30 Shockingly Scary Stories About Drivers On The Road At Night

1. Dad was driving at night, and I was looking out the window and saw two red pinpricks in the corn field, and it followed us. I told my dad about it and he said, in the most calm, casual tone for this situation:

“Those are cornfield demons. Stay in the car and you’ll be okay.”

Cue me freaking the hell out when he got out of the car not too long after to check a tire before getting back in.

2. Someone I knew locally came across a jeep that had just crashed into the ditch on a highway at night, flipped on its top, wheels still turning kind of thing.

He was the first on scene so called 911 and ran down into the ditch. The driver, who was badly mangled, had been tossed from the car and was dying. This guy held him and the driver died in his arms.

The weirdest part of it all was that he found out the next day that it was his cousin, but he hadn’t been able to recognize him.

3. Driving down a 2 lane divided highway. I came up to a couple semis and went into the left lane to pass. I did a shoulder check to get back into the right lane when I saw headlights in front of me… in my lane. The car was going the wrong way.

I managed to swerve into the ditch, felt like I was mere centimeters from death. Thought my wife’s scream would be the last thing I ever hear… And I never want to hear it again. The semis I passed all pulled to the shoulder to come check on us. Didn’t see the car anywhere… I think they just kept going.

Had to pull into a gas station after and collect myself.

4. I slammed the brakes once because I saw a deer in my peripheral vision. Upon closer inspection, it was a mounted deer head on a stick in the middle of the woods. Slammed the gas after I realized that.

5. Driving to work at 4:30 AM and seeing a cyclist with his head split open and brains on the road.

6. A hitchhiker almost leaping out in front of my car on a dark forest road late at night. The woman literally popped out of nowhere. Had to drift into the oncoming lane. Luckily there was no one else and painted median there. Read a police report that she ended up getting hit minutes after I drove by. She was intoxicated and running from the police. Pretty fucking creepy. I hope she’s alright. I can’t imagine what the driver that hit her was thinking.

7. I was driving home late one night and was driving on a dark stretch of the highway. Suddenly a body was in front of me. I tried to swerve out of the way but it was too late. My bumper was hanging on the ground.

The guy died. And I went to a nearby gas station not knowing what to do (was 18). When the tow truck pulled my car up on to it, there were a bunch of blood and guts on the bottom. I couldn’t get that image out of my head

Apparently a drunk driver with 5 DWI’s had hit a guy on the motorcycle prior.

For years after I had serious depression and thought about it every night before sleep.

8. A body in the ditch. Thought it was a deer as I approached and then my brain was like ‘Deer don’t wear boots’. I was shaking as I did a U-turn to make sure the person was alive. They were, just drunk and some people stopped as well and emergency was called. I was so shaken up by it.

9. Was driving from Atlanta GA to Lexington SC with my GF to visit my parents. I like to drive at night since there are less people on the road and I can take my time. At around 3 AM or so we are making good time. I had stopped at a gas station and picked up some coffee for us and we were due in in about an hour. GF was sleeping soundly and I’m listening to a quiet radio humming away. I start getting a little drowsy and take a sip. Road was just as my coffee, no cars in sight except for a spotted few on the side of the road here and there. In the distance I can make out what looks like a hitchhiker, or what I think is one, but can’t really tell due to such low light. As I get closer I start to notice other things, like how the person is kinda thin and tall and completely, for the most part, apparently brown. I’m right up on this thing now, and at about 20 feet it turns around and locks eyes with me as I pass by.

This was no person. And it is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life.

It was a deer.

Or I tell myself it was.

I have seen deer stand on their hind legs to fight, but they still have deer posture when they do. Not only that, but I was watching this thing walk for about 30 seconds from first seeing it in the distance to passing it.

The posture it had was human. Standard biped stance. Arms back, chin down.

But the worst part was the eyes, or lack thereof. In their place were two large black pits, almost black-holish. I’ll never forget the stare down it gave me.

The instant I passed it I had the only panic attack I’ve ever had in my life. I had to wake up my girlfriend to keep calm enough to get to an exit with a large gas station a few miles away. Like hell I was going off a ramp close to that thing. After we pulled into the station I had a complete meltdown. I started crying harder than I ever thought I could. I couldn’t talk, breath, or do anything but want to curl into a ball and cry. After around 30 minutes or so, she finally gets me to calm down enough to tell her what happened. While I don’t think she believed what I think I saw, she knew that I was convinced and legitimately scared to death.

