True Ghost Stories: Phantom Hitchhikers On The Massachusetts Turnpike
Truck Drivers See it all
You can't be a truck driver and not see some outrageous things. Any driver who's been on the road for more than a couple years will have at least one good story. Many of the stories will feature blizzards, ice storms, or the time you almost got hit by a tornado. Most of the stories will be about the insane things we see the drivers of cars (four-wheelers) do.
Yeah, we watch you. There isn't much else to do.
The most outrageous four-wheeler story I have is of the girl I saw just outside of San Francisco who was eating rice from a china bowl, with chopsticks, while driving with her toes in bumper to bumper, stop and go traffic.
Of course, you see all the sex stuff. You see people doing over a hundred while going the wrong way up the interstate. People reading newspapers or books laid out over the steering wheel or working on laptops while they drive. Heck, I once saw someone who had lost both drivers side tires speeding up the New Jersey Turnpike at over sixty miles and hour, throwing sparks from their rims like a spinning sparkler on the Fourth of July.
We see the burning cars. We see people lose control and go spinning off the highway or loose their load onto the roadway at seventy miles an hour. Sometimes we see each other have a “Bad Day”, which is to say that someone didn't walk away from whatever happened. Sometimes, we have the “Bad Day”, and that's, quite often, our last day.
Then there are the other stories. Stories of the unexplainable and bizarre. Not every driver has one of these stories. It helps if you drive nights, though the stories I have to tell took place in full daylight. I've talked to drivers who have seen low flying, red strobe-light orbs drifting along the road just above the tree tops. Some have told me about the bright lights in the sky that turn at right angles and travel across the whole sky in a wink. A few have stories about seeing strange looking animal-human-like things running across the road or dozens of other crazy sounding things that are the stuff of urban legend for most people.
I never got to see one of those lights in the sky. I did see the vanishing cars, though. I saw those all the time.
What's a vanishing car?
It happens pretty often, and I've met plenty of drivers who've seen the same. You're cruising down the Interstate, and you happen to pass a four-wheeler. You get well clear, and pull back over into the "Granny" lane (travel lane to non-drivers). Twenty, maybe thirty seconds pass and you're sweeping your mirrors, and you suddenly realize that the four-wheeler that should be right behind you is gone. Vanished!
This happens on straight stretches of road in broad daylight with no exits, turn offs, or pull outs. The cars just aren't there anymore, and you would see them in your mirrors if they were on the side of the road.
I've even had a couple where the four-wheeler passed me and were right in front of my truck. I checked my mirrors and when I looked back the damn car was gone. And that happens with a clear view of the road ahead, and nowhere they could go in the second or two it takes to do a mirror sweep.
People will say that we imagine that sort of thing. That the car was simply in our blind spots or that we must have missed the car pulling off the road or using a turnaround. Well, you can think what you like, but it happened so damn often that I had plenty of chances to check all those possibilities. Plus, when you're driving a twenty-plus-ton vehicle down the road at sixty miles an hour and you are personally responsible for the safety and well-being of yourself, your load, and every car, every life, around you...when one of those cars suddenly vanishes you want to know EXACTLY what happened to it.
It happens in some places more than in others. Upstate New York was always a hotbed for this sort of thing. Sometimes it will happen four or five times a day. Nobody likes to talk about it, but speaking for all the drivers who have told me about these sorts of things; it's really weird.
I'm not a Driver anymore. Bad roads blew my back to shards. It's a pretty common fate for many drivers. I had to drop out at just over my three years and three hundred thousand miles mark. If my back could have taken more I'd probably still be out there. I would have loved to hit my million miles.
The Legend of the Phantom Hitchhiker
The story I want to tell you is one of those that many dismiss as an urban legend. Maybe you've heard of it as the Phantom Hitchhiker, Resurrection Mary, or the Lady in White. These stories certainly do get around, embellished, and altered from place to place and time to time. The general gist is that someone is driving down the road when they see someone walking along the berm. In some of the stories the person simply vanishes. Sometimes, they say that the person vanishes only to reappear sitting in the back seat of the car.
