My grandfather used to say that nothing good happens after midnight, and while as a teenager I thought it was just a thing he said to reinforce my parents’ good sense in having a curfew, as an adult I can see how there could be some merit to the advice.
These 16 people would probably agree, given the things they’ve seen while driving late at night – and after you read through them, you might enforce a curfew of your own.
16. I have so many questions.
My young wife and I were moving between cities. We’d spent all day loading a large 16-ft. trailer with all our belonging, and began the drive across the state just before dark. I’d borrowed a large pickup truck to pull the heavy trailer to our destination, so the combination of this truck and trailer (fully loaded) was VERY heavy, and pretty slow and cumbersome to start and stop.
We were traveling along a very desolate stretch of highway at around midnight, driving roughly 60-65 mph, when I see what looks like a couple of deer walking out into the road ahead of us…maybe 200 yds ahead? My wife is asleep on the seat next to me. I begin to slow down a bit and lay on the horn to scare the animals off the road before we reach them. Where we live this is a pretty common occurrence, so I’m not slamming on the brakes cause I expect these deer will move well before we get there. They usually do.
Suddenly I realize, as these “deer” come clearly into the light of our headlights, that these aren’t deer! It’s two men, and they’re trying to stop us! It’s only a two lane highway, and one man is standing in the middle of our lane, and the other is standing in the middle of the opposite lane. By now there’s absolutely NO WAY I’m going to be able to stop this rig, and they aren’t leaving me anywhere to go. But they don’t realize I CAN’T stop!
I stomp on the brake pedal, and continue to blare the horn over and over again as fast as possible, hopefully getting them to move. I’m fighting to keep the truck and trailer from jackknifing, brakes locked up and tires screaming, but these guys are NOT moving, and I’m still going 35-40 mph when I reach them.
The only thing I can do at this point is try to thread the needle between them, so I center the truck in the middle of the roadway and hope neither of them tries to close that small window. At the very last second, the guy who’s standing in the middle of our lane jumps out of the way. He was so close I was seriously worried our big rear view mirror might hit him in the head! I missed hitting him by mere inches.
This all happened in a span of about 5-8 seconds. There was no car anywhere on the road, we were way out in the middle of nowhere, and it was pretty obvious, based on their behavior, that these two guys were up to something potentially nefarious. I didn’t stop. I’d come WAY too damned close to killing these guys. My heart was literally in my throat, and it was pounding so hard I was having trouble breathing.
I didn’t even realize until afterward that when I’d slammed on the brakes my wife had slid off the seat and onto the floor (this was before seat belts were mandatory). She groggily gets up off the floor and asks me, “What the hell happened??” She’d missed the entire ordeal.
/ Certainly not “unexplainable”, but it scared the SHIT out of me! I’ve never come so close to killing someone in my life, and I truly hope I never do again!
15. He may never know.
A driver drove past me by my right side.
I was driving in a single lane street next to a cliff on my right and a mountain (no road) to the left. I slammed my brakes and let it sit for some minutes before driving again.
To this day I’m not sure of what I saw
14. My stomach dropped.
Scariest thing was this dude who was hitchhiking except something was strange about him. He wore his hoodie down when it wasn’t raining, it was actually a hot humid night in Alabama, and also his other arm was behind his back.
When I passed him by I looked on my rear view mirror and saw behind his back was a shotgun.
13. It’s a whole mood.
I’m probably too late to this thread, but almost two years ago my brother and I were making a cross country journey and were planning on stopping off in Arizona to see some friends. There were highway notices everywhere that there was an escaped convict as soon as we entered Arizona, and it was about 1am so we were already in a bit of a strange mood.
Something about the drive through the desert felt super eerie, and so one of us mentioned it and we started joking about the spooky claims people make while traveling through the area (aliens, skinwalkers, ghosts, etc). While we were having this conversation this crazy looking animal ran across the road right in front of us. At first I thought it was a deer but it looked too wolf-like to be a deer. BUT it moved like a deer and was too lanky to be a coyote and it had a long tail like a cougar. And it was big.
I slammed on my breaks and it ran off into the brush. We both just started screaming and then laughing. We have no clue what it was. At first I thought “cougar with mange” after we had a minute to process it but the more I thought about it the less sure I was of what it was we saw.
