One of the things that you never believe about getting older until you’re actually getting older is how it gets harder and harder to drive at night.
You think you see things, you’re sure there are murderers waiting in the wings to “help” if you breakdown, and I don’t really know what else it is, but it’s true.
Whether you’re old or not, though, these 18 stories will have you re-thinking whether you really need to go out after dark.
18. Definitely gets your attention.
My brother and I were driving down a super remote road late at night many years ago. Wildlife was common so we drove slower than was posted. An accident could be fatal on this road. Anyway, it was a particularly dark night so we had the high beams on and were really concentrating on the journey.
We saw it at the same time. It was impossible to miss. My brother hit the brakes and we skidded to a stop in front of the biggest fucking cow on earth. We could have driven under it with room to spare. It was massive. And it stared at us without seeming to see us. The vibe was so creepy. Other cows were around but they were regular sized. This guy was the king of all bovine.
It doesn’t seem all that weird when telling the story but something was just off with this creature. It didn’t seem quite…natural.
17. My heart stopped just reading this.
I was 19 driving home from my then bf house and stopped at a red light on the very edge of town (like city lights behind me but corn fields and shelter belts ahead of me) because it’s like 2 in the morning I’m the only one sitting at the red light.
I saw something moving in my peripherals and because of my location I thought it was gonna be a deer. I turned my head and locked eyes with a man maybe in his 50s creeping towards my car.
When he saw that I saw him he froze and it was then then that I noticed he had a tire iron. I ran the red light and sped out of there.
16. That’ll get your adrenaline pumping.
My mom told me this story. She was in the car with my sister who was driving and they were on their way back from some event. The street lights on this particular stretch of road weren’t working very well and it was difficult to see.
My sister is chatting away and my mom is watching the road when all of a sudden she sees in front of the car a bike rack, complete with bikes on it, that looked as if it had just dropped off the back of someone’s car and they didn’t notice. She screams “BIKES” at the top of her lungs, my sister swerves, over corrects, spins, and then comes to a stop on the other side of the road facing the opposite direction, miraculously avoiding all the cars that were going by.
A few cars stop to make sure they’re okay. My sister looks at my mom and asks her how she even saw the bikes because she didn’t see them until they were almost about to hit them.
My mom said she saw them and it looked like they were illuminated by a gentle blue light, but they looked back and those bikes were just sitting in the darkness. Creepy.
15. It wasn’t what he expected.
I was driving to work, chatting on the phone with my wife to pass the time (6-8 hour drive out to the base from our home) and ahead of me was somebody riding a motorcycle. The road we were on was generally straight (Mojave desert) but had some unpredictable curves because of the road loosely following a broad wash/lake bed (like we’ve discussed, Mojave’s desert.) the person ahead of me was going between 70-90 MPH and seemed generally familiar With the road. But, then they just sailed straight over the edge of a 45 mph curve going about 80.
I made some reactive, disgusted sound, and hung up with my wife. I immediately pulled over, called 911 and put them in my pocket, got my trauma kit, and put on gloves. I was talking to the dispatcher and explaining what had happened when I step over the bank and see, to my surprise, not a crumpled body in the sage. But a young guy, mid twenties. Picking himself up off the ground about 75 feet ahead of me and 15 feet below. He’d been launched from the motorcycle which was in terrible shape about 30 feet from him. I told him to stay still and went through a quick evaluation. He was basically fine, but super rattled (ended up Having a broken collar bone and a mild Concussion).
Anyway, it’s not a ghost story. But I was absolutely certain I’d just seen a person die. And was completely shocked to find him in fine form if a little shaken up.
14. I would not have stopped. Just saying.
A friend and I were driving down some gravel roads one night, aimlessly turning and trying to get lost and find our way back home out of boredom.
So we’re driving down a long stretch and it’s pitch black out, no houses or lights nearby just the gravel and fields around us. Suddenly I see a large, black mass running next to the car and keeping up with us. I scream and point, my friend screams and slams on the brakes. We’re both in sheer panic mode as this thing stops and turns around to run back at the car. I thought this was the end. Some paranormal creature was about to kill us.. annnnd it was just a big, black, wild dog.
The relief and laughter that followed felt so good after being so fucking scared. The dog was huge to be fair but it keeping up with the car while we drove is what had me thinking it wasn’t some normal animal we see out here.