Some of the stories tell about how the driver actually stops and gives the seemingly physical person a lift. Sometimes this passenger doesn't speak but simply looks sad, or frightened. Sometimes they just ask to go home and give an address. When the driver reaches the address given they might find it is a cemetery or an old abandoned house. Often their passenger either gets out of the car and runs off, or simply fades away while the driver is looking right at them.
Like any good folk tale, these stories often move from place to place simply by word of mouth and wishful thinking. Probably a good half of the tales are just reworkings of other people's accounts. The whole idea of a Phantom hitch-hiker has made it into popular music, television shows, and movies. There's a really good one that my driving instructor told me was “mandatory listening” for any driver, just as “Smoky and the Bandit” was “mandatory watching”. It's the song “Phantom 309” by Red Sovine.
Unlike the actual stories of ghosts trying to hitch a ride home, “Phantom 309” takes it the other way around with a living hitchhiker who gets picked up by a ghost rig and driven to a truck stop where he's asked to get out. The driver gives the hiker a dime for a coffee (the songs from awhile ago) and bids him goodbye. Only when the hitcher gets into the restaurant and mentions the name of the driver who gave him the money for the coffee does he find out that that driver died in a wreck several years back at the crossroads where he was picked up.
I don't think I've ever heard an actual story with it working that way, but it makes for a fun, old, and spooky song.
Seeing Is Reason For Believing
Whenever I talk about seeing spirits people tend to get pretty snippy. I suppose that they don't like to think about death, or maybe they fear things that they can't see and can't control. It could be that the idea of ghosts and other things that go bump in the night challenges their beliefs in Materialism or a Religion.
I don't know, but for every person who wants to listen or has a tale of their own to tell, there is one who tells you to your face that you are crazy or a liar.
I'm pretty odd, I won't deny that. I've seen spirits off and on for all my life. I'm no “Ghost Whisperer”, but when it comes to the supernatural I do have far more experiences than most. Still, I always ask the person who gets upset by one of my stories if they have ever had an experience with the “Other”. When they say that they haven't I simply point out that not believing is the far more reasonable position in that case. If you haven't seen things move without apparent cause, objects appear or disappear right in front of your face; if you haven't awoken in the night to see a translucent, glowing something at the end of your bed, or had any of the strange arrays of “haunting” experiences then the rational position is to believe that nothing of the sort could exist. I mean, invisible people wandering around and causing mischief? Doesn't sound likely....until you've seen it with your own eyes.
Once you do see it, once that something unexplainable crashes your understanding of “normal” to the ground; well, then you have a choice: deny everything to do with it, or acknowledge that more is going on than you thought possible.
Personally, I feel the second option is the healthy and sane one...provided you check your sanity and verify that it wasn't, in fact, delusion. It's a sad fact for the deniers, but the truth is that more than half the population will have one or more unexplained experience during their life. A few of us have way more than that, but those of you who never have even one; well, you are actually in the minority. If we gauge sanity by what is average, then maybe you want to check out your own mental health and ask why you don't experience what is there for most of the rest of us. Or maybe we should just realize that “normal” is a very fluid concept that changes from person to person and experience to experience.
The Woman In Yellow
Southern New England is a hell hole for the truck driver. Roads are old and narrow. They twist and turn along seeming paved cow paths. Traffic is heavy and the drivers are aggressive. Combine this with parking lots designed to maximize green space while making it impossible for a truck to get to the loading dock without running over curbs and endangering parked cars and loading docks that were designed when trucks were under 48 feet long; let's just say that simply doing your job in New England is tricky.
Then there are the authorities. Basically, trucks are hated except as a source of income for local governments. No one wants to hear or see the trucks that they depend on for jobs and the regular delivery of their bagels and coffee.
Massachusetts edges out Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York as the worst state in the US for driving truck. Granted, it is a close competition, but Massachusetts has pulled out all the stops to make trucks unwelcome.
Early in my time on the road, I made myself the promise to never take my time off in Massachusetts if there was any way to prevent it. Massachusetts hardly has anywhere to park a truck anyway. There are few truck stops, and they have even gone so far as providing little or no parking at rest stops. Even if a driver must stop for their down time it's really difficult to do so.
