Highways of Horror

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.

In the dark stretches between our towns and cities, there lies millions upon millions of miles of road.

These paved networks are the lifeblood of our economies and facilitate our connections with the wider world.

They also provide the settings for some of the most disturbing encounters on record.

Join us as we explore these highways of horror.

The highways and byways of our world have always nurtured undertones of fear and trepidation.

Historically, they were frequented by bandits and robbers, simply because they offered far more lucrative opportunities than the relative bastions of the towns and cities they connected.

Travelling along them was always a risk, even in broad daylight.

But with the advent of motor transport, the specter of the traditional highwayman slowly but surely began to diminish.

As vehicles evolved over time, becoming capable of far greater speeds and security, it became much more difficult for lone gunmen to take advantage.

And in that relative absence of any real threat, people began to find other things to fear whilst travelling.

Stories of high strangeness, from dark and desolate backroads to open highways are nothing new, suggesting the dark energies therein predate the likes of Dick Turpin and his highwaymen.

What follows is a small selection of stories from people who make a living from driving on our roads, often in the dead of night.

Our first tale comes by way of Jakob Klar, an Estonian national living and working in the UK.

Back in the early 90s, Jakob worked for a Russian company situated on the outskirts of Skov, which meant that five days out of seven, he laboured in a foreign country away from his family.

Every Sunday evening, he would make the two and a half hour commute from Tartu in eastern Estonia, crossing the Russian border to the south.

Every Friday afternoon, he would retrace this journey to spend the weekend with his loved ones.

One Sunday evening at around 11 p.m.,

Yakob was well over an hour into his drive.

The border checkpoint was well behind him, and he now found himself travelling along the 58K 333,

a minor transit route surrounded by endless tracks of countryside.

It is nothing more than a tributary which feeds into the E77 highway to the south.

However, there was nothing minor about what Jakob would encounter on this otherwise mundane stretch of road.

He was already missing his family.

His wife had just given birth to a baby girl, the second addition to their young brood.

His other child, a boy, had just turned three and was becoming quite the chatterbox.

He was just thinking how much nicer it would be to find employment closer to home when he noticed a distant light in his rearview mirror.

It was coming fast up the road behind him.

As it got closer, the brightness intensified.

and naturally assuming it was another vehicle, Jakob shouted in frustration, willing the other driver to dip their headlights.

Soon, they were right up behind him, sitting on his tail, so close that it would have caused a major accident if he'd even slightly touched the brake pedal.

What the hell is this guy doing?

Jakob mumbled to himself, and no sooner had the words left his lips than he heard the sound of the boot or trunk catch being released.

Suddenly the interior light came on, and the sound of rushing wind was heard, as cold air blasted in from the rear of the vehicle.

As he looked back, he realised that the boot lid was now wide open, but the headlights which were there behind him just a split second before had vanished.

He pulled over at the earliest opportunity and exited his vehicle.

He glanced up and down the road, looking for any sign of the other driver.

It was deathly quiet.

No other vehicles could be seen or heard.

Confused, Jakob closed the bootlid, got back into his car and continued on his way.

He had been on the road less than a minute when the light reappeared in the distance once more, again coming up fast behind his car.

He noticed that it was a singular light source.

and began to suspect that it was a motorcyclist playing games with him.

As it settled on his tail, Jakob again heard the catch of his bootlid release, and sure enough, when he looked back, the tailgate was wide open, and the light had disappeared.

Frustrated, he pulled over again, and this time made sure the bootlid was locked, but instead of continuing along his route, he turned the car around and headed back the way he came.

hoping to catch the motorcyclist sitting in a lay-by further up the road.

To his utter disbelief, almost as soon as he started moving, the light reappeared in the distance behind him, closing in at supernatural speed.

This was impossible, as he knew full well that nobody had come past him when he stopped the car the second time.

Nevertheless, the exact same sequence of events played out, and Jakob found himself having to stop once again to close his boot lid.

He was completely dumbfounded, as he knew he had locked it.

Something was obviously not right about the situation, and he began to feel more than a little spooked.

When the light reappeared a fourth time, with Jakob having resumed his original route, he decided he'd had enough.

When it reached the back of his car, he suddenly slammed on his brakes, and the light flew over the top of his vehicle and off into the night sky.

never to be seen again.

He was so disturbed by the whole experience that he quickly made good on his intention to find work closer to home.

