It was late, and I was driving back from covering a high school football game, my mind drifting as the miles of empty farmland passed by. The road was straight, the kind where you could almost forget you were driving. I wasn’t exactly alert, but there was nothing around to worry about—or so I thought.
I don’t know how to describe it. There wasn’t anything visible, nothing I could see with my eyes, but there was this feeling, a sense that something was wrong. My instincts screamed at me just in time to swerve hard into the other lane, avoiding whatever it was. I couldn’t process it; I had passed something large, something that shouldn’t have been there.
I slammed on the brakes and turned around, heart pounding. I had to know what I had almost hit. My headlights cut through the darkness, and there they were—two massive black shapes standing in the middle of the road. Cows. Two huge, jet-black cows. If I had hit them at the speed I was going, there’s no way I would’ve survived. My little hatchback would’ve crumpled like a tin can.
Shaken, I called the local police. They sent an officer out while I waited, making sure no one else barreled down the highway into the same deadly trap. The cows wandered off a bit, but still, I kept my car there, hazard lights on, hoping to prevent what could easily be a fatal accident.
When the officer arrived, he took one look and sighed, annoyed but not surprised. He told me they knew exactly who the cows belonged to—a farmer who apparently couldn’t keep his livestock where they belonged. It wasn’t the first time, and the officer muttered something about giving the guy a serious warning this time.
As I finally drove away, I couldn’t shake the thought that if I had been just a second slower to react, I wouldn’t be alive to tell this story.
It was around 2:30 AM, and I was driving home from a wedding DJ gig, the interstate nearly deserted at that hour. The road was eerily quiet, and I was just trying to keep my eyes open, counting down the miles until I could crawl into bed. The stretch I was on, known as the “narrows,” always made me uneasy. The retaining walls on either side towered over the highway as it wound through a series of overpasses, making it feel like you were trapped in a concrete canyon.
Then, out of nowhere, she appeared—a young woman, barely more than a blur, leaping down from the wall directly in front of my car. My heart slammed into my chest as I stomped on the brakes, the tires screeching against the asphalt. I skidded to a stop just inches from her. She looked up at me, eyes wide with terror, then bolted for my passenger door. Before I could process what was happening, she was inside, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps.
She couldn’t have been more than 20, with long blonde hair, and her clothes were dirty—not like she was homeless, but more like she’d been running, falling, desperate to escape something. “I just need to call my mom,” she kept repeating, her voice trembling.
I tried to stay calm, easing back onto the highway, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I froze. Another figure, a shadow, had jumped down from the retaining wall, landing on the highway where I had just been. My stomach dropped, but I said nothing to the girl. She didn’t look back, didn’t see what I saw, or maybe she was too scared to turn around.
I pressed the gas pedal harder, putting distance between us and that figure as fast as I could. She kept repeating that she needed to call her mom, her voice distant, like she was in shock. Back then, cell phones weren’t common, so I told her I’d take her to a 24-hour grocery store a few exits down where she could use a payphone. I asked if she needed money or if there was anything else I could do, but she just shook her head, her focus unbroken, like she was clinging to that one thought.
When we finally reached the grocery store, I pulled up to the entrance. She got out quickly, almost mechanically, not looking back as she slipped inside. She didn’t say goodbye, didn’t even acknowledge me. She just vanished into the store, leaving me with more questions than answers.
I drove across the street to a gas station and called 911, telling them everything that had happened, describing the girl and where she was. But after that, I was left with nothing—no resolution, no closure. I don’t know why she jumped onto that highway, who that figure was behind us, or what she was running from. The whole thing left me rattled, haunted by the unknown.
Even now, I still wonder what really happened that night. Did I do the right thing? I hope so, but the unease that lingers tells me I may never truly know.
My friend and I used to go drive around our little country town at all times of the day; we’d chat, listen to music, and just sort of drive around for no real reason.
One night, we decided we were bored and that we should just take a drive around the back country roads and just chill out. The roads were just two way, one lane each, with a speed limit of 45-55, I think. So, we pull out from my parents house and start cruising down a normal road that we take. We pull up to the normal 4-way stop and then keep heading out toward the country where the road gets a little bit more rough. On top of this, because it’s actually out in the country, there isn’t really any light aside from either the moon or the few houses that you pass on the way out.