13. They definitely would have gone bump in the night.
Getting a feeling that I needed to turn my brights on in a dark spot in the middle of town …
And there ended up being 4 deer just chilling in the road that I wouldn’t have seen until I was much closer.
12. It’s scary enough.
My mom tells this story about when she was young and her mom was driving home from shopping. The car they were in broke down, and in the car behind them a guy gets out and offers to help and fix it there at the side of the road.
Thing is, after they were done fixing the car (I think she says they ran out of oil or something like that) the guy, and his car, just disappeared. Gone. Nada. Didn’t see him get in the car and leave, just one moment he and his car where there, and then next they were gone.
While the story isn’t particularly scary, but my grandmother was petrified, and they drove quietly all the way home.
11. That’s just irresponsible.
A bit of background: I’m a truck driver, specifically doing shuttle runs for a factory in my city. I run loaded trailers from the factory downtown, to a warehouse 20 miles away, where I drop my loaded trailer, exchange it for an empty, and take it straight back to the factory. I run this route 7-8 times a night; I’m told it’s a diamond in the rough as far as trucking jobs go.
Anyway, my route has me cross this rather precarious highway bridge on the return trip. The bridge is only two lanes wide with no shoulder. The speed limit on the highway is 70 miles an hour, but this bridge has a steep drop and a sharp curve down to surface level, so the recommended speed to take this curve is 45.
A few months ago, around 2 AM on a Wednesday, I was in the process of rounding this curve when a car was blocking the bridge, and I nearly plowed right into it.
The car didn’t lose control or smash into anything, there weren’t any tire tracks on the pavement, and the car didn’t have any damage. Said car was a brand-new Mercedes SUV with dealer tags, so it probably wasn’t broken down. And nobody was in the car; whoever was driving must’ve just decided to come to a complete stop in the middle of this practically blind corner, get out of his car, and walk away.
The car couldn’t’ve been there for longer than 20 minutes or so; it wasn’t there when I drove past that bridge in the other direction. I didn’t see anyone walking along the highway, either. I have no idea what was going on with the car; when I un-clenched my seat out of my asshole a minute later, I called the cops to get that car and I never heard anything about it afterward.
10. Harry and Ron?
While driving across Luisiana on I10, I saw a flying car.
There’s a bridge that’s about 40 miles long on that road. There was no other car in sight. And far ahead of me on that bridge there was this car about 8 feet above the road. It was kind of bobbing as it flew.
It was a very dark night. All I could see was it’s tail lights. I tried to convince myself it was just a trick of perspective. It just looked like it was higher than the road.
It was freaky, and scary. I was slowly gaining on it, so I slowed down.
I eventually speeded up, telling myself I was stupid being scared of it. Couldn’t really be a flying car. Not a ghost or something.
As I slowly creeped up it was definitely about 8 feet above the road.
As I got closer I finally saw. It was bring hauled on a flat bed truck like a wrecker. The truck had no tail lights, so I guess the truck driver turned on the car’s tail lights .
It gets spooky at night down in those swamps.
9. Mystery solved!
I once saw something late at night in the headlights on a dark country road which was sandy colored, about the size of a small cat with about twenty feet of tail following it, running really quickly, real wtf stuff.
some thirty years pass, and then I find out on reddit what it was.
Someone posted a video of a pale rat with lots of smaller rats all holding onto each others tails and running like that.
8. Heart attack city.
I used to date this girl who lived in a house in the middle of the woods and her driveway was like a mile long single car road.
I was driving up it around midnight to go home and my drivers side window exploded and showered me with glass.
Turns out a deer had rammed into the driver side of my car.
Completely destroyed that side and I had to get out of the passenger’s side.
I never even saw the deer, I assume it ran away but there was a perfect hoof print in one of the doors
7. The downside of owning a convertible.
When I was 16 I had a junky convertible 1989 Capri. I loved that car. One night I was driving the backroads home out in the middle of nowhere Missouri. Top down, enjoying the night air. I dove under some low hanging trees and heard a weird SLAP noise from the backseat.
urned around to see a huge black snake frantically slithering towards the safety of under my seat. I nearly wrecked. I hate snakes and even though this rat snake was 100% harmless I was panicked.
Pulled over screaming and called my dad to come de-snake my car. I never road with the top down in the country again.
