Real Life Spooky Story: "Highway Phantom"

Story #2 of my new blog series of Real Life Spooky Stories, based on real events and sent in by fans and followers of helendeakinauthor.com and my social media pages.

As usual, driving back from work it was rather late. I finished in the evening and would buy dinner before heading home. Each day I commuted from Gatton to Brisbane for work and then back again, and on this particular night, I got the fright of my life.

I tend to drive on auto-piolet a lot. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. My brain seems to know where I’m going, where to slow down, speed up and when to react to situations like rude idiots pulling out in front of me. My wife always roused on me for doing it and if she was in the car with me, most of the time I was more alert as we would converse with one another, however sometimes I would zone out and just drive, even with her in the car. Molly always said that one day I would cause an accident.

On this one particular night, I was brought back to reality when I caught a glimpse of a person standing on the side of the road. It was a strange place for a person to be as there weren’t any shops or other buildings nearby and later when I told the story to my wife, I couldn’t pin point the exact spot I saw the man. I simply remember there was a small grassy hill behind him and the part of the highway where I saw him had guardrails right along both sides of the road and in the middle for quite some distance.

There was little illumination on this stretch of the highway, with only a few streetlights a way ahead and just the beams from the cars to see by in the spot where the man stood, however when I saw him I was sure he was covered in blood. I tried to look back at him in my rear-view mirror, but I was travelling too fast and I couldn’t see him now.

There was a fair distance between where he stood and where I could pull over, but I did so as quickly as I could. I didn’t even stop to think about being in danger, I just knew there was someone who appeared to be hurt and so I needed to help him. I took my phone with me so I could call an ambulance if I needed to, but I didn’t have to.

When I reached the spot I had saw him, he wasn’t there. I looked around for a while but there was no sight of him and although I called out to him, no reply came from within the darkness just on the other side of the hill.

I went back to my car and headed for home, telling my wife the story as soon as I got inside. She urged me to call the police, and I did; although I didn’t really think it would do much good seeing as I had no idea the exact location of the man or if he had even been hurt.

The incident found its way to the back of my mind for quite some time, until several months later.

I had lost my licence for speeding and so my wife had to drive me all the way to work and then pick me up again. She was driving me home one night when all of a sudden she cried out and started applying the brakes. I had been starting to doze off and quickly snapped back awake.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” she said, speedy back up again. “I just had the scare of a lifetime. I just saw a man running across the road just ahead of me and I didn’t think I would be able to stop in time. I looked down at the speedo for only a split second and when I looked up again no one was even there. Must have just been a shadow or something, but it scared the hell out of me.”

It was then I realized the spot we had just passed, where my wife thought she saw a man running across the road, was the exact same spot I thought I saw someone that night. I told her so and her face turned white.

“That’s freaky,” she said.

“Just a bit,” I replied.

When I got home, I tried to find an answer on google as to whether there had been an accident on the highway there. More specifically, if a man had been hit and killed while trying to run across the highway, however there were too many accidents and nothing I could find.

To this day, we still don’t know who our highway phantom man is, but we see his from time to time. Always there in the same spot.