In July 2014, a truck driver by the name of Paul Drew found himself parked up on a stretch of US Highway 95, about 50 miles north of Las Vegas.

Paul had been delegated a task known as a meet-and-turn.

This is where two truck drivers start out from different points and meet halfway to swap their trailers over, then turn around and head home.

This was a common assignment for Paul, and he often found himself arriving an hour or two before the other driver showed up, and he would take the opportunity to catch up on some sleep.

On this night, he'd arrived at his meeting point at around 2am.

It was a dark lot right in the middle of the Nevada desert, and to his surprise, he found that it was completely empty.

On any other night, there would have been at least a few other trucks present, but he thought nothing of it and settled into his sleeper compartment for a nap.

After about 10 minutes, he was just beginning to doze off when he was suddenly shaken wide awake by the sound of a dog barking.

This struck him as odd given the location.

The nearest small town was about 20 miles away, and he couldn't have imagined someone's pet wandering this far into the wilderness.

The possibility that it was a coyote had briefly occurred to him, but it sounded like a much larger dog.

He realised the animal was close.

In fact, it sounded as if it was standing right outside his cab.

Climbing out of his sleeper, he peeked out of the driver's side window, and to his surprise, In the dim moonlight he saw the outline of a tall man standing there.

He assumed this was the dog's owner.

In that precise moment he didn't know what to make of the situation, so he simply grabbed his flashlight and opened the window to talk to the stranger.

But when his torch illuminated the scene he recoiled.

As the light passed over the man's face, he could see that it was in fact the man who was barking.

There was no dog.

His expression was sinister, snarling and inhuman in the way his mouth twisted and contorted when making the sound, and his eyes looked beady and aggressive, almost like a hostile dog's eyes.

His bark did not sound like a human trying to impersonate a dog.

It sounded exactly like a dog.

Paul was so flummoxed by what he was seeing that all he could do was stare at this apparently deranged individual.

After a minute or two, he turned away to grab his phone, hoping to record the commotion on camera.

but when he turned back, he found that the man had disappeared and the barking had entirely ceased.

His flashlight flitted back and forth across the lot, but he could see no sign of the tall man whatsoever.

There was nowhere he could have gone in such a short space of time.

Somewhat alarmed by the experience, he decided to remain inside his cab until the other driver arrived more than an hour later.

His colleague didn't know what to make of his story and put it down to the inherent high-strangeness of Nevada State.

Paul himself has never been able to shake the imperishable feeling that there was something beyond normal about his encounter, from the man's weird and inhuman expression to his impossible disappearance and the fact that it all happened out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles and miles of desert.

A year earlier in in 2013, a delivery driver working for UPS in Washington, DC had an unlikely encounter with the men in black.

Jim Wise had only been in the job for about two months, but quickly slipped into the monotony of delivering parcels in and around the US capital.

There was one particular building, the location of which he would not divulge, which was a regular drop-off point on his rounds.

At least every other day, he would be required to deliver a a parcel there.

The premises were highly secure, surrounded by high fences, and the only way to gain access was via an intercom system on the main gate.

Upon entry, Jim's routine would be to drive up to the main reception, press the buzzer and hand the deliveries over to the usually uptight receptionist in exchange for her signature.

One cold and frosty morning in January, he found himself driving through the main gate of the site once again, but this time when he buzzed reception, there was no answer.

He tried a number of times and waited for a couple of minutes before deciding to drive around to the rear of the building.

He thought that maybe there was a loading base somewhere, and that he could drop the parcels off there instead.

But as he rounded the corner, he was met by a bizarre scene.

About 20 feet further back from the main complex, there was another, slightly smaller building with a sheltered walkway connecting the two.

Underneath the shelter, walking towards the smaller premises were three men, all dressed in dark suits and wearing fedora hats.

Jim was taken aback by how incredibly tall and slim they were.

Each of them was nearing the seven foot mark, but their legs and arms were stick thin.

their waists barely the width of one of the delivery drivers' thighs.

Even more shocking was the way they walked, their movements all perfectly in sync with each other, but haphazard and all over the place, as if they were having trouble standing upright.

They disappeared into the smaller building a short time later, leaving Jim sitting there for a moment, wondering what on earth he had just witnessed.

He would go on to state how it's difficult to put into words just how surreal and unnatural these men looked, but he is steadfast in his conviction that it unnerved him to the core.

Unfortunately for him, it would not be the last he saw of them.

