15 Real Drivers Tell Spooky Tales From The Road That’ll Freak You Out Beyond Belief
Stories originally appeared on R/AskReddit
1. Followed me for 2+ hours
Back in college, I was driving home one late night. A 2hr drive. I noticed this truck with round shaped headlights following me on the freeway. Thought nothing of it and just thought we happen to be going the same way. Each freeway changes, it was still following me. 50 miles later, it’s still following me staying behind me at a constant speed and good distance. I got a bit agitated. 2 hours later, I finally reached my exit to my hometown, it exited. I knew something was up.
I instantly pulled into a 24hr McDonalds drive thru to see if it follows me still. It follow me into the parking lot and realizing I pulled in line into a drive through, it u-turn and drove off. When I left the McDonalds parking lot, I was paranoid that the truck was just waiting around the corner to re-follow me again. Luckily it never reappear. So I went home. To this day, I’m still not sure what its deal was.
2. Tried the 3 lefts and a right
A silver truck followed me for around 30 miles and I got off the interstate. The truck followed me down some 2 lane road for about 45 minutes. He stayed back pretty far, but kept on following me. Eventually we came to a small town and I done the “take 3 lefts and a right” thing, the truck was still following me and now he was right behind me. I pulled into a bank parking lot and so did the truck. I pulled out really fast and drove down to the middle of town and parked in front of all the busy shops for a while and left. I didn’t see the truck after that, but I was pretty shook up afterwards.
3. I thought I was going to die
I was driving on the highway around two AM a few years back, heading home. I noticed while driving past a U-turn gap in the road that something got picked up by my headlights, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
I look in my rear view and I can barely tell the black car pulling out of it with all its lights killed, as to be almost impossible to see. He started following me and I got pretty nervous about it. He kept his distance but kept on me for about 15 minutes while I kept speed and pretended like I hadn’t noticed him incase he started to speed up.
After that, he turned his lights on and ripped past me at way above the limit. Turned out that he was a fucking cop driving illegally without lights on just to try and bust me for something. Son of a bitch. I was afraid I was going to get killed for my car that night.
4. Creepy white van
It was around 2am and I was dropping my friend off at his house. A van (white, unmarked) was just sitting at a stop sign intersection and flashed his lights for me to proceed, even though he’d gotten there first and had been sitting there for who knows how long. He immediately starts following me, and it becomes clear he’s not just going the same route as I was driving in circles around the neighborhood. I eventually started running stop signs, which he also did. Basically we were chased for a good 15 minutes before we lost him. I hope it was just some douche having a laugh.
5. “He signaled me to pull off…”
When I was 18 and a freshman in college, I decided to come home for a long weekend. I made the long drive home for the first time all by myself. At about 9:30PM someone got behind me and started flashing their lights. Me, being the paranoid fucker I am, assumed that naturally, the car was trying to warn me about a murderer in my backseat. I haphazardly checked as best as I could but everything was in place so I kept going.
The car kept flashing and then signaled me to take the next exit. Now this was my first car and I was a pretty inexperienced, young girl and I was a bit worried maybe something was wrong with my car that I could not see, so I stupidly turned off and the car followed me. I pulled into a well lit gas station but immediately realized there was no one really there but the attendant. Fuck.
Then this creepy, old, leathery, Florida guy (if you live in Florida you know what kind of guy I’m talking about-tan, unkempt hair, reeks of cigarettes, David Parker Ray vibes, etc.) got out. He could not see that I could see his reflection in his car window from where I was sitting, but he had what appeared to be a revolver in his back pocket. NOPE!
I peeled out of there faster than a Taylor Swift relationship and called the police but they couldn’t find him. Don’t be naive in rural Florida kids.
6. He wanted me to kill him
I was waiting for my friend to pick me up to go out to a party at around midnight out the front of my flat (which is in a sketchy part of town). Anyway, while waiting to be picked up I heard all this mad yelling of some man screaming “kill me”. This freaked me the fuck out so I went and waited inside. My friends called me when they arrived. I told them about what happened and they shrugged it off.
