When you drive alone at night along a road remote from populated areas, you can see the most bizarre things and the strangest creatures that would never show themselves if you were in a big company.
Even when it seems to you that there is nothing unusual around and the headlights of your car simply illuminate the road surface ahead, you subconsciously feel that at any moment something big and terrible can crawl out of the darkness. And again hide in the dark, before you even have time to gasp in surprise.
Do you think this is all a game of your imagination? This can be mistaken for a version, be it single episodes, but if there are many of them? On several American highways, drivers have seen one strange, overgrown humanoid creature so often at night that they might call it the "Road Troll."
American researcher Jerry D. Coleman wrote about these unusual encounters in his books Exploring America's Dark Side. Strange Highways: A guidebook to American mysteries & The Unexplained, published in 2003 and published in 2006, Stranger Roads (More Strange Highways).
Most often, the mysterious hairy man in the rags was seen by truckers, cleaving in their trucks on the roads of the South and Midwest of the United States. They described this creature as similar to a person, but dressed in long out of fashion and very dirty and torn rags, overgrown with hair from head to toe, and, what seems to be the strangest detail, instead of one leg, he had a wooden prosthetic stick.
Very often the drivers mistook this creature for a typical roadside tramp, and only when they approached closer and wanted to help him, they realized that they were not at all a person.
Strange bum
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There are many reports of encounters with this mysterious "troll" in 1981, among which the most famous is the story of a trucker named Gary Durbin from Effingham, Illinois. That year, Durbin was driving on a remote road, and it all happened on a site near Mount Tyson in Arkansas, east of the Ouachita National Forest.
Tired Durbin was driving at night and suddenly, near the next turn of the road, he saw a creature that at first seemed to him a bum in rags and disheveled hair. Durbin perceived this man as a hermit living in the mountains, who decided at night to walk to civilization to the store. He would have forgotten about this meeting at once if she had been the only one.
Durbin drove safely along this section of the road to a roadside coffee, where he had breakfast, after which he continued his journey and drove along the I-55 highway. He drove outside of Arkansas and crossed the border into Missouri, where he stopped to rest in a special zone for truckers.
As soon as Durbin got out of his truck, he again saw the same mysterious "bum" who was standing at a distance by the side of the road and looking attentively at Durbin himself. One leg of this hairy man was missing and was replaced with a wooden prosthetic peg.
Durbin felt a little anxious, but he reassured himself that apparently one of the other truckers gave this poor fellow a lift to the rest point and dropped him off here. But the oddities did not end there. That year, Durbin observed this creature five times in total on different parts of the road and managed to get a good look at it.
“He is 6 or 6.5 feet (180 cm - 190 cm) tall and has a wooden prosthesis just below the knee. On the road, you can always see him only at night or in the late afternoon near truck stops or near recreation areas. He always stands motionless, only slightly turning his head. The brown hair on the head is very long and has a large fluffy beard. All his clothes are long out of fashion and badly torn. There is always something like a small bag in your hands."
According to Jerry D. Coleman, other truckers have also seen a very similar person in descriptions and always on their night trips. The same details of appearance are constantly described, including a prosthesis instead of one leg.
“Many drivers told me about the observation of a man who was given the nickname 'One-legged'. One saw him in the suburbs of St. Louis, another driver swore to me that he saw a heavily overgrown one-legged slob in a parking lot in Florida. What is this creature? Yeti species? A weird roadside troll? Or just some bum with a craving for travel?"
The savage warns of trouble
In 1983, Coleman interviewed a woman named Barb from Des Plains, Illinois. She talked about her meeting with the overgrown savage. According to Barb, she recently drove to her sister's house, and then together with her sister, she headed to a large shopping center, which was located near I-20 and I-59 on Green Pond. They planned to go shopping for three hours.
But when they got out in the parking lot near the center, they saw on the side of the road a tall man in dirty and torn clothes, as if he had been dragged on a rope for some time behind a car. He had long matted hair, a beard, and one wooden leg.
“A man or whatever it was, was standing and looking at us very carefully. For some reason, his sight shocked and frightened us. So much so that we decided not to go to the center, but just went into a little coffee and then sat there for a while, discussing this person."