12. I hope no one else stopped, either.
This reminds me of a time my brother and I went on a camping trip. We were running late and by the time we were nearing our campsite it was pitch dark outside. We were driving down some narrow mountain roads when we saw a group of 3 hitchhikers on the side of the road.
They were dressed in all black. I couldn’t even see their faces. Just dark shapes standing by the side of the road, one of whom started walking out into the street. I got a terrible feeling in my gut the second we saw them. My brother is the type to slow down and help stranded campers but he must have shared my gut feeling because he veered around them and said something like, “someone else will have to help them.”
Anyway, pretty uneventful story but it gave me the creeps at the time and your story reminded me of that feeling.
11. This could have had a sad ending.
I had just gotten back to the high school after a state dance competition. It was 2am and I’d been up since 4 that morning, so I was extremely tired. I only had to drive 7 miles from the school to my house, and it was a very rural area, so I figured I’d be fine, but I was exhausted. About 1 mile in, I started to see shadowy people walking on highway. Scared the crap out of me.
The next thing I remember is waking up in my bed that morning. I went outside and found my car in the driveway, turned off but still in drive, with the keys in the ignition. I still don’t know exactly how I got home. That said, I am known for sleepwalking. Yikes!
10. Call the police.
It wasn’t exactly something I saw, but some point halfway through my drive home, at about 8:30 ish at night, a guy started following me. It couldn’t have been for very long, because I didn’t notice he was there until I pulled into my driveway and he parked there at the entrance, got out, hiking his horn and screaming some sort of nonsense.
Bunch of s*%t like “we f**king know where you live! F**k you!” over and over again and not saying anything about why he had followed me. F**kin terrified me.
Worst thing? Happened two days ago. Still have no idea why or who it was. Been staying at my mom’s bc if some random angry man knows where I live then for the time being I don’t live there
9. A stroke of luck?
This happened to me when I was 20 years old and my car was about a year and a half old. I was driving home from work at about midnight, coming through residential streets. The boulevard that I was on was four lanes with a cement divider that had plants in it along the way. I was halfway through an intersection, and my car stalled. My foot was on the gas, and suddenly the car was dead. Luckily, they were no other cars that I could see, so I brought my car to a stop, put it in park, and started it up with no problems.
Then I looked up.
Coming straight at me we’re headlights. Someone had turned from a side street and instead of going across the median to turn left going down the correct side of the street, they had turned left into my lane thinking it was only a 2 Lane Road.
Had my car not stalled when it did, I would’ve plowed head first into that car. In the five years that I own that car, it never stalled again.
8. A moose story.
My family used to go out on little drives together sometimes for fun in the spring to watch all the run off water from the snow melt. We live in the rural prairies of Canada. Were on a back road slowly winding the edge of a prickly hay field with a tiny trickling ditch river beside us, its the golden hour, the returning geese are dotting the water gathered in the fields for miles. A scene Van Gogh might wanna paint, ya know?
Anyways, we’re driving along when this enormous moose thunders out of nowhere at top speed right in front of our car. She heads through the field right beside us and straight toward some water that had pooled at bottom of a little hill in the field. Very wide puddle, but looked maybe a foot deep at most. She made it a few feet in to the water then suddenly fell into an unsuspecting abyss below and vanished completely.
I don’t even know how long it was but it felt like ages, she eventually emerged ~40ft away on the opposite side of the “puddle” and kept on running like she didn’t just slip in to mariannas trench.
Its about 6ft from hoof to shoulder on a female moose. Theyre absolutely huge, larger than horses and she completely vanished. Ill never forget it.
7. Definitely strange.
It was in the dead of the winter and in the middle of night a girl was dancing around on the highway. I almost hit her because it was snowing but I managed swerve.
So I got worried and turned around on the next ramp and when driving back she had just disappeared. I was probably just sleep deprived but it felt so real.
6. You hate to see it.
Driving on one of the reservations in New Mexico and came across a car completely stopped in the left lane. We slow down to pass the car and see the victim of a hit and run in the road in front of the stopped car (it wasn’t them, they stopped when they came across the body). We pulled over, my Dad and husband got out to see if they could do anything.
Unfortunately he was long gone and others had called the police. We didn’t witness the accident and couldn’t help so we left so that we wouldn’t be in the way.
The worst was that we still had a few hours left of driving that night. It was super foggy and I was terrified someone was going to jump out into the road from out of the fog.