While leaving we came across a man without a shirt in the middle of the road playing chicken with cars shouting at people to kill him. We kept our distance from him and called the police, the police showed up quite quickly and arrested him. They said he was under the influence of some kind of amphetamines.
Definitely the freakiest thing I have witnessed.
7. There’s no explanation for this
This story is from my grandpa. He’s a retired long-distance truck driver, and he often drove throughout the night and early hours of the morning over unfamiliar roads. This one particular day, when my grandpa was in his thirties, it was between 2am and 3am, and he was driving down a twisting country road that was so narrow, only one vehicle could fit at a time, so if two vehicles met from different directions, one would have to pull off the road to let the other pass.
The road was empty save for my grandpa. On the right side of the road, there was thick woodland, and on the left, open fields and a lake. There were no street lights. The only light came from my grandpa’s truck and the moon. It was pretty lonely.
My grandad was going steady down the road, going a bit faster than he should (when my grandpa said this, I always took it to mean he was blazing down the road as fast as the truck could go), listening to the radio and probably not paying much attention, when he suddenly felt hands on his shoulders and a voice whisper his name in his ear, so close that he felt the breath on his skin.
He recognised the voice – it belonged to his mother, who had passed away a few years previously. Naturally, this spooked my grandpa and he instinctively hit the brakes. Seconds later, his headlights lit up a pile of three crashed cars that took up the entire road. My grandpa stopped just short of the wreckage, but if he hadn’t braked when he did, he would’ve ploughed straight into the cars.
The occupants in the crashed cars were all severely injured and my grandpa was able to get emergency help. Had he joined the pileup, it probably would’ve meant a more dire outcome for all of them.
There’s a number of explanations for what my grandpa heard and felt, but my grandpa truly believes it was his mother giving him a warning.
8. Became a first responder
I was driving to work on a day that was really windy. I work the night shift so this was at like 9:30pm. As I’m diving I see a car upside down in the ditch and a few feet away was a body. WTF. There weren’t any emergency vehicles so I backed up and got out of my car. I call the police and tell them about the accident and where it is. Dispatcher days the police are on the way, can I check if the person is ok. I cross the street to check if she’s alive, she is and she is sobbing.
I asked if she was ok (stupid question yes, but I was panicking) she was fine, some cuts that I patched up with some Band-Aids from my first aid kit in my car. The police get there and I fill out a report, she gets taken to the hospital to check for a concussion and I leave. Get to work super late. Omfg that was one of the craziest things thats ever happened to me.
9. Ghost truck
We were leaving a wedding we had attended that was held about 3 hours from home, my boyfriend had stayed sober in order to drive us home, I was pretty drunk.
As we were driving the dark country back roads to get back to the city, I was half dozing and remember squinting because there seemed to be bright headlights washing over us and then my boyfriend who was driving started screaming, like full on screaming like I’ve never heard him do so before or since, it wasn’t a loud high-pitched screaming, but a deep in the throats screaming that broke in and out and that left him hoarse, and swerved our car sharply to the side of the road nearly into a ditch.
I came fully awake, and was ‘what! Are you ok?’.
He said that he saw a truck coming full bore towards in the dark, and honestly thought we were going to die. I looked behind us….a long straight road with no houses or streetlights, there was no sign of a truck or any kind of vehicle, no rear headlights on the road or any light from a trucks headlights, which we would have seen, no sound of truck or car, or anything. But he was shaking, and I initially brushed it off as him maybe falling asleep at wheel – which is already scary in and of itself.
We were on a narrow country road, there was no way a massive truck could have gone by us, without hitting our car for one, and I don’t remember feeling the rumble and vibrating of our car (which was an old POS) that would have happened if a truck had narrowly missed us. So I dismissed it.
He still swears that he saw a massive truck coming towards us.