So when I had a grocery warehouse delivery on the south side of Boston in the late summer of 2002 I was happy to get off-loaded and beat feet back to Northern Connecticut to shut down for the night at the TA truck stop there. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon when I crept my way through heavy traffic back to I 95 and headed North for the Turnpike.
Traffic wasn't that bad, which is to say that it was bumper to bumper but mostly kept moving at around 10 MPH or so. By the time I hit the Turnpike entrance and turned out of the slow moving stream of cars it was already a quarter to five. Thankfully the Turnpike was mostly free and clear that day, and with an hour and a half to run on my log book I figured I should make it to my stop with time to spare.
I was somewhere a few miles from the I 495 interchange, where there is a break in the towns and buildings and the Turnpike is open and wide with a green strip of grass in the middle and swamps and woodlands to either side. I wasn't watching the mile markers so I can't say the exact location, but it wasn't more than ten miles from I 495 on the Westbound side of the road.
I drove for Schneider National in one of their road-cone orange Freighliners. At that time we had a speed restrictor set to 62 MPH. As a result, I didn't pass too many people.
Once in a while, though, you had someone who was going slow enough that you felt the need to try to get around them. Ahead of me was a small, white hatchback that fit this description. There were at least two people inside, and the car looked like it was just barely capable of Highway speeds.
As the road was clear, and I had no one behind me I felt that I should be able to pass easily enough. I flipped on my turn signal and slowly merged into the hammer lane (passing lane).
The restrictor on the truck meant that I could not go any faster than I was, and as so often happens the little car decided to speed up as I started to pass. This left the car just inside my blind spot on my blind side. That's bad!
Slowly I began to gain on the car which I watch carefully in my mirror as it eased slowly out of my blind spot. As I gained on the car at little more than one mile an hour I alternated my view between the road ahead and my passenger side mirror, watching for the safety of that little, beat-up car.
I don't know how many times I looked back and forth between my mirror and the road, but one of those times I noticed something that caught my attention even more than the car courting death by trying to race a passing truck on its right side.
About a quarter mile ahead of me stood a woman on the inside edge of the Highway. That struck me immediately as very odd. You don't tend to see people walking on the Highway and when you do, you usually see them on the outside edge. You also tend to see their disabled car long before you see them. In this case, there was no car to be seen. For this woman to be where she was she would have had to cross two lanes of traffic and hopped two guardrails. That seemed unlikely.
It was even more than unlikely because as I approached the woman I could see that she was wearing an ankle-length, canary yellow dress which would have made hopping the guardrail difficult.
There was something very strange about the woman. She looked perfectly real, and normal, but slightly out of place. The dress was not really in style, but I couldn't quite place a period to which it would belong. She wore no hat or bonnet, but the dress almost looked old enough to be colonial, or maybe from the 1800's. It wasn't a fashionable dress, but the sort of thing that a farm wife or house servant might wear to do chores over a hundred years ago. I could not figure out why a woman in such a costume would be standing along the inside of the Massachusetts Turnpike looking fixedly across the road. That was when she took a deliberate step into my lane.
I was running with an empty trailer after my delivery, but I wasn't going to be able to stop. I had just enough time to, once more, check my passenger-side mirror and see the tiny hatchback still slowly drifting backward. It was just in front of my trailer tandems (wheels). If I swerved to avoid the woman in front of me I would almost certainly kill both people in that car. At the distance I was from her, even if there was no car, I could not dare to move the wheel sharply enough to try to dodge the figure, I could easily roll the truck.
I had to make a decision. Even though you aren't supposed to, I slammed my brake peddle to the floor. I knew I could not possibly stop in time, and under no circumstance was I going to turn my wheel and kill two more people and possibly myself. A horrible feeling gripped my stomach. I was about to have a “Bad Day”. This poor woman was going to pop like a balloon filled with meat and blood. I felt sick.
At no point in my approach did I have any reason to doubt the solidity and reality of that woman. There was not a second that I did not believe I was about to slaughter an innocent human.