5. You probably don’t want to know.
First, I was driving home from visiting family late at night. I was on a 2 lane highway in the middle of nowhere. Farms all around and spotty cell phone reception. If you didn’t have headlights on, you couldn’t see anything. My radio started cutting out and my headlights started getting dimmer all of a sudden. I turned the radio off and was just listening to the silence as my headlights were getting worse and worse, when all of a sudden, I hit a huge bump in the road. My radio came back on LOUD and my headlights were at full brightness. It was the weirdest car thing I’ve ever dealt with. But I would have been screwed if I’d broken down out there.
Second, driving home from a friend’s house in the city at 2am. As I’m coming around a corner I see this creature crawling along the road. It was definitely larger than a raccoon, but smaller than a medium sized dog. It was moving slowly and sort of wobbled as it walked. I slowed down because I wanted to see what on earth it was. As I get up along size it, it scurries directly toward my car and I stepped on the gas. I looked in my rearview mirror and nothing was there. Still not sure what it was…
4. A cautionary tale.
This is my grandmother’s story, she’s 85 now. This was in London, England.
When she was in her early 20’s my grandmother was walking home from work late at night (actually I think it was early hours of the morning after a night shift).
She noticed a man walking behind her for quite a long time that she thought might be following her. She continued walking and he was still behind her, if she slowed down so did he, she crossed the road and shortly after he would cross the road too.She knew there was a secluded alleyway coming up that she had to walk down to get home and panicked. The man walked ahead of her at this point and went down the alleyway. My grandmother saw a milk float and flagged down the driver and asked if she could get in with him as she thinks a man is following her.
The milk man agrees and as they drive past the alleyway she turns her head to look down it and the guy is standing there against the wall obviously waiting for her to turn into the alley.
Every time I go out late at night she gives me cab/taxi money and tells me this story.
3. Never stop.
Around midnight at Rio de Janeiro and two boys on foot (maybe 16, 17 y/o) with machine guns attempt to make me stop the car by pointing their guns at me, screaming “stop, stop” and closing the road with their own bodies.
It was a sharp turn and I entered exceptionally fast because there were almost no cars at the street and I was rushing home, and that’s what made me react as not stopping.
The entire thing lasted only for a split second, as I barely saw their faces. On the next split I started wondering: “WTF, I have almost just died tonight.”
2. That’s amazing.
I was on a run to pick up 3 cars on a trailer from Virginia Beach back to Iowa some years back. I drove the entire way there without stopping except for bathroom (about 20 hours if I remember correctly), and had planned on grabbing a hotel room when I got there and sleeping before turning around to come back home.
I wasn’t tired when I got there after drinking a few 5 hour energy during the trip, so I loaded up the cars and turned around and figured I’d stop when I got tired.
It got to be pretty late at night and I was driving through the mountains of West Virginia and starting to get tired but didn’t see anywhere to stop for a while that didn’t look too sketchy.
All of a sudden, I see a person crawl up out of the ditch and lay down on the side of the road. I’m doing 75 or so with 3 cars on a trailer, going down a mountain, so I couldn’t exactly slam on my brakes or anything… So I just dialed 911.
I said “I don’t know if I’ve just been awake too long or what, but I’m pretty sure I just saw someone climb up on to the road from the ditch”.
They said they would check it out and that they were getting the same call from a couple other people.
I decided that I would stop at the next exit and find somewhere to stay.
Next morning, I turned on the news in the hotel and it said that the guy had crashed his motorcycle a day earlier, and barely alive, climbed up to the road and died as soon as he got up there.
1. Weird AND creepy.
Me and a few of my friends in college went on a hike my freshman year. We had a few tokes by the river and started heading back to the car. It was starting to get dark out so we turned our phone flashlights on for the last 5 or so minutes of the trek.
We all piled in my 01 Civic (there were 6 of us) and I switched the key and turned on the headlights. I shit you not about 30 or so feet in front of the car, just within the tree line stood a 40 or so year old man butt a$$ naked. He stared at the car with zero f**ks and just stood there.
I dont know what the f**k he was doing or why he was there but i’ll never forget that “is this real?” moment we all had. We all think he must’ve been high on something or he was just a wild dude lurking in the shadows. He straight up looked like tom hanks in cast away.
I have no desire to see any of these things through the darkness, let me tell you.
If you’ve got a creepy story that belongs on this list, please share it in the comments!
