Keep your foot on the gas. Avoid eye contact. Never slow down.
My car swings around a curve as the two lane highway changes from strip malls and car dealership lights to a dark New England road. I’m in search of the Red-Headed Hitchhiker, a ghost who has haunted this stretch of Route 44 for decades.
A few miles into the trip I arrived at the town line between Rehoboth and Seekonk Massachusetts, prime Red-Headed Hitchhiker country. My thoughts got away from me. Wasn’t the Red-Headed Hitchhiker a farmer killed while changing a tire? The car filled with the odor of horse manure. He would smell like that. If I looked towards the passenger seat would I see him? Did I want to?
Whenever I get a chill I say to myself, “Be Like Johnny Cash.” It’s a gimmick that usually works. The Man in Black wasn’t afraid of anything. With the chorus of Folsom Prison Blues running through my head I pushed on, tackling one of the most persistent urban legends, the vanishing hitchhiker.
When I first started tracking down info for this column I joked about it. Sure, great idea I told myself. Nothing too terrifying. The trick would be finding a couple of stories to document, maybe talk to a few “witnesses.” That was of course before I discovered a famous haunting so close to my home. This meant for sure I would have to go out looking for it.
Soon I found that these legends are too numerous to count. It seems every town has a story. Sean Tudor of roadghosts.com explains it best. “The peoples of the modern western world are by far the most mobile, well-travelled humans in history. Alongside the evident freedom of vehicular rides comes the virtual daily awareness of accident and tragedy on our roads.” Ghosts are sure to follow.
Sean lives close to Blue Bell Hill in England, a sight of many strange encounters. However he said, “any road with a poor accident record or a history of tragedy is a candidate for a road haunting.”
A dark road combined with a dark history helps put drivers in what Sean calls a “receptive state of mind.” As I drove on I wondered, “What am I doing out here?” I tried to get into that state of mind only to chicken out.
Sean also said that the majority of the road ghosts (as they are called in Britain) are women or young girls. This tends to generate sympathy from driver and the people who tell and retell these stories.
The Red-Headed Hitchhiker isn’t a kind ghost. He’s been known to taunt those who see him. Apparently he’s angrier than the lost soul known as Resurrection Mary, the Chicago woman often seen trying to find her way home. She fits into the common tale of a girl who’s looking for a ride. When the time comes to drop her off she disappears. At the address she asked to go to they say she’s been dead for years.
I kept checking and rechecking my rearview mirror, swerving into traffic. The shadowy mix of oncoming cars and street lights produced strange shapes that could be construed as anything. The right combo might congeal into the form of a man. You never know what’s you’ll see.
As usual with this gig the people I met along the way were as bizarre as any ghost, wolfman or alien. I crisscrossed the area, searching Route 44 for signs of the ghost and stopping in a pizza joint that looked like it was populate by locals. Few of them were eating pizza. Instead they slung back beers at a rapid rate. I was hoping for a “Large-Marge” moment. I’d ask about the hitchhiker and they would all freeze and then tell me their stories. Cue the mood music.
I lost my nerve. These guys looked like they’d just come off work and would like nothing better than to beat up on some lunatic journalist. It felt safer to let them be.
I continued down the road, pulling in at a neon lit mini-mart. These places are always a magnet for weirdness, especially during the overnight shift. I walked around the store, coming off like an armed robber. The guy behind the counter eyed me the entire time. He must have downed enough iced coffee and No Doze to keep him up through a dozen night shifts because he didn’t blink. He stood talking with a worn out customer in a torn John Deer cap. The old guy looked like the type who would have had a story about the hitchhiker but he also looked like the type who had a dozen hitchhikers buried in his back yard. I shuffled out of the store.
As I got back into my car I thought, I wouldn’t even be in the position if I hadn’t talked to a man named Clay Fees.
We’ve all heard our share of urban legends but they always seem to have happened to a friend of a friend. Few stories are told in the first person.
I tracked down an actual witness. Mr. Fees, a 31 year old soon to be lawyer, told me his amazing story. Over 15 years after it happened he can recall even small details of his experience on an old Oklahoman back road. He went out looking for his girlfriend but he found something else.
He told me, “It was a cool April night around 11:30 or so as I remember it, and it was very foggy. April can still be cool in Oklahoma, and it was this night.
I reached the lake, and, having not found my girlfriend, was headed home to beat my 12:00 curfew (I was a high school senior at the time). I was driving my old 68 Roadrunner, and it was equipped with old incandescent headlamps which did not cast much light, due to their age and the foggy gloom. In order to get back to my house by midnight, I was speeding along much faster than was safe given the conditions.
As I came up on a rise in an area of the road which was lined on either side by hay meadows, out of the gloom appeared a man standing on the side of the road. Due to my speed, the fog, and the poor light being cast by my headlamps, the man sort of “appeared” because I was traveling so fast that my mind had little time to register what I was seeing on the sides of the road.”
At this point I began to think that his words sounded familiar. These stories have been with mankind for a long time and follow certain archetypes. Sherry Austin, author of Mariah of the Spirits, a collection of ghost stories, told me that most people skeptics or not “love to loiter in the idea of a fringe reality.” That’s an accurate description of the Bump In The Night Column.