However, I do remember a flood of headlights hurting my half closed eyes just before my boyfriend freaked out…
10. Jesus.
I saw a girl who looked about 10 to 12 years old, standing on the side of the road holding a mangled dog. She was wearing a long white dress and it’s blood and guts was all over her.
11. When ancient spirits attacked
I was a kid when this happened… My uncle and I were finishing up chopping/gathering firewood for my grandmother because it was getting dark. Driving back on a dirt road at about 30mph (give or take 5mph) I had this awful sense of being watched. Before I could turn to look out my window (passenger side) my uncle quickly shouted, “Don’t!” I completely froze. My heart felt like it was beating out of my chest then completely stopped when I heard a tap tap on my window.
My uncle sped up and was loudly praying in my native language. I didn’t know what was going on and thought it was over till our truck suddenly dipped from the bed. My uncle then started saying, “Look at me” and “Don’t turn away” over and over. Then I heard it again, tap tap but from the window behind me. It was getting harder for me to breathe and I wanted to cry.
A minute or two passed and the truck dipped again. My uncle looked around and sighed. It was quiet besides the truck and the road. He looked at me and said, “We will ask your father to do a prayer in the morning. So the evil will forget our faces.” (Navajo to English equivalent). I remember curling up on the seat and just staring at the radio watching the time. Listening to my uncle sing an old prayer till we got to my grandmother’s house.
12. Deer don’t wear clothes…
It was new years and I was driving home on 495 south from Maryland.
The traffic was very light.
I was just going past the weird ass church thing when I saw up ahead a dead deer. Blood was bright red and pooled all around it. I could not see it well from my point of view and the distance but I could tell that deer was hit in a very bad way. Like everyone else driving around me, we didn’t want to hit it so most people moved one or two lanes away. Deer are known for looking very dead and just having enough energy to get up and freak the fuck out so I, at least, gave it a wide berth.
So I was going about 60 or so and I passed it.
Wait, that wasn’t a deer because deer don’t wear clothes.
On the right hand side of the highway I saw people, dressed very nicely as you do for new years out on the town, running up the side towards the pile of bloody person and that pretty much confirmed to me I was not seeing things back there.
I tried looking up the police blotters and any news about it, but saw nothing about it.
13. None of the wheels were touching the ground
One day I was driving by a rural road that was all plantation fields on either side. As I was getting closer to a water stack on the side of the road, I notice a man holding a rifle pressing his back to the water stack. It looked like he was hiding from cars on the road. There was nobody around in that area so I don’t know what he was doing there but I didn’t stick around to find out.
Another time I was driving down that same road with a friend. A few miles down that area I mentioned earlier, there is a neighborhood, and as we were driving past it, my friend says “look!”. When I turn I see a pickup truck leaning on a fence, pointing straight up. None of its wheels are touching the ground. I stop my vehicle in the middle of the road to inspect, but I don’t get off. There is not a scratch or a dent on the truck and no damage to anything in sight, not even the fence. At first we suspect that it wasn’t a car accident because of the lack of damage, and the fact that even though it’s right in front of a neighborhood, there’s nobody anywhere in sight. Then however, we notice that there are two people. A young man and woman are hugging tightly ten feet from the truck next to a tree, we look at them for a while, but they don’t move. We just leave.
— juaners
14. Who was she?
I was driving home with two friends. It was January, we’re in Wisconsin. It was cold. Very cold. It was also almost 2 in the morning.
Anyway I was driving past a school that has its play area for the kids in back. Couldn’t see too much, but the swing set was visible. One of the swings was moving, that caught my eye.
There was a young girl swinging on this swing set at 2 am all alone. I doubt she was older than 13, and she was not dressed for January in Wisconsin. I slowed down to get a good look, she had to notice but she just looked straight ahead. Naturally my friends and I are wondering why this girl is out there by herself at 2 am. Did we get out and ask? Nope. I don’t need to anger a playground demon. I did call the police however.
