~by Marie Robinson
There’s something that I love about driving down a spooky old road.
No streetlights, just two walls of thick, dark forest pressing in at
either side.
Countless roads like this exist, and many of them come with
their own urban legends and ghost stories. While we could probably list
a dozen for each state alone, I’ve tried to find a few of the creepiest
haunted roads in the world for you to think about next time you take the
long way home.
A75 Kinmount Straight
The A75 is a 95-mile stretch of
two-lane road that runs through Scotland. Since it’s establishment in
1923 it has obtained the reputation of Scotland’s most haunted road.
However, most of the activity is concentrated on a fifteen-mile stretch
between Annan and Dumfries, called the Kinmount Straight.
The
first recorded sighting seems to have been in 1957, when a truck (lorry,
if you’re from the other side of the pond) driver believed he hit a
couple walking hand in hand down the road; but, when he stopped the
vehicle, he couldn’t find a trace of the two figures. This sort of thing
is most commonly reported, phantom people appearing in front of cars
and then vanishing upon “impact”. Disturbing as it is—especially for the
driver, who believes they have just killed a person—that is far from
the strangest experience to have occurred on Kinmount Straight.
Perhaps
the most bizarre story from the A75 was that of drivers Derek and
Norman Ferguson, who were going down the Straight at midnight when a
chicken flew at their windshield, but—like all our other
apparitions—disappeared upon impact. This was seemingly the start of a
terrifying string of apparitions, which included an old woman waving her
arms, a screaming, long-haired man, and a pack of assorted animals,
including dogs, goats, big cats, fowl, and “stranger creatures”. The two
brothers stopped the car, which had begun to sway back and forth. Once
it stopped, they pressed on, only to be met with one more spectre—a
furniture van that came speeding toward them only to, you got it,
vanish.
That certainly isn’t the sort of story you hear everyday,
but it’s just a normal evening on the Kinmount Straight. There have
been many “unearthly creatures” sighted on this infamous road, as well
as eyeless ghosts and shrieking hags. Parades of disheveled and medieval
dressed people pushing handcarts and carrying bundles, like troupe of
vagrants misplaced in time, have been seen at night.
The Kinmount
Straight has become famous for its bizarre and frequent activity, and
like any paranormal hotspot, it has also become a haunt for local
legend-trippers and paranormal investigators.
Clinton Road
New Jersey fascinates me because despite its
proximity to the Big Apple, it has vast expanses of untamed forests.
Clinton Road stretches across ten miles of such territory, giving it the
perfect setting for an abundance of ghost tales.
The drive is a
lonely one, and passes only several houses, some of which look
uninhabited and rather foreboding. There are also several ruins along
the route, both of which claim folktales. The first is a little
anti-climactic; the remains of an iron smelter from the 1800’s. It’s
been out of use for centuries but many people claim that it’s not
entirely abandoned; there have been reports of witchcraft and
ritualistic gatherings at the structure. It has been infamously
mislabeled as a Druidic Temple, and superstition has painted it as a
dangerous place to be at night.
Another strange ruin is that of
Cross Castle, a mansion built in 1905 by a man named Richard Cross.
Several years later it was consumed by fire and all but destroyed, and
that’s seemingly all that is known about the place, making it somewhat
mysterious. It is accessible by way of hiking trail, and those who have
made the trek to the dilapidated castle have reported satanic scriptures
painted on the walls and people coming away with unexplained bruises.
One
of the most popular legends surrounding the road is that of “Ghost Boy
Bridge”, where a child allegedly drowned and now haunts the spot. The
legend is that if you throw a coin into the water, it will be tossed
back at you by the child’s spirit.
Many “ghost cars” have been
seen on Clinton Road; one is of a Camaro driven by the ghost of a girl
who supposedly died in a crash in the 80’s. Another more sinister
apparition is of a big black truck that races up behind you and flashes
it’s lights (BEATNGU style) and chases you to the end of the road.
Additionally, people have seen floating headlights seemingly attached to
no car at all.
A final legend surrounds that of a now closed
Warner Bros. theme park called Jungle Habitat. The park opened in 1972
and closed only four years later, on Halloween weekend (spoooooky!) The
park—which was much like a zoo, consisting of roughly 1,500 exotic
animals—became infamous after several attacks on visitors and rumors
that several of the animals had escaped into the surrounding woods.
The
buildings still remain in Passaic County, as do the myths of bizarre and
dangerous creatures roaming the forests. Many who have driven down
Clinton road or explored the surrounding land have told of seeing
horrible creatures, believed to be hybrids of the escaped animals from
Jungle Habitat.
Perhaps the only confirmed macabre event is that
of a corpse found on the side of the road in 1983, a victim of Richard
Kuklinksi, a contract killer dubbed “the Iceman” after his method of
freezing a body to throw off investigators when determining the time of
death. It is possible that this victim’s ghost still haunts the woods
surrounding Clinton Road.
Perhaps the most horrifying of all, Clinton Road is also known for
having America’s longest traffic light wait, which can have a motorist
frozen in a state of agonizing suspense for up to five minutes…
Zombie Road
About
a forty-minute drive outside of my hometown of St. Louis, nearly
swallowed by the thick woodland, lies an old dirt road that has earned
the sinister (and admittedly a little cheesy) moniker of Zombie Road.
Once known as Lawler Ford Road, historians speculate that the path was
formed by Native Americans to access a passable part of the Meramec
River, which runs very close-by. Over time, it became a very highly used
road, and, even, in the 1950’s, a lover’s lane. Since then teenagers
have been passing around various ghost stories about the road, which has
since become impassable to cars and is only accessible by foot or
bicycle.
Zombie Road may have gotten its nickname from urban
legends of a mad serial killer who lurked in the woods to pick off the
lovers who parked there at night. It is also believed to have its share
of ghosts; one such being the spirit of a man who was struck and killed
by a train on the now defunct tracks that run beside the road. Another
is that of a little boy who fell from the bluffs that close in around
the road, and drowned in the Meramec River.
There are many tales
of an old insane asylum—or sometimes, an orphanage—hidden in the woods.
Another phantom building is supposedly that of an old house at the dead
end of the road, where an old woman resides and will fly out of her
house shrieking to chase off anyone who approaches.
Many have
claimed to see “shadow people” (see Christine’s article
HERE) as they walk through the forest; so many, in fact, that it inspired a
local documentary called, “Children of the Grave”, which aired on SyFy.
Perhaps
the most common reports are the disorienting effects the road will have
on people. Some have said that the road will never look the same twice,
that it may seem longer or shorter each trip, or give off the feeling that it may
never end at all. People commonly have the feeling of being watched, or
being followed—hearing a second set of footsteps keeping up with theirs
from beyond the tree line.
The once infamous road has become
heavily patrolled by local police, so anyone looking to catch a glimpse
of a ghost may instead be met with a slap on the wrist.
If
you enjoyed this article you may want to take a peek at our list of
Haunted Bridges!
Paul (Andrew Sensenig) and Anne (genre-fave Barbara Crampton) Sacchetti have bought an old farmhouse in the idyllic New England countryside to escape the real world and try to get past the death of their son Bobby in a horrific car accident. No sooner do they start unpacking when Anne starts feeling the presence of her dead son. Things that go bump in the
But Anne is not as enlightened as we are. In a moment ripped right from the fabulous ghost story flick The Changeling, a baseball (shown to be in a box of their son's possessions in earlier unpacking) comes bouncing down the basement steps to Anne's surprise. Naturally, it's way too early in the movie for anything to truly rear
its ugly head, so Anne is left with a melancholy wonder - as if she
hoped her son would grace her with his ghostly presence.
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