Spooky Travels and related matters

Calling all FReeper gearheads! Last week, I skipped my usual Friday gearhead post (I had a heck of a lot on my plate). Anyway, I thought that since we had Halloween a few days ago that this would be a good opportunity to swap spooky automotive stories. I think that most of us have had some travels that included some strange, bizarre, or spooky things.

Also, I know that many of us are eager to share some spooky stories about vehicles that we have owned or those that friends and family have owned.

So, in the spirit of this post, let's give one another some spine-tingling chills related cars and the open road.

I had a high school classmate whose father loved AMC vehicles, that’s all he owned. He’d buy them in practically any condition, repair them and I don’t recall him ever selling them. He bought a Gremlin for her, my high school classmate, that had been involved in a minor crash requiring replacement of the hood and a front fender, and she drove it to school. The high school was out in the country, a consolidated county high school.

On the last day of class before Christmas break, I was driving myself and my sister to school, and on a steep shaded hill the car fishtailed. I thought, isn’t that odd, is there oil on the road or something? Didn’t think anything more about it and went on to school. Second period there started to be a sort of commotion, students whispering, a few crying, teachers and principals seemed worried and distracted. Eventually there was an announcement, that my classmate mentioned above had died in an accident on the way to school.

She’d hit a freak ice patch, the same one I’d hit and thought it was oil, inexplicable how there would be ice, the temperature was above freezing. Her car had been speared by a guardrail and overturned into a creek. Other students had stopped to try to help her but she wouldn’t let them, she was screaming for her mother. There were Christmas presents strewn all over the road. She died there, upside down in a creek, screaming for her mother.

Her dad freaked out, just totally. He took the wrecked car and buried it in their backyard. The freakout was exacerbated by the State of NC attempting to bill him for the damaged guardrail. It made national media at the time, quite an outcry. The state backed down out of embarrassment.

To my knowledge there is still a ‘72 Gremlin X with mismatched hood and fender buried in the backyard of that house, that my high school classmate died in on her way to school on the last day before Christmas break.

Last year we drove from Ohio to California to visit my wife's relatives. On the way we stopped at a restaurant. I rolled up the Windows and locked the car. When we came out the car was unlocked and my window was down. I assumed I'd bumped the remote and ignored it. In CA we stopped at a store. My wife went inside while I stayed in the car. Suddenly all the emergency blinkers started blinking. I managed to get them shut off. There were several more such incidents before we got home. I took the car to the dealer, but they couldn't find anything wrong. No more incidents after that. For a while, though, I wondered if the car was haunted.

About 20 years ago, I was driving a lot between North Jersey and Boston on Friday nights. I was dating a girl who lived in Cambridge and because she was fun and gorgeous, I was enthusiastic about these road trips despite the 250-mile journey over some of the most congested highways in America.

After suffering in heavy traffic across the George Washington Bridge, the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Connecticut Turnpike, I was ready to try other routes. The Tappan Zee Bridge was as bad as the GWB and ultimately dumped me onto the same crowded highways. So, in desperation, I took a route that I thought would cross the Hudson just outside the sprawl of the greater New York metropolitan area--the Bear Moutain Bridge.

Boy, was I wrong! The route to the bridge, through the 47,000 acre Harriman State Park, was as crowded as any of the routes to the two larger bridges to the south. Plus, the driving rain and nighttime conditions made for poor visibility. My 10-year-old VW Jetta's wipers could barely keep up.

The approach to the bridge was a long decline on a curving parkway disgorging onto a 1920s era traffic circle. At the bottom of the hill, two lanes of highway traffic were made to yield to the vehicles in the circle. A sea of brake lights lay ahead. I applied my brakes. Nothing.

I was traveling at 45 miles an hour in driving rain as the red tail lights of the cars seemingly raced up to meet me. I foolishly placed all my weight, nearly standing on that brake pedal, in the hope that at some point the brakes would hold and my car would come to a stop.

Still nothing.

I could read the license plate of the car directly ahead of me. A quick glance in the right side mirror revealed a solid lane of cars. Impact was certain. I was seconds away from causing a multi-car accident. At that realization, I lifted my foot off the brake.

The car instantly "jumped" into the right lane. It landed perfectly into a space between two cars and maintained speed and I easily cruised into and out of the traffic circle and brought the car to a stop at the toll barrier.

I was rattled. I said to the toll-taker "You'll never believe what just happened." The no-nonsense toll-clerk didn't react to my comment so I continued over the bridge and poked my way through the dark along the narrow, twisting highways high above the Hudson, convinced that my Guardian Angel lifted my car out of danger and dropped it safely into another lane at the last possible second.

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