Truckers’ Heart-Stopping Road Stories That’ll Give You Chills

Julie Ann - August 7, 2023
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Picture this: it’s the dead of night, you’re cruising down a lonely stretch of highway, and your only company is the rhythmic hum of your engine. Now imagine you’re not alone out there – strange, right? Just as you’re starting to relax in the quiet, you spot a figure up ahead. It looks like a person, but something’s off. As you draw closer, you realize there’s something eerie about them – their face is hollow, like a void where features should be. And let’s not forget the time when a trucker was hauling a massive load through the wilderness, surrounded by nothing but trees and darkness. Suddenly, the radio crackles to life with static, and right at that moment, a chilling sight comes into view – a girl walking along the road, hair flowing and clothes pale. Goosebumps, anyone?

These are the kind of stories from the truckers who’ve seen it all – tales that’ll have you questioning reality and glancing twice at the shadows outside your window.

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The Terrifying Reappearance

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, and saw a woman with a “miss trunchbull bun” (as he describes it) 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, with the same woman in the passenger seat, with the same expression on her face. My dad thinks ‘f*ck this’ and plans to pull into the next services to report as even if it’s nothing/misunderstanding, better to be safe than sorry, right? Anyway, the car disappears before he can get any details (plates etc) and he thinks there is no point in calling the police with no details so he carries on driving. Literally about 4 hours later, almost in London, yet another car pulls alongside him with the same woman, the same miss trunchbull hair, same terrified expression, except this time she appears to be SCREAMING at my dad through the window, so my dad pulls over into a layby and calls the police. Apparently, they have received 3 other calls about the same woman/car in the same area in the last few minutes. It is unfortunately anticlimactic as he never heard anything more about it but he didn’t see her again and although he kept an eye on the news, didn’t see anything about it. Hopefully, it’s just a giant coincidence. Who knows.

ScrewLucy

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Guardian of the Night

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 (Citizens Band Radio) and started chatting with him. He helped her stay awake for the run until she stopped off at a truck stop until her husband could take over.

That next morning, she told her husband what happened, and he told her the CB was broken, and that was impossible.

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Surviving the Checkpoint

My father was a truck driver in East Africa in the 80’s and early 90’s. During the years leading up to the Rwandan genocide, my father was passing through Rwanda. He reached a checkpoint and was forcibly removed from his truck at gunpoint. Apparently, he looked like he belonged to the Tutsi tribe and they put him in a cage with other Tutsi prisoners. He tried communicating that he isn’t Rwandan but no one spoke the same language as him. After the third night, he saw a man that spoke a little bit of Swahili, which my dad spoke and told him that he was not Rwandan and showed him his ID. Somehow that guy got him out and he was handed the keys to his truck and was on his way.

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Handprints and Nighttime Fears

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 driver’s side 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 sight line. I take a deep breath and close the sleeper curtains too, because for some reason that’s going to make things better right?

After laying back down and convincing myself that something blew against the truck and it only sounded like the doors (it was fairly windy outside and a lot of flat ground) 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 but 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.

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Guided by the Stars

I had a college teammate from Miami tell a story that he swears on to this day. He and his girlfriend were making the drive to Naples late at 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 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 and come across a massive accident. The truck they were following had jackknifed and took out a handful of vehicles that were following. He said there were multiple fatalities, but I’ve never been able to find a new story about it to confirm (probably would have been in 2005ish). They most likely would have been involved if not for that random DJ on the only radio station to come in that night.

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Close Call on the Highway

A good buddy of mine is a long-haul trucker for my company. A few months ago, he woke up in a parking lot surrounded by police.

Some dude was dumped 15 feet from his truck.

Chilling Run-In

Around 2006ish I was driving a flatbed, picked up a load of construction material (drywall, roofing, don’t remember but it was prepackaged in boxes and I remember having to use strap protectors on the load) in rural Tennessee, memory is foggy now but I want to say it was between Memphis and Nashville but closer to the intersection of the MS, AL, TN state lines.

Tarp required so I strapped everything down, tarped the load and left the shipper. About 5 miles down the road, in the middle of nowhere woods on a 2-lane road, I notice my tarp flapping in the wind. Found a wide shoulder and pulled over to fix it. I realize that I just flat did a sh*tty job tarping this load and decide to redo it on the side of the road. Undo all the bungee straps, drag the tarps off, roll them back up, climb up on the load and start unrolling the tarps again and 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 cause I’m in the middle of nowhere and continue what I’m doing. About the time I have 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 (8-pound solid metal bar about 4 feet long tapered to a blunt point on one and hollow on the other, used for tightening straps and chains etc….)

