Tales Of Horror In Highways
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 and the relative bastions of the towns and cities they connected. Traveling along them was always a risk, even in broad daylight. But with the advent of motor transport, the specter of the traditional highway man 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 while traveling.
Stories of high strangeness, from dark and desolate backroads to open highways are nothing new here, suggesting the dark energies therein predate the likes of Dick Turpin and his highway men. 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.
Jakob Klaar's Supernatural Experience
Our first tale comes by way of Jakob Klaar, an Estonian National living and working in the United Kingdom. Back in the early 90s, Jakob worked for a Russian company situated on the outskirts of Pskov, which meant that five days out of seven, he labored in a foreign country away from his family. Every Sunday evening, he would make the two and a half hour commute from Tartu and 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., Jakob was well over an hour into his drive. The border checkpoint was well behind him and he now found himself traveling along with 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 rear view mirror. It was coming fast up the road behind him. As he got closer, the brightness intensified and, naturally assuming it was another vehicle, Jakob shouted in frustration, willing the other driver to dip the 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 him from the rear of the vehicle.
As he looked back, he realized 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 came out his vehicle. He scanned the road up and down looking for any sign of the other driver. It was deathly quiet. No other vehicles could be seen or heard. Confused, Jakob closed the boot lid, 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 boot lid release and sure enough when he looked back, the tail gate was wide open and the light had disappeared. Frustrated, he pulled over again and this time made sure the boot lid 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 for sure 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 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 of 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.
Did Paul Drew saw the creepiest dog in the world?
In July of 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 2 a.m.
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 realized 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 to 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 no way 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 in human 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.
Encounter with 'The Men in Black'
A year earlier 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 Capitol. 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 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 bay 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 the 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 driver's 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 of the men in dark suits, all standing in a semi circle 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.
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 was 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 center for such conditions. Seemingly satisfied with this response, a 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.
Conclusion
Regardless of how sensational these three stories may seem, the people who shared them believed implicitly in what they experienced. Whilst it's true that these encounters may be explained away by tiredness or the clever pranks of adept tricksters, there is always the possibility that there was something out of the ordinary taking place. In short, whether you believe these stories or not will depend on your own experiences out on the road. Drive safely!