Realizing that there was nowhere else to deliver his parcels, he made his way back around to the front of the main complex, and this time, when he buzzed reception, a man answered the door and invited him in.

The man, who was also dressed in a dark suit, asked him to bring the parcels through and led him down a short corridor and into another room.

To his surprise, the room was small and completely devoid of furniture, and there were five other men in dark suits, all standing in a semicircle facing him.

Alarmed, he tried to back out of the doorway, but the man who showed him in had already closed the door behind him and ordered him to put the parcels down.

At first, he thought he was looking at a group of mannequins, as the men in front of him had not moved an inch.

They were tall and thin like the others, and were stood absolutely stock still and deathly quiet.

Their skin was waxy and pale, and their lifeless eyes did not even move to follow him as he placed the parcels on the floor.

For the next five minutes, the delivery driver was grilled by the man who had answered the door, asking him what he had seen in the parking lot behind the complex.

The five other men remained completely motionless, but he noticed how their eyes had all eerily zeroed in on him as the questioning began.

He felt as if they were reading his mind.

Jim was honest about what he had seen, but decided to play dumb, saying that the men he witnessed were obviously suffering from some sort of muscular disorder, and that this building must have been a research centre for such conditions.

Seemingly satisfied with this response, the man stepped aside and told him he was free to go.

He was shown to reception, and as the man opened the main door to let him out, he said in a very matter-of-fact way, you'll never come back here.

Two days later, Jim was inexplicably made redundant from his job.

In the years since this experience, he has tried to make sense of what happened.

Whilst it's a possibility that those men were indeed suffering from some sort of muscular dystrophy and that his subsequent interrogation was nothing more than a wild prank to scare him, he can't help but feel that there was something completely abnormal about the whole situation.

In his story, he described the men he saw in that room as resembling mannequins, but he has since come to the realization that they in fact reminded him of something else.

It's difficult for him to comprehend, but he is now certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he was looking at were five corpses.

In various fringe accounts regarding men in black, many people who have encountered them at length have stated how intelligences beyond our own use reanimated bodies of the dead in order to blend in.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Stefan Penkridge cursed his father as a light rain began to fall.

Knowing his luck, it would soon turn into a downpour and he would arrive home looking like something resembling a drowned rat.

It was just after 8pm.

The autumnal nights were arriving earlier with each passing day, and even now, the sun had already sunk below the western horizon.

The night sky there was tinged blue with the afterglow, but it faded to a deep black overhead.

There was just enough light to see by.

His friend Paul Patton lived in a large country house just over a mile away, and that's where he had been since late afternoon.

Normally, he would have cycled, but he had ridden into a ditch two days earlier and buckled his front wheel.

As a result, he had been forced to walk to his friend's house.

His mom had promised to pick him up in the evening so that he didn't have to walk back in the dark, but his father had had to work late, meaning that the family's only vehicle was unavailable, leaving him in this predicament.

It wasn't the walking that Stefan minded, it was the coldness of the approaching winter, the unpredictable British weather, and the encroaching darkness.

He lived in the small town of Newport in Shropshire, England.

And whilst it wasn't a bad neighbourhood by any means, there was a certain foreboding which fell over these country roads at night, thanks in no small part to the various myths and legends permeating the surrounding area, which now preyed upon his 15-year-old mind.

On this evening, he was walking along Chester Road and had just rounded a bend leading away from St Michael's Church, heading towards his home on the outskirts of town.

On his right was a high brick wall, built on top of a sloping embankment, which ran almost the entire length of the highway.

The night was quiet.

There were no houses or streets along this stretch of road, only fields and trees.

He hadn't seen any other pedestrians out walking, and not a single car had passed him as he made his way along the path.

Up ahead, about 50 feet away, An indistinct movement on top of the wall caught his attention.

He struggled to see what it was in the dark.

All he could make out was a whitish smudge and initially assumed it was a cat or polythene shopping bag which had become snagged in the old brickwork.

But as he drew closer, this shape seemed to grow in size, as if somebody had been crouching down on top of the wall and had then stood up at his approach.

He could now make out the definite shape of a person as he came to within 15 feet of whoever it was.

And then, he stopped walking.

It suddenly dawned on him that the figure was in fact a dull white translucent apparition, with no features whatsoever.

And it was just standing there, seemingly watching him from the top of the wall.

A chill ran through his entire body as his mind began to process what he was looking at.

He had heard stories all through his childhood of a ghost which supposedly haunted this stretch of road.