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 and said f*ck it “good enough to party”. The next thing I noticed were his eyes, which I can only describe as “off”. Like they were clear, I didn’t think he was drunk or high or anything, but it 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, cause 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 and 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 continues on his way, stops at about the driver’s door on my truck and turns around, comes back to me and repeats himself. “I’ve got a long walk”. At this point, I explain that I can’t give him a ride, insurance and all that. 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, now about 100 yards in front of my truck and coming back my way. It looks like he’s talking on a cell phone, has his hand up to his face and I can barely make out his mouth moving, his other hand 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 talking to his f*cking hand and now I’m nervous, cause he doesn’t look like he’s having a nice pleasant chat, it looks more like an angry conversation. 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 with this dead-*ss look on his face just staring at me. Gave me the creeps. About the time I hit 5th or 6th gear, I look in the mirror and there’s no one there.

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A Grinning Stranger

I’ve spent the past 4 years driving every day/night for work. I was in a fairly rural part of Mississippi somewhere between Clarksdale and Greenwood, important note it’s a 2 lane highway the 250-mile drive home. The weather had turned pretty sour as I was leaving Clarksdale.

I called my wife and told her there were high wind advisories and very possible tornado threats throughout the Delta 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 had eaten 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 without inclement weather

I had driven maybe 30 miles out into the farmland when the hail started bouncing off my truck, being an MS native I knew in July hail meant a tornado. I pull off to the side (I’m in the middle of nowhere no lights to be seen no cars behind or in front of me) and start looking for the storm/tornado I believe is approaching. I rolled the passenger window down and shined a bright flashlight off into the night. Nothing there. Turn to the driver’s side and this guy has his face pushed against the glass. Grinning from ear to ear. I screamed and he was gone. I slammed the truck into the drive and took off.

We have all the time running cameras on our trucks. I got to the first safe place to stop and called my wife. I didn’t want to scare her so I didn’t mention the guy or the hail storm. I did however pull the SD card and check the cameras. I promise you this guy never popped up on my front or rear cameras. I’ve always played it off as my imagination. I will say I don’t drive through the Delta in the dark anymore if I don’t absolutely have to.

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Credit: Smithsonian Magazine

In the Dead of Night

I’m not a truck driver but the story is from a truck driver. I was working the overnight shift from Friday night into Saturday morning at a gas station. At about 6 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 (we get a lot of drunks walking across a 4-lane highway in front of the store). So I ask what was 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.”

“No bigger than a bear on its back legs.”

“Maybe a big person?”

“It picked up a dead 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 the local says, “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 the big foot. I just don’t go in the woods cause I don’t know.

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Shadows of the Night

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 in either northeast BC or northwest Alberta (can’t remember the exact location), 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 6 feet tall. Aside from that it was completely featureless. I couldn’t make out any details whatsoever, no shine from its eyes, nothing.

And then I noticed there were more of them in the ditch on both sides of the road. 5 or 6, 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.

I don’t really believe this was a paranormal experience. I had been driving for 8+ hours through the middle of the night, and I was exhausted. Most likely, it was a hallucination caused by lack of sleep and spending too long staring straight ahead into the dark. But it was still a very unsettling experience.

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A Child’s Unlikely Adventure

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. One day he was coming up on a cardboard box and just had the urge to swerve and miss this one, he misses it and passes by with no incident, looks in his rearview to look at the box and out pops a kindergarten-age little kid. They just head back to their house as if nothing happened.

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Pitch-Black Perplexity

I think the best “creepy” thing that ever happened to me was I was heading from Tucson, AZ up to Saltlake City, UT. Well, this was a few years ago and the main highway had been taken out in a flash flood, and was under construction so I had to take a weird detour through the mountains in lower Utah.

Well, 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. Anyway 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 but on the outside of the cab. Then I feel something climb onto the landing that’s on the back of my truck and it shakes my whole truck, so I’m guessing something around 2 to 3 hundred pounds was climbing around back there, I’m thinking like a mountain lion or a bear. At this point, I’m wide the F 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, SLAM Hard enough to really make it loud.

I then hear someone, a male, scream bloody m*rder 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 ruck 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 3 miles back down the road. They were not expecting me to be sleeping there and thought I was part of the drill. I’m ex-military so after explaining I was not part of their test and legit was just there out of coincidence we laughed it off. They had to radio their C.O. and tell him I was there and not have the other squads bother me.