Every once in a blue moon I will dream about it and wake up crying or in a cold sweat, and she will tease me about it or roll over and ignore me instead of comforting me about the one thing that I’ve ever been terrified of. But I know what I saw, and I know it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

10. This is the only experience I have ever had like this. Nothing else has come close: Some friends and I (5 of us) we’re driving around some rural roads waiting for a friend to arrive to his girlfriend’s house. We were just kind of wasting time, cruising down some dirt roads around 20 miles an hour, talking. My friend who is driving slams on his brakes and I, in the passenger seat, looked up and there was this thing. I had never seen anything like it before. We stopped the car and watched as this thing, which didn’t have a perceivable head, moved slowly across the road about 15 ft in front of us. It was creepy to say the least. It was approximately 4 ft tall and we could see its joints moving as it walked slowly with a gait similar to a giraffe. It had very skinny, long legs. Its body was about 1.5 ft round. If it had hair it was pretty short, but the thing was Brown. We were all screaming, “What the fuck is that?!” We could not see any perceivable head and it was walking perpendicular to us. We watched as it slowly walked through these people’s yard and behind their house. Needless to say we were freaking out about it. When we got to my friend’s house we all drew pictures of it separately and showed each other at the same time when we were done to verify that we all saw what we saw. It was the strangest thing I have ever seen and I have not found any satisfactory explanation to this day, 20 years later.

11. Not me but a friend of mine was on a family road trip and while they were driving through the desert at night they happened to pass by a burning cross a little ways off the road. Pretty creepy imo.

12. It was about 3 AM and we were driving back to Dallas from a field party in OK. Long dirt roads, houses few and far between. As we pass a particularly broken down looking farmhouse there is little girl standing at end of the driveway holding a headless doll just watching our car drive by. Made my blood go cold.

13. Watched IT at a friend’s house, leaving late at night and I look in the rearview to see Pennywise the clown’s yellow fucking eyes staring at me. It was another car with weird headlights. I almost crashed the car… into a graveyard

14. A dead, butchered horse laying in the road. Someone had completely skinned and butchered a horse, took the choice pieces of meat, and just dumped it on the highway. I almost crashed into it.

15. Killer Clown on the side of a deserted country road during the 2016 clownpocalypse. I think I cried.

16. Long stretch of road, not so much as a driveway for 100 miles in either direction. Late at night in this middle of nowhere road, there was a car on the side of the road that was on fire. And I don’t mean like an engine fire, I mean completely engulfed in flames. Not a single person or another car anywhere around it. I hadn’t even driven past a car in over an hour.

17. Driving to work early, still dark, got caught on scene as the paramedics and police were closing down the street. Man on a bike hit by a car, woman standing outside her car holding her face and staring at the man she hit totally inconsolable. Man on the ground, head contorted behind his back, legs splayed like a ragdoll, shoes in the street with his toes facing the wrong way, his face bloodied and cut, and his butt half out of his pants while he convulsed, obviously dying from his injuries. I was forced to stay there while police figured out who saw what and who was involved, so I got to watch the guy die.

I didn’t work that day.

18. One time I was driving at night on hour 36 or 38 of no sleep and I started seeing shadows jump out in front of my car. But nothing was ever actually there.

19. I was driving from New Hampshire USA, to Colorado springs Colorado USA, we had to go through Kansas and never heard of a “super cell” but apparently those beautiful clouds turn into swirly death traps called tornadoes. Well as night hit and the strongest became difficult to drive through we slowed down because it was hard to see through the down pouring rain, well lucky me looked outside to my left into a field and in between lightning flashes a tornado was swirling in motion about a mile away from us. I’ve never shat myself so fast and hard before, I tell you I will never go back to Kansas in a Subaru outback, if I go back it’s gonna be in a tank.

20. After seeing The Ring 2 with friends late one night, I had just dropped off one of them at their house in the middle of nowhere. I was driving down a dark rural road through trees and I turned a corner going fairly fast and there were like 5 deer in the middle of the road. I was able to stop before hitting them but I couldn’t go anywhere until they moved so I sat there until they finished crossing the road. If anyone remembers the terrible movie that was The Ring 2 there is this scene where they get stopped by a deer then the deer attacks. That was all I could think about as I waited for the deer to cross. Realistically it probably took less than a minute, but man did it feel like an hour. Eventually though they all pranced across and I kept driving. But to this day I still remember it and it still comes up in my nightmares sometimes.