Later, Barb was able to describe her feelings as a premonition of something terrible, like a premonition of great trouble. And so it happened. When she returned to her home, she learned that her sister's son, shortly after their trip to the center, fell from a tree and very unsuccessfully broke his leg, so that fragments of bone were sticking out and there was profuse bleeding.
The sister returned from the center almost by that moment and she managed to take the boy to the hospital on time and this probably saved his life. But what if they went to the center as planned for three hours and, accordingly, would return much later? What would become of the child? Barb thought about this situation a lot. Is it possible that that savage sensed trouble and deliberately intimidated them so that his sister would return home as soon as possible?
Mysterious hitchhiker
Another mysterious incident occurred in the winter of 1998. The truck driver, callsign "Gunslinger", was heading for Chicago, Illinois on I-255. As he approached the town of Alton, he saw on the side of the road a very tall man, barely hobbling, in dirty, worn clothes. His appearance was so unusual that the "Shooter" decided to slow down a little and see if a person needed help.
“He was 6 or all 7 feet (210 cm) tall, his entire head and face were practically hidden under his long hair and beard. The arms were hairy too. There was a wooden leg just below one knee. The clothes were very outdated in fashion and all torn. He didn’t move until my truck was completely level with him and only then lifted his head and looked directly at me. I'm not sure what I saw, there was something wild and it was definitely not your typical hitchhiker."
Judging by the absence of a continuation of this story, "Shooter" decided to drive out of harm's way and did not get out of his car.
Two more cases of observation of unusual humanoid creatures near the road were described in 2000. The first happened in March when trucker Brad Royalty revealed that he saw a one-legged bruiser on the side of I-44 and he was so overgrown that his whole body seemed to be covered from head to toe with long thick hair.
"At first I thought it was just a dirty bum, but when he looked at me, I experienced a sudden, very intense fear."
In the summer of that year, a husband and wife, both truck drivers working together, spotted a tall road troll near Boonsville, Missouri. Also with one wooden leg.
“He stood on the side of the road, not like a hitchhiker, but motionless, like a huge creepy scarecrow. He had one leg and a lot of body hair!"
In June 2003, Pastor Jim Washington was driving from a church service in Tennessee when he saw a huge, hairy man limping along I-181 near the town of Unicoy. Washington drove by at first, but then returned when he thought that the man might be injured.
But although Washington turned around very quickly, within literally 2-3 minutes and on that section there were no nearest roads or paths at all, which could be turned off, that bruiser was no longer on the road. Washington did not understand where this man could go.
“He looked very wild and strange with this disfigured leg. I can't explain what it was, but he looked distressed and lost."
What's the bottom line?
In total, writer Coleman has collected 11 episodes of meeting this mysterious wild man or troll, or who he really is. They all fit between 1981 and 2003. Later, new cases with this creature did not occur or Coleman until he found out about them.
We met him all over the country, but mainly in Illinois, Missouri, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas. All the witnesses who told about this creature seemed to be the most ordinary people not inclined to fantasies and not sick with mental illness. Their descriptions are eerily similar in many details.
So what was it? The simplest answer to the question is that it was just a tall tramp with one wooden leg. But why was he so often seen in different states, and every time people looked at him, they thought that there was something inhuman in him, something that more likely makes him related to trolls and yeti than to people? You don't often see such frighteningly weird bums like this, do you?
There is a version that in fact it was a yeti, but with an injured leg, which in appearance looked like a wooden leg and matted hair that looked like a torn coat. But what about an injured yeti by the side of a road in different states? And just look at people, without any attempt to approach them?
It is also difficult to explain it by the hallucinations of tired drivers. If many different people see similar "hallucinations", this is clearly anything but hallucinations.
Coleman himself is sure that the appearance of a road troll is a mystical omen of disaster, and the troll himself is a protector who is trying to warn about it.
“It is possible that this anomalous entity is a product of our own mind, combined with the mysterious games of the universe and our ever-changing fate. It is possible that having seen this creature, you changed something in your plans and thus averted the coming trouble from yourself or made it less dangerous.
Let's remember how Sister Barb returned home earlier than expected and managed to save her injured son. Let us remember how the pastor turned around on the road and spent some time looking for this creature. What if he hadn't turned around and later had an accident?"