Back in the 17th century, a lady from Chetwin Park, a manor house further up the highway, had apparently died in childbirth, also losing her baby.

Her name was Madame Piggett, and her spirit was said to jump out in front of cars, and sit beside drivers in passenger seats, amongst many other hair-raising tales.

Stefan had always written these stories off as nonsense, but now he was seeing something he just couldn't explain.

As he came back to his senses, he considered running back the way he came, but to do so would have added another two miles to his journey.

Instead, he simply hunched forward and decided to press on at a much faster pace, passing the ghostly figure as it continued to stare down at him.

He looked back at it multiple times as he hurried away, and still it continued to stand there, unmoving.

He began to relax a little as he increased the distance, and when he was around 50 or 60 feet away, his fear gave way to curiosity.

He decided to stop and look back at the motionless apparition.

Studying it for a moment, he had taken one small step step back in its direction when it had suddenly jumped down off the wall and begun to run towards him.

In a blind panic, Stefan turned and sprinted for home.

Each time he looked back, the figure was still behind him and appeared to be slowly gaining ground.

He had no time to consider whether this ghost or creature or whatever it was was chasing him or simply running in his direction, but he wasn't about to stop and find out.

Luckily for him, he was a cross-country runner for his school and he was less than half a mile from home.

Even so, he ran faster than he had ever done so in his life.

His house was the first one on the corner as he turned left into his street at the bottom of Chester Road.

Running into his front yard, he banged heavily on the front door.

It seemed like an eternity before his mother answered, finding him out of breath, gesturing towards the main road adjoining their street.

Both of them stood watching, as this mysterious figure continued to run on, past their house, towards Chetwind End.

The story you have just heard was told to me, the narrator of this podcast by one of my best friends.

This apparently happened to his uncle back in the 1980s, and I can personally vouch that other friends, relatives and acquaintances have shared similar experiences regarding the entity of Chester Road.

Whether it is related to the ghost of Madame Piggett or something else entirely is unknown, but it is quite a famous local legend nonetheless.

Our next story comes from a subscriber going by the handle Ladona Mariposa Vigilis.

We were never given a real name, so we will simply refer to the witness as Donna.

One night in September of 2009, Donna was travelling east along Highway 70, heading for Uedoso in New Mexico.

With her in the car were her three dogs, who unfortunately despised one another.

As a result, They all occupied separate seats, one in the back, one in the front passenger seat, and the smallest lay in her lap.

Just as she was passing Round Mountain, a landmark topped by a huge white cross, her vehicle suddenly jerked and swerved to one side, as if one of the tyres had blown.

Pulling over at the side of the road, she got out to inspect her car, but there was no fault as far as she could see.

There were no dents or scrapes, and all four tyres were still intact.

Confused, she went to get back into her vehicle and just happened to look up at the cross on top of the mountain.

It was eerily illuminated under the moonlight, and although she passed it a couple of times each week, she was suddenly overcome by a strange feeling, as if she was only just noticing it for the first time.

Climbing back into her car, she was surprised to find that all three of her dogs were now sitting together on the front passenger seat, each with their hackles raised, teeth bared, and emitting low growls, staring intently into the vacant rear seat.

She found this odd, as none of her canine companions could usually stand to be anywhere near each other, but something had caused them to unite in this manner.

Unnerved, Donna tried to usher her doberman back onto the rear seat.

The back of the car was completely empty, but for some reason, the dog wouldn't budge.

Finally accepting this, she started the engine and continued on her journey.

After only a few seconds of pulling back onto the highway, she noticed that her radio had died.

No matter which frequency she switched to, all she received was dead air.

The dogs were still growling, and slowly but surely, she began to get an overwhelming feeling that someone else was in the car.

She couldn't see them, but she could sense their presence.

And then,

almost out of nowhere, came the sound of slow, ragged breathing, emanating from right behind her.

The dogs began to whimper.

as Donna saw in the rearview mirror that the back window was starting to fog up, despite the fact it was a dry September night.

All the hairs on her body stood on end as she began to panic, not knowing whether to pull over or just keep going, praying to God that the phenomena would soon dissipate.

She opted for the latter, and in all, she would travel more than 20 miles with this apparent phantom hitchhiker.

before it seemingly vacated her vehicle right at the boundary of the Mescalero Reservation.

The air pressure inside the car seemed to change as if a window had been opened.

She hadn't even noticed how oppressive the atmosphere had become during her ordeal.

