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Ghosts and Phantoms of the Highways
by Brad Steiger
FATE :: August 2007

One of my favorite ghost “categories” tells of eerie encounters with phantoms and spirit entities experienced while traveling dark roads and highways. I have often reflected that such stories no doubt hearken back to horse and buggy and stagecoach days and even earlier, when people traveled great distances on foot. Discounting the repetition of certain urban legends, such as the Phantom Hitchhiker, it would seem that people do have genuine encounters with ghosts—or with perplexed human beings strangely out of sync with time and space.

Virginia, a retired schoolteacher, wrote to tell of her strange experience on a late November day in northern Wisconsin. The sky was overcast with heavy snow clouds, the wind had reached gale force, and it was very cold. And then one of the tires on her old Buick blew out.

She fought the wheel and got the car off the road onto a crossroad about ten yards ahead. Then she walked back to the highway, hoping to flag down someone who could stop at the little town that she had whizzed through about five miles back and send a wrecker from a service station.

Fortunately, Virginia was wearing her old army field coat with the liner, but it was getting darker and colder, and she was steadily feeling more helpless. No one would stop to help her, and she didn’t know what to do.

Then a voice in her head said, “You’d better pray,” so she did.

Within about three minutes a Model T Ford without a top drove up and stopped. Virginia described the three people in the antique car as “unbelievable.” The driver had a beard and wore blue jeans and a denim jacket with an old brown fedora on his head. The young man in the back seat was dressed exactly the same and was lounging with one foot resting on the back of the front seat, a silly grin on his freckled face. His carefree attitude suggested that he thought he was riding in a Rolls-Royce. The woman who was seated beside the driver wore a light cotton house dress and only a tattered brown shawl against the terrible cold.

“I couldn’t understand how she could keep from shivering in the freezing wind,” Virginia said. “In fact, all three of them acted as though they thought it was the middle of the summer.”

The bizarre trio offered to give Virginia a ride to a service station, but she thanked them and explained that she did not wish to leave her car. The bearded man repeated his invitation, and the woman urged Virginia to get in the Model T and drive off with them.

When Virginia once again graciously refused their offer, they seemed very reluctant to leave without her, but they finally accepted her decision and began to edge the Model T back into traffic.

Virginia remembered that once the antique car got back into the traffic, it appeared to take off at over 60 miles an hour. “I stood there gazing after the strange trio, not believing what had just happened,” she said. “Again that voice in my head said, ‘You have been talking to angels.’ Then, in the blinking of an eye, the Model T and its strange passengers had disappeared from sight.”

Virginia had no more than a few minutes to deal with her remarkable encounter with the bizarre motorists when a wrecker pulled off the highway and parked in front of her car. Without a word to Virginia, the man got out of the truck and began to work on the flat tire.

She asked him how long he had lived in the area and if he happened to know the people who drove the Model T, but he ­didn’t answer her. She went on to describe the occupants of the old car and how inappropriately they had been dressed against the bitter wind and cold. But the service attendant seemed unable to hear her—or at least he gave no sign that he did.

“When he finished, I asked him how much I owed him,” Virginia said. “He looked at me strangely, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. I finally handed him a ten-dollar bill and told him to take it to his boss. He accepted the bill hesitantly, looking at it as if I had presented him with a great mystery. Finally he nodded, as if understanding the exchange at last, and said, ‘Oh, all right.’ With those few words, I found out that he did possess the ability to speak. He got back into the wrecker, and with a wave of his hand—the first sign he had shown of friendliness—he drove away.

“It has now been many years since that strange experience,” Virginia said, concluding her encounter with the unknown, “and I have often wondered if I had got into that old Model T with its mysterious passengers, would I, too, have disappeared along with them?

“If the out-of-place, inappropriately dressed entities were angels, then I have decided that the truck driver who fixed my tire was also an angel. He couldn’t have been sent to me by the first angels in the Model T, because he couldn’t have arrived on the scene so quickly. And that was probably why he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about as I described the other three beings. He had been sent to help me by some other heavenly dispatcher.” ...........

Read the rest of this article in the August 2007 issue of FATE

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