DWL52

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Unforgettable Night Drive

We were driving down south along the Sea of Cortez with a buddy at night on 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 coming down fast and now effectively tailing us and the b*stard had bar mount headlights on top or what seemed like it, which are super bright. It’s normal (or was) that locals and gringos get wasted in the nearest (now former due covid) spring breaker town and then go down this road super fast to “test” their rigs since there’s no police there.  So I try waving him off to get the guy to keep the lights low since he was blinding us but he isn’t slowing down a bit nor turning his roof lights off and it was a dangerous super dark road, finally near a curve near the shore I found a spot to bail off the road without crashing and we see lights passing by us super fast and going straight to the curve and we were like “that’s it, he is going to crash down to the sea” but the lights didn’t fall and 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?” and I say “The f*cking flying truck?” Didn’t talk about it anymore as simply it didn’t make sense to talk about it, or with anyone else when we arrived.

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Paranormal Pit Stop

FedEx contractor, I’m in one of those big box trucks. Anyways, 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 whispered 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 f*cking idea what the heck it was because I had ruled everything else out.

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Eerie Night Drive

I used to deliver hotshot freight across the great plains/Minnesota area. One night around 2 am I was hauling across North Dakota trying to reach Montana by morning. I was delivering a particularly valuable tractor part that a farm desperately needed for the following day. I began to notice some highway hypnosis sneaking up on me, but it didn’t really bother me because I’d been through it hundreds of times before. Anyone who has driven across North Dakota knows that it is incredibly flat. Like, really flat. There also tend to be very straight and long roads. It’s somewhat easy to see things on the road that are far away, even at night.

I noticed something long on the road, spanning my entire lane, approximately half a mile in front of me. I slowed down a little and prepared to move into the opposite lane, thinking it was some re-tread off a blown tire. As I got closer I noticed it was two people, laying head to toe across the entire lane. I swerved into the other lane, successfully avoiding them and came to an almost complete stop. But they didn’t move. Not an inch.

I was just about to back up and check on them when I remembered a story that an old Greybeard colleague of mine told me. He told me that in certain remote areas, people will lie down in the middle of the road and wait for a car or truck to stop and see what’s going on. At that point, the road-layers along with whoever else is hiding in the nearby bushes will beat the sh*t out of the driver and steal his vehicle, leaving him in the middle of nowhere.

I decided not to back up, and when the two people on the road saw me put my truck back in gear and drive away, they both got up and walked toward the shoulder. I called the police and explained what happened, but we were so far away from civilization that I doubt anything came of it.

Thanks to that old greybeard, I got to keep my truck, my job, and my teeth.

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Beware the Seductive Specter

My father told me this story maybe a thousand times.

My family, as well as a couple of uncles and my oldest cousin, went on a trip from Mexico City to Acapulco when I was barely a year old. Back home in the middle of the night (Ah, the good old days when you could travel at night) the car broke down, and a police car quickly came to our help.

There were three policemen in the car, and the chief offered to take my dad to the nearest gas station, where he could find a mechanic and told the other two officers to stay in our car. My dad says they seem 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 officers.

Driving to the gas station in the police car, my dad asked the chief what was all that about. The chief told him that there had been many accidents in that part of the road (that’s why they were able to find our car so quickly). All of the accidents involved young men traveling without female or child company. Those who had survived said that they crashed because they could see a very beautiful woman next to the road, but once they came close to her, she turned out to be just a rotting corpse staring at them, and they crashed because they were paralyzed by fear.

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A Wrong Turn into Tension

One of the creepiest days was when I was sent with an end dump load of non-hazmat material to the general 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 (a very non-descript desert road was what I was looking for) I headed back. I turned on the next dirt road I came to and ended up at the sedan crater. Went and smoked a cigarette on the observation deck all by my lonesome. My hands were still shaking from the run-in with the armed guards.

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From Silence to Fear

One of the worst was when I was parked at a dirt turnout in the Arizona desert between Cameron and Page for the night. This is out in Navajo country I believe. At about 2 am I woke up to scratching at the window of my Sleeper, went on for about 15 minutes, and I’m sitting there in the dark scared to death wondering what the f*ck is happening with my Bowie Knife in my hand. After it ended I waited another 15 minutes or so before I opened my curtain and looked out the windows, 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 in Cameron now.

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A Life-Altering Encounter

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 pee and have a smoke. 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, have my pee while staring out into the dark and then light up a cigarette and stand by my car.