6. This is insane.
Many years ago, my uncle was driving home from a night shift very early in the morning (it was still dark out).
His driver’s window shattered – except his was from being shot at.
Some guy he fired waited on the side of the highway to shoot him on the way home.
5. Do yourself a favor and don’t Google it.
If you see a deer on the road that… isn’t quite right… in some way or another, it’s probably chronic wasting disease. It’s a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (prion disease) that often presents in ways like the deer is rotting while still alive. This can mean a lot of things, like deer with weird postures, pieces falling off of them, etc. so in the dark at night it can look really freaky. Like a monster that is trying to look like a deer but didn’t quite get it down.
I’ve heard several “I saw a monster on the side of this mountain road one night” stories that were almost certainly a deer with progressed chronic wasting disease. It’s very sad but also quite fascinating, if it wouldn’t gross you out to read about.
4. Alternate universe.
This didn’t happen at night, closer to the evening, but I’m still not quite sure how to justify what had happened.
I live on a backroad in the country, so when I need to head to town, I almost always end up having to pass by an Amish carriage. It’s a common occurrence, and they’re usually friendly and pull as much to the side as they can to let cars pass them by, but this one was going unbelievably slow. So I came up behind them, checked to make sure it was clear, passed by, and I very vividly remember looking at them as I passed in my rear view, looking ahead to the road, and then looking back in my rear view to see that nothing was there.
No horse, no carriage, no roads to turn on nor hills to cut off my sight. One second they were there, the next they just weren’t.
Not sure if I’m going insane or if this belongs in a spooky subreddit, but I’m still a little creeped out by it everytime I drive by that spot.
3. An absolute horror.
About 25 years ago my sister and I were driving late at night and it was deserted.
We could both see something flapping on the road up ahead. I asked her what it was and my sister said she didn’t know but that it looked like a black garbage bag. I agreed, it really looked like a bag lying on the road being whipped lightly by the wind.
As we approached it completely changed shape. It went from being quite flat and small to morphing into a fully grown man on a bike. He -was just standing there in the middle of the road with his bike. We pulled alongside and asked if he was ok. He nodded but didn’t speak. We drove off.
We STILL talk about it because it was the strangest, creepiest thing ever and we both still can’t explain what we saw.
2. This could have had a much different ending.
Four years ago I’m driving across the Colorado / New Mexico border at around 4am and I’m looking for a place to stop for fuel. I happened along the smallest and saddest little farm town with only one tiny gas station. I hadn’t seen another car for hours, it’s freezing cold, and it felt like this town was abandoned it was that quiet… honestly it was kind of cool except for the cold.
I’m pumping away feeling like I’m completely alone, until I notice another car in the shadows near the back of the building. Flashy black low rider with completely tinted windows and 4 “right out of a Mexican Gangster movie” looking guys leaning against it. I remember laughing because 1, they startled the hell out me and 2, they were wearing the black shorts, wife beater tank tops and the knee high socks. Remember it was FREEZING cold, it was the middle of nowhere, and they looked so casual.
Without a word, all 4 got off the car and walked straight towards me until I could see the full sleeves and face tattoos under the pump lights. Dropped the gas pump, fired up the motor and did the greatest 0-100 that old girl had ever seen. Not 20 seconds after burning out onto the highway, I see headlights swerve out and follow me. Little did they know, my beat up looking dodge truck had the hemi motor and a couple of upgrades, they never had a chance and after a few miles their headlights disappeared in my rear view mirror.
I didn’t think much of it, and even laughed at how bad I outran them till a cop buddy told me about the Mexican Cartels running drugs through there to avoid the Interstate. I wasn’t laughing anymore
1. He may never know.
I was working a night shift and rode a moped to work, the headlight was fairly dim but on the way home I saw what I can only describe as what looked like.. black pants, floating slowly just overhead but making a walking motion as they passed, I got a good look and I still cant make heads or tails of what it actually was and I sure as f**k wasn’t going back to double check.
Someone said it could have been the Fresno Nightcrawler! That’s a cryptid that supposedly just looks like a walking pair of pants. I’ve not seen it described as floating before, but it’s not like there’s much in the way of eyewitness accounts out there.
Yep, I can get food delivered and my house is nice. Never leaving.
Have you ever seen something creepy while driving at night? Tell us about it in the comments!
