There are many legends about the ghosts that appear to travelers on the roads. In England they are called highwaymen, or road people. Stories about highwaymen could be taken for pure fiction, if not for the huge amount of evidence: such meetings are not uncommon …
They say that on the roads of the French province of Brittany you can meet a phantom … of death itself!
Anku - the name given to him by the locals - looks like a tall, very emaciated man with long white hair, dressed all in black. He has a wide-brimmed hat on his head, such as are usually worn by farmers in Brittany, and a braid on his shoulder. In place of the eyes of the ghost - empty eye sockets. As a rule, he is seen walking next to a carriage, which is harnessed to horse skeletons.
They say that in the old days, hearing bells ringing in the street, people hid, closed the windows and doors of houses … If someone happened to meet Anka on a deserted road after sunset, an unknown force pressed the person with his face to the ground. This meant that he would die no later than two years later. Those who encountered the ghost late at night died within a month.
They said different things about where Anku came from. Someone claimed that it was the biblical Cain himself, who killed his brother Abel and was now hunting for new victims. Someone - that this is the ghost of a person who died in the area last and is looking for a company for the afterlife.
Strangers in raincoats
Legends say that people who have died a violent death most often become highways.
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So, in the late 80s of the past century, a girl named Vinti April was driving her car to a Christmas party in Sheffield. When Vinty reached the town of Todwik, a dark silhouette suddenly blocked the way of the car near the small roadside hotel "Red Lion". It was a man riding a black horse, wearing a long cloak and a cocked hat. The rider rushed towards the car and suddenly … disappeared in front of the astonished girl.
In another English village, Thorpe Salvin, highways have frightened passing motorists for hundreds of years. Pacman Lane, one of Britain's oldest trade routes, has seen a phantom man in a black cloak more than once. In 1991, a group of friends who saw a ghost on the highway decided to experiment: they turned the car around and came back at least five times, but the blurred silhouette in a raincoat still remained in the same place. According to rumors, during his lifetime, this man was a robber of mail coaches, and now the restless soul strove to where he had to engage in his criminal business.
On the outskirts of the Yorkshire village of Beverly Beck, several young men one evening encountered a ghostly long-haired rider in a black cloak by a stream. Not paying any attention to the oncoming people, he crossed the stream right on the water and disappeared into the night. Sometime in the past, two bridges were thrown across this stream. Perhaps the rider just crossed the usual road …
Dead children on the move
Here's another very touching story about highways. In Texas, in the San Antonio area, sometime in the 1930s-1940s, a school bus crashed at a railroad crossing. Ten schoolchildren and the driver were killed.
Now, crossing the rails in the place where the tragedy occurred, drivers sometimes feel how invisible hands push their cars back, as if wanting to prevent a possible accident. If a car's engine stalls on the tracks, it starts rolling slowly by itself until it reaches a safe place. All this could be seen by the "ghost hunters" who arrived in San Antonio to establish the truth.
There are rumors among motorists that if you sprinkle the hood of the car with some light powder - powder or talcum powder - at this crossing, the prints of children's pens will remain on it …
Lady in white
One of the plots of the popular American television series "Supernatural" is dedicated to the "woman in white" - a ghost that often appears on the roads of Europe and America. There are several versions of the story of the ghostly stranger. One of them is about a young man returning home from a party late at night. On the way, he noticed a girl in a long white dress on the side of the road and stopped to give her a lift. Noticing that the stranger was shivering from the cold, the guy threw his jacket over her shoulders. Having reached the girl's house, the driver opened the door to help her get out, and then he realized that his fellow traveler had disappeared. In the end, our hero decided that she just ran into the house.
The next day, the young man remembered that his new acquaintance had forgotten to return his jacket. He went to her, but found at home only the mother of the girl, who said that her daughter had died in a car accident ten years ago. Seeing that the guy did not believe her, the woman took him to her daughter's grave. His jacket lay on the tombstone …
Does the "woman in white" have real prototypes?
In the 60s of the last century, a certain Maria Rua and her fiancé were traveling in a car to the girl's parents: they were in a hurry to inform their relatives about their engagement. On the way, Maria fell asleep, and the young man lost control. There was an accident and both died.
A few years later, on the same road, a guy traveling in his car saw a girl in a white dress on the side of the road. He stopped and offered to give her a lift. The girl sat silently in the back seat. At some point, turning around, the driver found that there was no one behind … Deciding that the passenger had somehow fallen out of the car and was now lying on the road wounded, he went to the police station for help. Together with the officer on duty, they searched everything around, but there was no girl on the road. And then both noticed that the car door opened and closed several times by itself …
It happens that road ghosts cause accidents. So, in the mid-1970s, a young girl was hit by a car on a steep mountain track near the American city of Klamath Falls.
Now from time to time, her ghost votes on the road. If one of the drivers stops, the phantom beckons him to follow him and lures him into the abyss … Sometimes the ghost suddenly appears in front of the car, and he, sharply dodging to the side, falls into the abyss or crashes into the rock …
The insidious ghost of a girl in white also lives not far from the German town of Deggendorf, in the place where the railway passes through the tunnel. Late in the evening, he lures random passers-by into the tunnel, and they are hit by a train speeding at high speed …
Chauffeur and witch
And with our compatriot, Krasnoyarsk Yuri S., in 1993, a story happened that overshadows all foreign horror stories about highways.
At about midnight, Yuri was driving along the road in his KamAZ. Suddenly, right in front of the car, a figure emerged from the ground. Frightened to death, Yuri braked and saw a woman standing near the hood of his car. She opened the cabin door and asked to take her to the cemetery. The driver was about to refuse, but at that moment he seemed to be disconnected and did not understand anything. When he woke up, he found that the stranger was already sitting next to him. She had a fresh wound on her forehead, from which blood was dripping. He was not even surprised, as if it was in the order of things.
Yuri drove the car as if in a dream, not looking at the road. Finally she stopped by herself. The woman said, "Help me!" After her, the driver went to the body of the dump truck and pulled out … an empty coffin. The dump truck was in front of the cemetery. The ominous stranger led Yuri to the dug grave, lay down in a coffin, and the driver mechanically pushed him into the pit. At the same time, the woman's body fell out, leaning against the wall of the grave. Yuri threw the lid of the coffin in there, then took a shovel that was lying nearby and began to throw earth into the hole. Only when the work was over did the KamAZ driver come to his senses. He stood late at night in the cemetery in front of a slightly covered grave alone. Yuri was seized with terror, and he rushed to run to his dump truck with all his might.
After a while, the driver came to the cemetery with his friends, to whom he told about his terrible adventure, and instead of a half-buried grave he saw a monument with a photograph of a certain Tamara K., buried here several years ago. The photo showed the same woman that Yuri gave a lift …