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. 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 smoke and have 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 cops”. I cautiously ask why and he tells me he had gone out into the woods to end himself but he couldn’t go through with it because he had thought of his daughters right before he was about to do it. I call the cops while the guy quietly cries outside. He had a kitchen knife that he was gonna use on himself so I stayed in the car and advised him to maybe leave the knife on the ground before the cops arrived. The cops 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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The Unseen Hand

My father was a truck driver and he was driving through a smaller town in northern California hauling tomatoes. Suddenly he got incredibly tired. Wasn’t low on sleep, or deprived at all but ended up passing out at the wheel. The last thing he saw was the light of the town in front of him.

He woke up about 2 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.

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The Unforgettable Stare

I used to have this regular that was out in the boondocks, 25m+ out of the way of civilisation 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 1 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 and I had never seen anyone around them in 6+ months of driving the route. Always assumed they were vacant because they didn’t look livable.

Well, I was driving out to this customer one Fall afternoon. Had been driving for a very long time without seeing a single car drive towards me. Finally, drive past the abandoned houses and there’s 1 old lady in her front yard pushing an old manual grass cutter, but she stops in her tracks as I drive towards her. I took it as a sign I was speeding or something and slow down. I take a quick glance in my rearview mirror after passing by and she was staring straight at me. She dropped the grass cutter and turned 180* 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.

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In the Dark of the Desert

My friend drove for a few years a while back. He told me he was driving a rig very late at night in Utah. Driving on a lesser-used two-lane highway. He said he remembers feeling very alert that night. So he noticed what appeared to be a figure manifesting up ahead on the dark road. Told me it wasn’t on the road but just next to it. He then comes to a stop and grabs his heavy-duty flashlight and points it at the figure.

He then describes “it”. Apparently, this humanoid creature had a dead coyote it was eating and the truck had gotten its attention and pissed it off. So it sorta stands up so he can get a full view of the thing. It was giant, with very big eyes, and of course the coyote blood all over its face. Its height was about 6’2, it had skinny limbs and no clothing. He then describes how it started to shuffle slowly towards the truck. Not only does he not have a weapon at that time, the only usable weapon being his flashlight, is actively helping him view this creature. He decides to book it and leave. Had no problem passing it. Turned around to see it standing in the middle of the road on two legs as he drove away.

When he reaches the nearest rest stop he sees two other truckers talking. Apparently, my friend wasn’t the only one to see the thing. Both the two guys looked as horrified as he was.

As for my opinion on my friend’s encounter. I have to say, my friend isn’t one to lie. So his story had me intrigued. I told him maybe what he saw was some mentally ill person out there. but he brushed the idea off saying he knew what he saw wasn’t human. I’m not the superstitious type but his story really did creep me out.

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The Longest Drive

The only thing that’s ever happened to me was during the last week at a major carrier before I began driving locally. I was on edge because we had a strict, no-passenger policy due to insurance and here’s this female friend of mine who wants to become a truck driver. So I break the rules and take her out for 5 days to change her mind about driving. I left my home and headed towards my typical rest area right as I’m entering Illinois. I’ve driven this route many times so I know where I need to stop for the night. My truck was governed at 62 MPH. I am almost done with my 11 hours of drive time, coming upon my rest stop in a few miles. Look at my Qualcomm and it says I have an extra hour and a half to drive. There is no way possible! I’m driving west to East. It was not daylight savings time. (Late August) So I decide to get closer to my destination and I continue driving while we continue talking. An hour later I notice that I still have an hour left of drive time. I am tired as h*ll. My friend is in the passenger seat trying to do the math for me. Time we left breaks, etc. I finally said screw it and pulled into the next truck stop and called it a night. But I had been driving for 13 hours and yet my timeline showed that I had only driven for 11 hours. By Thursday, two passenger vehicles had spun out right in front of me, wrecking into everything but my truck and one semi truck stalled out in front of me going up a mountain pass. Great times one crazy week. My friend decided to go into medicine instead.

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Close Call with a Supernatural Presence

In my time driving cross country, probably the freakiest encounter I had was going through Cabbage Pass in Oregon.

Let me set the scene; It’s dark and late fall in 2016. I’m coming from Florida with a load of beer headed to Portland, OR. It’s about 0200 and it’s cold out.

I had just left a truck stop in Utah on I-84. I can’t remember the name of it, but, it has a Thunderbird as its logo and is probably on or very near a reservation. My wife and I had just gotten something to eat and were in the driver’s lounge enjoying our extremely late lunch. This is a common thing in the industry. Anyway, we get done and head back to my tractor. Everything seems like any other night. We get going and get into the pass. This is where things get strange.

