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Phillip Rouss can’t help but smile when he remembers how much fun his parents had taking car trips together. “Dad was the regional manager of the United Shoe Machine Company,” he said, describing how the senior Phillip’s route covered a four-hundred-mile radius near Memphis in the 1960s.
Sadie and Phillip Rouss, Sr., sang along with their Guy Lombardo eight-track tapes and sometimes wrote their own songs to sing in the car as the miles flew by.
They were happy times for Sadie, who, at ninety-two, has spent over a dozen years without her husband. “Dad passed away in 1991,” said Phil junior, who is privy to an unusual memory his parents shared. “Dad talked about it till the day he died.”
Sadie, too, will never forget the odd encounter on a lovely spring afternoon. She and her husband were driving home from an Atlanta trip and were on Highway 78 about halfway between Holly Springs, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, when they saw some other travelers who seemed out of place and out of time on the side of the two-lane highway.
“They saw a wagon train,” said Phil. They stared at the sight that seemed right out of an old western. An elderly couple sat in the front of the horse-drawn wagon train. The man held the reins, a pipe clenched in his teeth.
“The woman wore a white bonnet,” Sadie remembered.
The Rousses were so stunned they traveled two blocks before Phillip senior said, “We have to meet those people!”
Figuring that the unusual travelers must be involved in making a movie, they headed back to the spot where they’d seen them less than two minutes before.
“They were gone,” said Sadie, who still shakes her head in awe.
How could the wagon train have vanished so quickly? The couple got out of their car, puzzled. They examined the wet ground, scrutinizing it for the track marks that should surely have been left there but found none.
The Rousses drove around the area, searching for the elusive travelers. They were nowhere to be seen, and there were no nearby roads they could have ducked onto.
“Mom and Dad couldn’t wait to get home and tell my sister and me,” said Phil.
But when the parents excitedly shared their experience, Phil and his sister mocked them. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” they teased the elder Rousses.
“They got mad at us,” Phil said, laughing a little at the memory.
Phil senior and Sadie were shaken by the episode. “I could see the fear in Dad’s face,” said Phil. They did not know what to make of the odd event. The apparition had been so vivid that they could describe the curl of smoke rising from the old pioneer’s pipe, the big black hat on his head, and the rope and the water keg that hung from the side of the wagon.
When they saw their grown kids’ reaction to their experience, they extracted a promise from them. “They insisted we never tell anyone about it,” said Phil. “They were afraid people would think they were nuts.”
Until now, they shared this incredible episode with family only. Sadie is still baffled by the mystery.
Did they see the ghosts of pioneers?
Perhaps.
Or the apparition may have been a place memory, a phenomenon where a dramatic event is inexplicably impressed upon the environment. Like a loop of movie film, it is played back when the conditions are just right.
It is theorized that in such an instance the actual spirits of the people seen are not really there—no more than the soul of Clark Gable is present when Gone with the Wind is viewed.
If it was a ghost encounter, the figures seen could have interacted with witnesses. And if indeed the old pioneers were ghosts, they would have been mighty confused by the sight of motor cars whizzing by along with such new-fangled gadgets as eight-track tapes. Time marches on.
Dead Man’s Detour
It was a hot summer afternoon in 1995 as twenty-one-year-old Angela Boley headed toward a three o’clock class at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Ohio. As she drove along Wooster Pike, she noticed something odd. The normally busy road was quiet. In fact, only one other car drove on the road. “It was an ugly tan car from the 1970s,” she told me. “It looked like a Buick and it was really loud, like it had a hole in its exhaust. It was covered with big bumper stickers that said things like “Free Ireland.”
The car was moving along at about forty miles per hour and she found herself studying the bumper stickers. After a moment she pressed her foot on the gas pedal, moved to the other lane, and left the Buick behind.
She was again alone on the road—until she reached the stoplight. “There was the same ugly car waiting for me at the stoplight! I knew no one had passed me and I had left that car in the dust.”
Yet it appeared to be the exact car she had left behind. “All the bumper stickers were the same, it made the same sound, and it had rust in all the same places,” she told me.