The radio suddenly burst back into life and her dogs visibly relaxed, assuming their usual positions.

Donna is unaware of any local legends regarding US Highway 70, but she does know that the cross on top of Round Mountain commemorates a band of Apache warriors who were trapped and massacred there after they attacked Tularosa.

Could her Phantom Hitchhiker have been the spirit of one of the participants in this battle?

On the other side of the world, there is a famous Indonesian legend which would prove all too real for one traveller back in 2004.

Chandra Widodo was travelling between Jambi and Palembang on the island of Sumatra when he came face to face with what he believed to be the Kuntilanak.

The Kuntilanak is said to be a vampiric female spirit which preys mainly on young women but has been known to attack men.

He was driving late at night in March of that year on a rural stretch of highway when he noticed a woman in the road up ahead waving him down.

Thinking she may be in distress, he began to slow his vehicle and came to a stop stop right beside her.

In the full moonlight, he could see a very pale but beautiful woman standing at the side of the highway.

Lowering his window, he asked her if there was a problem, but she remained silent, her expression fixed with a strange smile.

Chandra found this a little unsettling.

and as he was in the process of repeating his question, he noticed that her face was beginning to change.

He watched incredulously as she transformed from a beautiful young woman into an old haggard creature with bulging white eyes and a mouth full of demonic teeth.

Chandra floored the accelerator attempting to flee the scene and leave the strange woman behind him, but almost immediately the headlights started to flicker and the engine spluttered and almost stalled.

The car began to move, but it seemed hugely underpowered, as if it was pulling off in a higher gear.

When he got about 20 feet away, he could see in the rearview mirror that the woman was still standing there, waving at him as he drove away.

Her arm moved above her head as if in slow motion.

Suddenly, he was overcome by a tremendous rumbling sound, and the car began to shake and vibrate.

Chandra later said it felt like he was in an earthquake, but the further he got from the strange woman, the rumbling dissipated and the car soon began to pick up speed.

Even after all this time, this experience is something that Chandra thinks about every night before he goes to sleep.

He says he'll never forget the way her face deteriorated before his eyes, or that last vision of her waving at him in the rearview mirror mirror as he drove away.

He remains convinced that what he saw that night was the Coon Tillanak.

Our final story comes from Emily Dentith in New South Wales in Australia.

Back in 2014, Emily and her boyfriend Lewis were travelling from Melbourne to Broome for a two-week holiday.

This is a 43-hour journey by car, covering almost 2,500 miles, most of which cuts through the Australian Outback.

This would translate to four days travel, with stopovers in Port Augusta, Alice Springs and Halls Creek.

Emily and Lewis would each take turns at the wheel for five or six hour stints, whilst the other rested.

On the second day of the journey, travelling along the Stewart Highway just before the couple hit Alice Springs, Emily was awoken by the sound of her boyfriend weeping to himself in the driver's seat.

His hands were clutching the wheel and his head was bent forwards resting upon it.

The car's dash clock read 11.14pm and she noticed that they had stopped in the middle of nowhere with the engine still running.

Lewis was startled by the sound of Emily's voice as she asked him what was going on.

It was a deer, deer, he told her.

It was a deer.

It must have been.

Confused, she asked him to elaborate, but he was almost inconsolable and just kept repeating himself.

Deciding that he was in no fit state to continue the journey, she drove the last 40 or so miles into Alice Springs.

As time passed, Lewis seemed to calm down, and as they arrived at the hotel, Emily again tried asking him what had happened.

Reluctantly, he told her that he had seen something in the road.

He said that the high beams had illuminated a movement in the darkness from a couple of hundred feet away, which he at first assumed was somebody walking along the highway.

As they had approached, he could see that this person was extremely thin and walked with a strange gait.

But when he looked at the face, he knew in that instant that it wasn't human.

It had an elongated snout, and it was holding its arms, or rather its paws, out in front of it as it shambled along the highway.

But it was the eyes which had frightened him to death.

They were deep, black, soulless orbs.

which stared at him as they drove past, seeming to bore into his soul and fill him with dread.

It was a deer, he said again, and explained that they are known to rear up on their haunches and walk on hind legs from time to time.

But Emily could tell by the way he said it that he was trying to convince himself more than her, especially since he knew that deer populations never ventured this far into the outback.

She went on to explain that Lewis was never the same after this incident.

He developed insomnia and fell into a deep depression as a result.

And tragically, he would end up taking his own life the following February.

Bed tongue is already.