Ahead of me in the distance is another trucker. He’s not moving terribly fast. My guess was a heavy load like mine. It’s starting to snow a bit. As I’m putting up the pass, I get close enough to see the company logo. It’s a Prime Inc. rig. In my head, I’m thinking “That explains the slug pace up the mountain.” As close as I can get, I can’t seem to pass him. A few turns up the pass and somehow, I lost sight of him. Didn’t think much of it at the time. The downside is the next couple of turns, he probably hit the grade and coasted down. Whatever. I get to the Oregon side of the pass and hit the Pilot down there. Wife needs the toilet. We get stopped and head inside. I didn’t see any Prime trucks in the lot. Figured he just kept going. Until I heard a Swift driver talking. He was saying a Prime driver was trying to run him off the road. Just about that time, an older driver starts talking. About 10 years before I even got my CDL, a Prime driver went over the pass near the top. A purple and black tractor. Well d*mn, I saw a purple/black Prime tractor on the pass. Coincidence. Has to be. I say as much and the older driver gives me a look.

“Did you pass him?” asked the driver to which I said I couldn’t. He got pale. Now I’m getting antsy. The heck? “Ok driver, what the f*ck is going on? A purple/black Prime goes over the pass. What happened?” Seems he lost control when he hit black ice and went off the top of the pass. He died. People have been seeing that tractor going up the pass and not seeing it on the other side. Anywhere. Now I’m officially done with this conversation and was going to leave when the driver asked if my CB was on. Well no, it’s 2 in the morning and my wife was sleepy. Be kind of rude. The older driver tells me that probably saved our lives. A few weeks beforehand, a fatality accident happened on the pass, at the top, on black ice, after talking to a driver on the CB. That was all the provocation I needed to never go over Cabbage Pass again. A ghost trucker? No thanks. We’re a hard group of people to spook, but, when our lifelines become liabilities, that’s unsettling. I didn’t get a lot of sleep for a couple of days. That sh*t freaked me out.

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Credit: freepik

Mysterious Journey through Time

This is my dad’s story who’s been a trucker for over 50 years, he tells us of these experiences when we ask otherwise he doesn’t really speak of them.

One night he was doing a long run, he knew he wouldn’t make it home that night so when he saw an old-looking pub up ahead (Ireland) he decided to park up for the night at about 1.30 am and get himself a nice pint. He went into the bar and thought everyone was dressed really old-fashioned and dancing. He thought nothing of it and got himself a Guinness, he still says to this day it was the nicest pint he’s ever had in his entire life. After he finished his pint faces started to get fuzzy, he said it was like they were going out of focus. So he got back in the cab, pulled his curtains and did his crosswords until he fell asleep.

The next morning when he woke up he was going to get some breakfast and a coffee from the pub before he start driving again. He pulled his curtains and saw the pub from last night was derelict and boarded up, untouched for many years. He has no explanation for it but he knows it wasn’t a dream.

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Haunting Night Drive

It was about 2:00 AM passing through rural Texas making a heavy machinery delivery. The route I was taking to this farm was through rural Texas, you know the type you see in movies that involve a farm in the middle of nowhere type stuff, a house every two miles type deal. And little did I know this route I was gonna take was about to lead to the scariest/freakiest experience I’ve ever had. Hands down, period.

I have LED light bars on my truck all over the front so when there’s no oncoming traffic I can see for literally a mile. So I’m driving down the road minding my own business when I can see something off in the far distance with my lights, and the closer and closer I get, it looks more and more like a person. About 200 yards from what appears to be a person, I can make out that it’s a girl because of the long hair and light-colored clothes she had on. So I slow down as to not scare this girl walking in the road, and turn my brights off so I don’t blind her. Truck lights are bright enough as-is, so I could see her just fine without at this point. As I get closer, she turned. And when she did, my CB radio started making some slight static, and as I passed by I swear she had absolutely no face. At all. It looked like a hollow shell. I’m getting antsy just typing this sh*t out, and you’ll see why in the next paragraph.

I’ve never flown through gears so fast in my entire life, especially with a heavy load, and I had to be doing at least 70 before I finally came back to my senses. I called the police about it and the worst part was, they said I’m not the first person to call this in. Through the years they’ve had people call it in with similar descriptions of a girl walking down the road in the early morning hours, and when she turns she has a hollowed-out face. The sheriff I talked to told me about an accident that happened years back, a girl in her 20s was struck and killed by a truck speeding down that road in the early morning hours and she was described as having long hair and wearing light-colored clothes. THE EXACT SAME DESCRIPTION AS I SAW THAT NIGHT.

Needless to say, I will never be taking that route again if I have another delivery. Ever.

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