Angela was baffled. There had been no exits since she passed him—no place for him to have gotten off and sped ahead. How could he have gotten in front of her?
As she pulled up beside him, she glanced through her open window at the teenage driver in the other car. He was a pale skinny boy with short black hair, and he stared straight ahead. The teen was dressed in black, and she noted it was an odd choice for such a warm day. It also struck her that he appeared to be a cautious driver with his hands placed precisely at “eleven o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel.” He never moved. “He didn’t even blink,” she remembered.
“A strange feeling came over me,” she confided, describing the overwhelming sense of dread. She had the sensation that she should not look at him—that she was seeing something she shouldn’t be seeing.
Despite the feeling of foreboding, Angela was not really frightened. She was confused and extremely curious. She kept glancing toward the car as they went through the town of Mariemont, both of them headed toward Columbia Parkway—a stretch of highway notorious for fatal accidents.
“I slowed down as we went through the dangerous ‘dead man’s curve’ on the highway, a near perfect U-shaped bend marked with yellow flashing lights,” Angela explained. She watched the other driver and noted, “He didn’t even turn the wheel at all as he went through the bend. He was completely immobile! It was like the driver was frozen in time, like a 3-D photograph.”
She could not quite wrap her mind around the surreal episode she found herself in. She grasped for logical explanations but there were none. Determined not to lose sight of him, she watched her rearview mirror, but soon he was left behind and she was alone on the road again.
“I thought the car got off at the Red Bank exit, but when I stopped at another stoplight, there was that very same car waiting for me.”
It’s impossible! she thought. She suddenly found herself thinking of a 1976 hit song by the band Kiss. “It is called ‘Detroit Rock City’ and it’s about a kid killed in a car accident on the way to a concert,” she said. Along with the tune, a thought popped into her head. “He’s dead. He was killed on this stretch of highway and wants attention. He wants me to follow him.”
Prior to this revelation, the word “ghost” had not entered her mind as she tried to sort out the odd occurrence. Now the realization that this was a spirit encounter crystallized.
“I had to turn off to go to Eden Park Drive, but the car continued on Columbia Parkway, and it looked like it was headed straight for downtown Cincinnati,” said Angela. “I wanted to follow it to satisfy my curiosity, but I had class.”
Nearly nine years have passed since Angela shared the road with the mysterious boy. Today, she still lives in Ohio, and is an artist with a fine arts degree. The surreal journey is etched distinctly in her memory.
Interestingly, it is the stillness of the event that stands out the most. “He was like a statue,” she told me, recalling the unblinking apparition with his hands placed so precisely on the steering wheel. The air, too, was eerily still, as if the day were holding its breath.
When Angela expressed regret that she had not followed the freakish car to the end of its journey, I felt an unaccustomed fear. “I’m glad you didn’t!” I quickly told her. It occurred to me that if she had, she might not be here to tell her story. For it seemed to me that the ghost was not visiting her plane, but she was visiting his. The fact that all the other traffic vanished from the busy thoroughfare indicated that Angela unknowingly took a paranormal detour.
Probably there were other cars on Wooster Pike and Columbia Parkway on that date and at that time and if we investigated we’d likely find witnesses that would testify that they were traveling there.
Apparently Angela stepped out of our time and space for her meeting with a stuck soul. While most of the ghost encounters I investigate seem to take place when the witnesses have at least one foot planted firmly in this plane, I have interviewed those who seem to completely leave our dimension.
The rules of our plane and our time dissolve in these incidents. While some of the world’s greatest minds continue to develop theories on anomalies such as time warps, they have yet to discover definitive answers.
As for the encounter, Angela has her own theory. She believes that the teenage boy was killed on his way to a concert in the 1970s and wants his parents to know that he was not driving recklessly—that the accident was not his fault.
“Maybe if they knew the truth, it would bring them some peace,” she said.
Perhaps she is right. Perhaps we will hear from a grieving family who will claim the ghost in the distinctive tan car as their own.
According to Angela, the dangerous curve in the road, long known as “dead man’s curve,” has been altered so it is not nearly so deadly.