No idea if they actually checked and saw anything sadly.
— Lurk_102
15. “I heard them hooting and cackling!”
I was driving home one night from an evening work event held off-site, which mean instead of my 4-minute commute it was the better part of an hour on a twisty, dangerous 2-lane highway known for moose and bears. It was after dusk a bit, in that “it’s definitely nighttime but not pitch black” kind of way. I knew where I was going so I was zoning out and just keeping my eyes peeled for animals darting out into the road. Fairly quiet Wednesday night.
A huge truck comes peeling up behind me–I figured it was a local who wasn’t interested in the 90kmh speed limit, which was common, and he would pass me and go on by. This was a big fucking truck, too–at least the size of a Ford F350, and lifted. Not anything crazy, but I live in a rural area, and big honking working pickup trucks are fairly common. So I didn’t think anything of it other than it was just a local in a hurry to get somewhere.
He slowed down behind me, as I was doing about 100-105, and then flashed his high-beams in preparation to pass me. He sped up into the oncoming lane, came even with my car, and then paused, matching my speed for a second. There were two youngish guys in the truck, looking down at me in my hatchback–a lone female in her 20s, in dressy clothes–and then they slowed down and got behind me again. This had never happened to me. I was beginning to worry.
I was still a half hour from my turnoff to get home, and it was pretty rural along the way. I was driving and driving and checking my rearview mirror compulsively and this truck just kept creeping closer and closer up to my bumper until they were tailgating me. They’d fall back a little bit, then creep up and ride my tail. I slowed down to 90, 80, sped up to 110-120 (still worried that a deer or moose would choose THIS MOMENT to hop out in front of me and then I’d have more problems), it didn’t matter. They stuck right on my tail. We passed turnoffs–they were still there. And then they started flashing their highbeams at me again and again. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.
Stupidly, I wondered if they had seen something in my car and were trying to warn me about it? But my car had been in for a tune-up the week before and I knew there were no lights out. I had checked it before I had gotten in because I was loading work stuff into it, and it was a hatchback–I could see everything perfectly. Then I started to wonder if they were trying to alert me of something up ahead. Basically, my mind was racing. I even wondered if they were trying to signal me something in Morse code, but it was just a constant on-off-on-off-on-off high beam dance. At one point they turned their lights off completely, and then I definitely panicked hard.
I didn’t want to stop at a gas station, because I didn’t trust a single solitary gas attendant to help me in the event these dudes wanted to hurt me. The nearest OPP station was still 50 minutes away. I thought about calling 911, but was afraid no cops would be nearby to help me. (This was stupid. Do not be afraid to call 911.) And the truck was getting closer and closer to my bumper every time, until I was genuinely afraid they were going to run me off the road into the woods or a lake.
At one point I turned my radio off and cracked the window, even though it was a cold night, and when the truck came very close to my bumper I could hear the two guys in the cab screeching and hollering. I don’t know what they were doing, but it was noisy. I kept speeding up and speeding up and they kept flashing their beams, getting up to my bumper, dropping back, and coming close again like they were deliberately trying to terrify me.
I live near a military base and the main gates are on my way home. On the turnoff from the highway, they followed me. Of course they did. My only thought was that there was no way I was going home with these assholes tailing me, so I turned into the main gates. Nobody at the main checkpoint, so I flew through it and turned down to the MP shack. The truck got to the main gates behind me, then stopped. Just stopped. They pulled through it, did a U-turn, and went absolutely flying out of those gates and back towards the highway, doing way more than 100kph. I got the MPs to escort me home.
I don’t know what was going on. I was very, very, very frightened that I was about to be run off the road and attacked, or possibly just left for dead. The MPs called me the following week to tell me they hadn’t been able to find any complaints of trucks matching that description, but they would note it for the future. In the very best case scenario it was a couple of drunk or high idiots who thought scaring someone would be a terrific way to spend an evening. In the worst case scenario, that could have been my last night on earth.
