaken, carries on.
About half an hour later, a different car with a different driver pulls alongside my dad. He looked over, and his eyes went wide. It was the same woman in the passenger seat, with the same expression on her face. My dad thinks "screw this" and plans to pull into the next services to report it, even if it’s a misunderstanding. Better to be safe than sorry, right?
However, the car disappears before he can get any details, and he thinks there is no point calling the authorities with no details, so he carries on driving. Literally about four hours later, almost in London, yet another car pulls alongside him with the same woman, same hair, same terrified expression, except this time she appears to be SCREAMING at my dad through the window.
So my dad pulls over and calls the authorities. Apparently, they have received three other calls about the same woman in the same area in the last few minutes. He never heard anything more about it, but he didn’t see her again. Although he kept an eye on the news, he also didn’t see anything about it. I think it really haunts him to this day.
100. To Eat Is Human
A good friend of mine told me this story years ago. He is the stereotypical old big, bad trucker type. I've seen some weird stuff with him while driving in south Texas along the border. He never batted an eye at any of that stuff—but while telling me this story, he had goosebumps all over and a concerned expression on his face.
From this guy, that was basically the equivalent of a trembling lip and poop-stained pants. I'll tell this story in the first person, the same way he told it to me: Years ago, in the late 90s, I was on my way to pick up a load in Laredo from my house in central Texas. It was early morning, probably around 4 or 5. I had just come off of a string of days at home, so I know that I wasn't overtired or anything like that.
I am on one of those two-lane winding roads in the absolute middle of nowhere when I suddenly see something on the side of the road at the edge of my high beams. At first, I just thought it was roadkill, as is usually the case. As I get closer, though, I see that it is roadkill—but there's also someone crouching over the deer carcass.
I remember thinking that either this guy must have been taking the antlers as a trophy, or he's just some weird sicko. As I got closer still, I could now clearly see that this guy was eating the freaking deer! He's pulling chunks of meat out of the stomach with his bare hands and bringing them up to his face over and over again.
Then, as I’m getting closer, he stops in mid motion and looks up at me. Not at my truck, but directly at me. He stands up, and that's when I realize that this is no ordinary guy. It is some huge, brown, non-human creature covered in hair from head to toe. I remember being terrified at this point and thinking that I was in serious trouble.
This thing was standing on the tiny shoulder looking right at me. By this point, maybe a good three seconds have already passed and I'm about to pass the part of the road that he's standing at. I didn't even think of stopping—in fact, I'm starting to lay on the gas so I can get the heck out of there as fast as possible. As I'm passing it, it’s still looking at me.
Again, it’s not just looking at the truck—it’s looking through the driver's side windshield directly at my face. He obviously had the intelligence to understand that there was a driver in there, and he knew exactly where inside the vehicle I would be sitting. As I started to pass him, our eyes met and I remember seeing what looked unmistakably like human intelligence in its eyes, despite the fact that this creature was clearly not human.
It still scares the heck out of me every time I think back upon it.
101. Just Bee Strong
I was headed west on I-76 here in Denver, just cruising along at about 70 miles per hour. Out of nowhere, I suddenly saw a massive, almost solid cloud of what appeared to be dirt coming right at me. I'd say it was at least 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall. I scanned ahead of me, but couldn't see any vehicles that it could have came from.
With nowhere to go, I slowed down and took the hit, hoping that there wasn't anything big enough in the cloud to come crashing through my windshield or to jack up my truck. I am the owner and operator of the company, so it would have actually been a major issue for me if there had been any damage done to my vehicle, but I really had no choice at that point but to just sit back, hold on tight and hope for the best.
It was pretty loud as I smashed through it, and the instant it hit I knew that it was definitely not dirt. I immediately hit the washers because I couldn't see a darn thing through all of the carnage, as my windshield was suddenly painted with guts. Turns out it was a swarm of bees—as in freaking abnormally huge bees that sounded like rocks when they hit the car.
I can't even imagine what seeing that swarm would have been like if I had been walking instead of driving, they would probably kill the heck out of anything in their path.