21. A lady tried to use my truck to commit suicide. I was going 40 and she jumped towards my truck. It happened so fast I couldn’t stop in time and her head smashed out my drivers side window. Scared the shit out of me. At first I didn’t know that I hit a person until I looked back and saw her body in the road. She didn’t die that day but as soon as she got out of the hospital, she went back and did the same thing. This time it was a semi truck and she didn’t make it. Super sad story.

22. Night shift. Driving home. Child right in the middle of the street. Noped outta there because I watched those car hijacks. Took twice as long to get home though…

23. A lot of people that drive for a living or have done balls to the wall cross country drives can tell you about the running shadows. First time I saw em I was on the tail end of 12 straight hours of driving. I was driving through the middle of nowhere, in the desert, at night. Very little light from the sky, no man made lights even on the horizon. Just the pitiful cone from my truck’s headlamp, and being in the middle of the desert it pretty much only lights up the road ahead. Nothing above ground level to catch the light.

As I’m barreling along I start to see shadowy figures running alongside my truck out of the corners of my eyes, on two legs and four. All I can think about is the creepy stories you read online about shit that lives out in the desert, or the Asian ghost stories where if you don’t acknowledge the spirit it can’t harm you. So I’ve got my eyes glued to the road, refusing to let them flicker off to the side. I rolled my windows up and cranked up the volume on my radio. Drove like that for probably an hour and a half until they slowly petered out roughly 15 minutes outside of a little one light town.

I’ve had people try to carjack me, people try to rob me after I pull over to render aid, people jump out at me on twisty mountain road, you name it. But nothing matching that level of fear the first time I saw them. Felt like my spine was rippling like a ribbon in a wind trying to jump clear out of my back and hide under the seat.

Sleep deprivation mixed with sensory deprivation does some strange things.

24. When I first started learning to drive I was working for my dad, and one day after work he asked if I wanted to drive home, I was like all right! So I got on the highway headed for home, and while driving, I looked in the rearview and a guy on a crotchrocket was coming up behind me, I thought nothing of it I was sure he would pass or slow down. I look ahead again and a few moments later I hear this sound, like metal scraping against the ground. I look around and then look back into the rearview, and the bike was on its side, spinning down the highway, and behind it I could see the biker on his back, legs and arms flailing kind of like a baby on its back in a crib, then I watched as he disappeared under the vehicle behind him.

I was so freaked out driving after that I didn’t want to drive for weeks following the incident. Then eventually got over it. Still I can see the guy in my mind just sliding along the ground flailing about then being swallowed under another car.

25. I got off on my exit, and the whole road was covered in blood. I put on my brights and saw a bisected body of a large animal. It just made me so sad.

26. A lonely abandoned shack with a bunch of arrows pointing to it. Saying come in!

27. Not me but a friend. After dropping me off at my house around 2 AM, my friend calls me and tells me to pick my doors. He said he saw a man standing in the middle of the road and that as he passed him the man kept staring through him. Not at him really, but like there was something behind him in his backseat. He also said he could barely make out anything about the man other than his large eyes and trench coat.

What really terrified me is that this happened on a street that only my family lives on and no one would have been out that night. Also we’re a solid mile and a half from the nearest neighbor. Freaked me the hell out.

28. I had just finished driving for Uber and was driving down the access road to my home around 3 AM when I saw a body lying completely lifeless next to one of those motorized scooters. I pulled over and flagged down his buddies who were drunk and kept going without realizing their friend was lying on the ground. Ambulance arrived and took the kid away, but I never came to find out if he made it. Fuck those scooters man.

29. I woke up in the driver’s seat to the sound of rumble strips and the guard rail coming right at me.

30. I was following a grey Toyota Tundra in a massive blizzard through Montana on McDonald pass. He was going pretty quick most of the way but must have been unfamiliar with how steep the final few miles are. He got away from me as I slowed down to about 35. Not 5 min later I passed his tire marks in the fresh snow that went off the side of the mountain. Pulled over and looked down to see his truck upside down and on fire about 300 yards down.

Called 911. He didn’t die but was burnt up pretty bad. Sad and scary and don’t go 50 in the snow just because you have a truck or 4wd!!!