Whenever I think of Angela’s inexplicable journey, I get chills. And I wonder if anyone else has taken Columbia Parkway’s “dead man’s detour.”
Legends of road ghosts can be found in every corner of the planet. Often difficult to validate, these stories are nevertheless told and retold. The following hauntings from the highway have been mentioned in the news:
Going My Way?
FOR THE LAST FOUR DECADES in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, area an eighteen-wheeler truck is said to pick up hitchhikers along Waverly Road. The driver, named Joe, was killed in an accident years ago but that doesn’t stop him from giving lifts to unsuspecting riders. Apparently, he tells hitchhikers his full name and they later learn they’ve taken a spin with a ghost.
(Source: Halifax Daily News, April 2002)
Hell Hollow Hello
A DANGEROUS ROAD IN CONNECTICUT is the site of frequent bad accidents and a place where restless spirits roam. The Hell Hollow area of Pachaug State Forest was named for a depression in the woods where two women died. One was a Native American woman who was murdered by British soldiers after they killed her family. Some say her pitiful wailing can still be heard. The other ghost belongs to a suspected witch named Maude, who is restless because her gravestone was stolen.
(Source: New London newspaper The Day, September 18, 2003)
Here Comes the Bride
CEDARVALE ROAD IN CEDARVALE, NEW YORK, is legendary as the site of a ghostly bride. An ethereal lady in white appears on the rural road of thirteen curves.
While area skeptics say the ghost story is a hoax, others have stepped forward to describe their encounters—including incidents that go back to the 1950s. Many insist the ghost is that of a bride killed on her wedding night on the twisting road ten miles southwest of Syracuse. When the car missed a curve, it plunged into a creek.
Dolores Collard told a reporter that she had seen the ghost over three decades before while riding in the car with her family. The frightened family thought they were about to hit a pedestrian when they saw the lovely woman in a white gown on the road, but the ghost simply “walked through the car.”
Witnesses of more recent sightings say the ghost carries a glowing lantern in her left hand.
(Source: The Associated Press, October 2000)
Ghost Wrecks
FOLKS IN HEREFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND, believe that a victim killed in a car crash is responsible for the unexplained accidents on the A465 near Bromyard. In an eighteen-month period, twenty-six drivers crashed into a fence in the same place. Though the cars often roll in the accidents, no one is injured, which adds to the mystery. Some of the drivers said they had inexplicably lost control of the steering wheel, as if someone were wrestling it away from them. Concerned authorities improved road signs and conducted speed checks but the perplexing crashes continued. The ghost is believed to be that of a woman killed at that spot six decades ago.
(Source: BBC, October 26, 2002)
Vengeance from the Grave
POCAHONTAS PARKWAY in eastern Henrico County, Virginia, is the site of a tollbooth haunted by the ghosts of tribal warriors who are frequently seen, startling drivers into dropping their coins. Both the toll takers and state troopers have become accustomed to reports from motorists who often assume that the torch-carrying warriors are alive. Usually appearing after midnight, the specters ride horses and whoop aggressively.
Some witnesses described the apparitions as fully formed with distinct torsos and fading heads.
A state police spokeswoman who made a late-night visit to the toll plaza was quoted as saying, “Three separate times during our watch, I heard high-pitched howls and screams. Not the kind of screams of a person in trouble, but whooping. There were at least a dozen to fifteen voices. I would say every hair on my body was standing up when we heard those noises.”
Before the construction of the parkway, archaeologists sifted through the site and found tribal artifacts that dated back thousands of years.
(Source: Richmond Times Dispatch, August 11, 2002)
Author’s Note:
This writer’s research reveals that the area was once a war zone, with the English and the native Pamunkey tribe fighting for the land. The English set an evil precedent when they kidnapped and murdered native children, a practice that shocked the Pamunkeys. In 1662, Chief Opechancanough orchestrated a massacre on 350 white settlers. Survivors retaliated, killing so many natives and obliterating their tribes that a truce followed and lasted two decades—until an elderly Opechancanough waged war again, killing many before he, too, was murdered.