So, on the way out, I start getting this really weird feeling. I’ve driven this road tons of times before at night and I’ve never had this feeling before. It felt like a stone in my stomach along with some chills that were going up my legs and my arms. Around the time that I started feeling this, there was a car coming toward us going the opposite direction–we were maybe a mile or so away from one another, probably a bit more than that. My friend and I were still just talking and not really paying much attention to the car coming toward us.
As it got closer, I remember feeling particularly uncomfortable and the conversation between my friend and I just sort of stopped abruptly. The car that was coming toward us was basically right in front of us at this point and it was about 2-3 yards in front of my car before it flipped its headlights off and veered into our lane, aimed directly at my car. This was all split second; back country road, pitch black, and headlights coming toward us just cut off completely.
I, by some miracle, managed to swerve to the right, not too violently, to get out of the way. My friend and I were shaken as fuck. I checked my mirrors and just saw the car flip its headlights back on and continue driving from the way we came. I think my friend and I had 5-6 cigarettes between us on the drive home and we decided to cut the drive extremely short because of this weird shit.
I was 19, working late shifts, and on this particular night, I got off work around 3 AM. I always avoided the highways, preferring the back roads that led straight south from my job to my house. The roads were deserted at that hour, no streetlights, just miles of darkness. Once you got a couple of miles in, the pavement gave way to dirt, interrupted only by a few lonely 4-way stops.
This night, the fog was so thick that it swallowed everything in its path. Visibility was practically nonexistent, so I kept my speed down to about 30 miles an hour, straining to see ahead. As I approached one of those 4-way stops, I knew there was a house off to the side, set back from the corner with an old lamppost in the yard. I always looked for that lamppost as a marker, something to reassure me that I hadn’t driven too far in the fog.
I rolled up to the intersection, slowing to a stop. When I glanced over at the lamppost, that’s when I saw it—a figure standing beside it. It looked like a man, but in the dense fog, it was hard to tell. Just standing there, motionless, at 3 AM on a night like this. Every hair on the back of my neck stood up, and goosebumps raced down my arms. Something about the way that figure stood there, so still, felt wrong—deeply, instinctively wrong.
I forced myself to drive through the intersection, my heart pounding in my chest, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The rest of the drive was a narrow dirt road flanked by towering rows of cornfields on either side. The fog clung to the stalks, making the darkness seem alive, ready to close in at any moment. I kept the car at 30 mph, white-knuckling the steering wheel, my eyes darting to the sides, half-expecting that figure to emerge from the corn at any second, step into the road, and stop me dead in my tracks.
But nothing happened. I made it home, locked the doors behind me, and tried to shake off the terror that had followed me all the way from that intersection. I was safe, but the image of that figure standing by the lamppost was burned into my mind. Even now, years later, it still gives me chills. I don’t know who—or what—it was, but I’ll never forget the feeling that something was out there in the fog, watching, waiting, and that I was just lucky to get away.
One summer I took a long road trip with a friend at the time around the southwestern US. We hit up everything we wanted and because we’re young and don’t give two shits about most things we were driving long hours at any time of day.
This specific late night/early morning we were driving to a hotel just outside of the Grand Canyon. Now, we were certainly tired and it was late, but we hadn’t been driving long enough to really be in any danger to ourselves. So I was driving down this two lane road trying to find our hotel with my friend helping me. We see some lights ahead of us, clearly the headlights of a car in the distance, move on from it and keep looking so we can finally get some rest.
The lights get closer.
And closer.
They looked like they were heading straight for us without stopping. Both of us realize what’s happening and I actually drove off the road to avoid being hit by whatever was attached to those lights.
But there was nothing.
As soon as I drove off the road they disappeared. My friend and I both saw them and we weren’t tired enough to have such a frightening double hallucination. Nothing passed by us, nothing turned- just completely gone. There was no car, it was just like they vanished into thin air after they did their job.
My friend and I were definitely freaked out because there was nothing else in the area anywhere. We still had a ways to go before we got to our hotel even. It took a few minutes to regroup but eventually we made it to the hotel and spent the night before exploring the next day, but there was and is no explanation for what forced us off he road that night in the middle of nowhere.