Even with my brakes pushed to their limits, I had dropped my speed by little more than 10 MPH when the hood of my rig contacted the woman in the yellow dress. Instead of the horrific explosion of life and limb that I expected, the woman in yellow slide silently through my bumper and hood without resistance.
Stunned, I watch as the top of a head, covered in dirty blond hair, slid silently through the floor of my cab and out the rear of the truck.
I've seen so many strange things during my life. I've been attacked by a three-dimensional shadow, threatened by a glowing orb, I've faced death on at least three occasions and seen the other side each time, I've even seen objects lift and move with no hand to direct them, but that moment in that truck had to beat them all.
Obviously, questions of “what” and “why” leaped to the front of my mind. But I was driving a truck, a ten-and-a-half ton death machine, and by some miracle, I had managed to not kill anybody when it had seemed unavoidable. I put questions out of my mind, returned to a proper speed, passed that small white hatchback, and headed to a well-earned rest outside that strange State that hated who I was and what I did.
The Jogger in Blue
That experience would have been a good story even if nothing further happened, but Massachusetts wasn't finished with me. It was more than a year later that I would go for round two, but I would have a second experience in that very same location.
By now I was team driving with my wife. She took days and I drove at night. But, when it came to cities like Boston, I would still take the wheel.
We were given a load to a Walmart on I 95, and it was around 3 o'clock in the afternoon when we pulled in and delivered. Unloaded, and empty once again, I headed South on I 95 for the Turnpike entrance once more. Traffic was far better on this occasion and we made good time out of the city and headed West.
As I approached that same location, there was a car going very slowly in the Granny lane, and I followed two other cars in pulling into the Hammer lane and passing that vehicle. This time all went smoothly. I passed the car easily and was preparing to merge back into the travel lane when I saw him.
Just as it had happened before, an apparently solid human form stepped up to the inside edge of the Westbound lanes.
Unlike the prior experience, this was not the woman in yellow. Instead, this was a young man with dark hair in his late twenties. Like the woman, he was dressed strangely, but this time I recognized the style immediately.
He was dressed like a jogger, but not like any modern jogger. He wore tight blue shorts with red and white stripes running up the hem. On his chest, he sported a blue sports jersey, though I could not make out the numbers on it. The cut was very dated, and if I had any question about when I had last seen that style the elastic sweatbands in red, white, and blue on his head and wrists answered that question instantly.
This throw-back to the mid-eighties stood on the side of the roadway just as his previous counterpart had done. Like her, he starred straight ahead, and then took a deliberate step into the middle of the Hammer lane, and with casual indifference, bent down to tie his shoe.
Unlike the prior experience, three things were different. First, I had two cars ahead of me and between my bumper and this apparition. Second, I was further away and had time to respond if I chose to do so. And, finally, I had seen this particular event before and wasn't going to fall for it twice.
I prepared to apply the brakes and change lanes if I turned out to be wrong, but even as I tapped the brake to disengage the cruse control and began coasting to drop my speed I saw the kneeling jogger pass though the first car, reappear for a second, pass though the second car and reappear directly in front of my truck.
I shook my head, grinned and gave a nervous laugh at the strangeness of it all. I accelerated my truck and plowed right through that jogger without a sound or even the slightest resistance.
The two cars in front of me never flashed their brake-lights. I had thought that they might try to brake suddenly, or swerve just as I had thought to do that time before, but there was no reaction from either one. I suspect they did not see the jogger.
I never saw another ghost in Massachusetts. I've seen other strange things far out West, but Massachusetts pretty much left me alone after that.
Nothing inspires curiosity like the unexplained, and from that time I took great interest in the stories of Phantom Hitchhikers wherever they appear. It seems that Massachusetts has a fair number. Yet, in no book, conversation, or tale have I discovered a reference to the lady in yellow or that young jogger on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
It would be interesting to know more, of course, but I think I will probably never solve that particular mystery. The lady in yellow and the jogger in blue are simply two more instances of the strange occurrences that happen all to commonly on the roads of this nation: food for tall stories, legends that remind us just how much we think we know, and just how little we really do.