Sherry loves stories about phantom hitchhikers. She believes that, “the hitchhiker is an emblem for our endless quest for an eternal home.” Her fictional creations can be, “truer than true,” filling the same niche as real life ghost stories. Often there’s not much of a line between literary invention and the truth. Of course in real life Sherry said she would, “never pick up a hitchhiker.”
Clay continued, “The man appeared to be about 6 feet tall, and was wearing clothing that was all some shade of gray, and he had sort of a luminescent look about him. I attributed that look to the fog and the lighting. He was wearing a long duster, cowboy boots, and an “Indiana Jones” type hat pulled way down over his eyes and he had his hands in his pockets. He had gray eyes, and had rough, short stubble, like he hadn’t shaved in several days.
He was standing facing the road, right on the edge of the road, and was facing across it with his head down. When my car neared him, and about the same time my mind registered what I saw, his head whipped sideways and his gaze locked onto mine with two cold, gray, and dare I say, dead looking eyes. His eyes were without emotion, and they locked onto mine.”
During my research trip I tried to block out Clay’s account. I hit the pavement of Route 44 to snap a few digital images for my files but even that creeped me out. At first I’d park the car and walk. Then I’d leave it running. Finally, I’d only slow down and hold the camera out the window. The power of suggestion worked on me. The woods by the side of the road rustled. Fewer cars rolled by. I waited for the Red-Headed Hitchhiker to appear.
Clay told me, “I’m not given to believe in ghost stories or in the supernatural.” However, he admits to having “no rational explanation” for what he saw that night. It’s hard to say what it was.
“In an instant, I was passed him, and speeding on my way back toward old 66. I was terrified, both by his eeriness, but at the time I only thought I had almost hit an eerie man on the side of the road. No thought of a ghost had yet entered my mind.
I was however, startled enough to decide to speed up some to get home quicker. So my roadrunner roared through the cool spring night, through the fog and the tree-tunnels over the road for the next 3 miles or so, to where the road begins a climbing, curvy ascent around a small hill. At the base of the hill is a 3 way intersection with a dirt road, and there I slowed down to make the curves. And it was there that I saw him again.
The man was standing on the opposite side of the road, miles from where I had seen him before, but only minutes later. He was in the dirt road, and he was dressed the same, and was standing the same way. He had his hands in his pockets, because I slowed down. I could make him out more clearly. Again, he locked his gaze on mine, and then took his left hand out of his pocket, and stretched it out to me as if to say STOP, looking me dead in the eye the entire time. “
I blew by him, and looked back in my rear view mirror to see him turning to follow my car with his eyes, with his gaze still locked on mine even in the mirror. He was still a ghostly gray, but was bathed in the red glow of my taillights as I ascended the hill.
Clay never saw the man again but was “very shaken.” He sped home as quickly as his antique Plymouth would take him. He said, “I was not sure what I had seen, and still am not sure, but I know that there is no way he could have been miles from where I first saw him in the couple of minutes between my two sightings.”
Clay, a part time teacher, works at a middle school and on Halloween tells the story to scare the kids. Several of them have told him that their parents had seen the same man over the years.
Later Clay forwarded me and e-mail he’d received from another area resident. This woman said that the man he’d described has been around since the late 1970’s. As a child her sister had, woke her, in the middle of the night to tell her someone was in the back yard.
“We saw him clear as day,” the woman told Clay, “but when we went to get my dad, he was no where to be found. I was told as a child by those few adults who would talk about him that the man had some connection to an old abandoned bridge.”
She added, “My step mom saw him, I could tell by her expression when we descried him.”
I returned home from the ghost hunt and began typing up my notes and going over an interview I’d done with Christopher Balzano, who runs masscrossroads.com. The site serves a depository for all kinds of ghost stories. Chris is, “amazed by how often he’s asked about the legend.” He originally pointed me in the direction of the Red-Headed Hitchhiker but warned that, “stories feed off each other.”
I wanted to play up this angel. These kinds of sightings tend to build on older versions. Someone tells the story of a phantom hitchhiker. Then I go out on the road and hear a sound in the woods or see an unexplained light. Next thing you know I’m telling people I’ve seen a ghost. If let loose the imagination can do some serious damage.
I had been spooked wandering that haunted road. I tried to take comfort in Christopher Balzano’s theories. Part of Red-headed Hitchhiker folklore and something that differentiates him from other phantoms is that he’s been know to follow people home.
Later that night, while I continued working, the power went out. In a flash total darkness enveloped me. I could feel something. It was easy then to believe that I had run afoul of an angry ghost. Chris and I had talked about how deep down people take comfort in ghosts. They are a sign that something exists after death.
In the blackness with my laptop battery fading and no flashlight around I could have cared less. I confessed to the Red-Headed Hitchhiker, sorry to have bothered him and wished for him to find peace.
Regardless if I believe my own words it took the edge off. I relaxed and waited for the lights to come back on.
The “Road,” that great metaphor for life, teems with stories of lost souls. They rise up around each bend. Take a turn too hard, hit the breaks too late and over the high side you’ll go. Who knows maybe you’ll wake up a phantom of the foggy night, left to forever wander, chasing after the life you once had.
This article originally appeared in the late great Severe Magazine.