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When police arrived, they agreed the 1956 model BSA motorcycle had been stolen.
Item, the police never did answer how a 20-year-old motorcycle, rusted and long since drained of gas and oil, had roared out into the chill Cicero night.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24-mile-long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland, it’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
In our next two episodes, we’ll be hearing from folklorist Chris Woodyard.
She’s a walking treasure trove of folklore, especially of the spooky flavor that we love here on Monster Talk.
In part one of our chat, we’re looking at the lore of headless motorcycle ghosts.
But before we kickstart that engine, I want to trace the lineage of this particular monster because its roots run deep.
My first exposure to a headless motorcyclist likely came from Kolchak the Night Stalker, specifically the 1975 episode Chopper.
It dealt with the revenge-seeking spirit of a biker whose murder left his head and body in rather different zip code.
It scared me back then, and honestly, the imagery in that episode holds up.
There’s something uniquely visceral about it.
A rider with no face, no eyes, no expression, just the scream of a spectral motor and the scent of moldy biker leather.
Marvel Comics had introduced their own ghostly motorcyclist three years earlier in 1972, Ghost Rider, the flaming, sculled spirit of vengeance.
And while Ghost Rider feels like a purely American invention, all brimstone and chrome and open highway, his conceptual roots reach back further than you might expect.
The character was partly inspired by the 1948 cowboy ballad Ghost Riders in the Sky, an iconic tale of damned souls chasing phantom cattle across stormy skies.
But that song drew on something older still, the Wild Hunt.
This spectral band of supernatural hunters tearing across the night sky is a staple of European folklore.
It’s one of those legends with origins so layered and muddied that we’ll eventually need an entire episode just to untangle it.
When we do get around to covering those ghostly cowboys, you can bet they’ll be heard here.
So Ghost Rider evolved over time.
The original 1970s Johnny Blaze gave way in 1992 to Danny Ketch, a new host to the Spirit of Vengeance who came equipped with a signature weapon, a Hellfire Chain.
Now, when I think about chain-wielding figures from the darker corners of the world of folklore…
There’s really only one contender for the title of most absolutely metal, and that has to be the Dullahan.
This Irish spectral horseman is headless, naturally, and rides a black steed through the countryside on festival nights.
But he doesn’t use a leather whip.
Instead, he carries a whip fashioned from human spine bones, and he uses that to tear out the eyes of anyone unlucky to witness him.
Pretty badass.
Now, was Washington Irving thinking about the Dullahan when he wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1820?
Probably not directly, because the earliest major written account of the Dullahan didn’t appear until Thomas Crocker’s work in 1825.
But these characters were traveling around in the same folkloric back roads around the same time.
Now, this image of a headless rider, death personified, carrying its own severed head like macabre luggage, bubbles up out of the human imagination whenever the road gets dark and curves disappear into the gloom.
That archetype has simply migrated from the saddle to the pillion.
For some, a tragic road trip doesn’t end with a crash.
It merely begins.
And Chris Woodyard knows these back roads better than almost anyone.
Hop on.
We’re going to go for a ride.
Monster Talk.
Hey, well, welcome back to the show, Chris Woodyard.
Thank you.
Delighted to be here.
We’re so happy to have you on again.
We have previously talked about omens and women in black and most recently the Wollaton Gnomes.
That was a very popular episode.
That was so fun to talk about.
So we brought you back on today to talk about a number of topics.
So we’re going to actually turn this into two separate episodes, one in which we talk about headless motorcyclists, haunted roads and road ghosts.
And in the second episode, we’re going to treat haunted cemeteries.
Excellent.
Two of my favorite topics.
This will be fun.
There’s so many things to unpack here, but let’s get started with the headless motorcyclist.
And I’m going to…
I have to say I’m a little embarrassed because I’ve heard of vanishing hitchhiker legends, lots of related legends, but never the headless motorcyclist.
And I looked into it and then only to find that there are quite a few stories around the United States and around the world as well.
So could you give us the basic story and then I guess the more specific story that you’re familiar with?
And tell us a bit about why this particular type of rogue ghost has become so popular over the years and the decades.
Right.
I haven’t found a whole lot of them around the world.
I’m almost familiar with the U.S. versions.
And it’s usually a young man riding his motorcycle, usually to see his girlfriend, and maybe he’s about to propose, and there’s an accident.
and his head is cut off, usually runs under a barbed wire fence.
But then his motorcycle is seen driving down the road.
It’s like a ghost light.
You just see the headlight.
And some places you have to do something.
You have to honk your horn three times or blink your light three times, and then the light will be seen coming down the road, and it will vanish, usually in the middle of a bridge.
Yeah, that three times motif just makes me think about legends regarding Marie Laveau and knocking three times.
Oh, yes.
Kind of relationship with the Trinity.
So, yeah, it’s interesting to see that come up here as well.
Right.
And I think the reason, one reason they might be so popular is, you know, the idea, the vision of a headless person driving a motorcycle is quite dramatic.
And then there’s that association of motorcycles with the heroic loner that we like so much in the United States.
And so many of the legends are about a man going to see the girlfriend or the lover and their life is cut short.
So those kind of tragedies make very appealing ghosts.
And Blake, didn’t you find a…
movie about this.
Oh, yeah.
There’s a movie…
There’s an Australian movie called Stone from 1974 that has a motorcycle rider whose head is apparently chopped off by a wire across the road.
Now, I’ve seen lots of movies with wires across the road taking down riders, but not usually decapitating them.
But apparently that was…
It kicked off, I would note that that’s a year before they cover it on Kolchak and do the, which is really my favorite headless motorcycle, the episode Chopper.
I love that one.
Good, good title.
It really is.
It works on two levels, right?
Yes, several levels, yes.
Some of the variations I heard, there was a case in California in Enmore and that had the…
the kind of string across the road story, whereas other ones have the one that you’ve mentioned.
It seems to be the most popular one.
Right, right.
But you have a specific Ohio legend around this?
Yeah, it’s in a place called Elmore.
It’s northern Ohio, northern central Ohio, and it’s just sort of out in the middle of nowhere.
It’s very flat country up there.
And you see the – again, you go and you blink your lights three times and you honk your horn three times.
And the road – you see the spook light coming down the road and it vanishes in the middle of the bridge.
And the story there is that a man came back from the First World War and went to see his girlfriend and found she’d married somebody else.
So he roared off down the road and under a barbed wire fence and cut his head off.
And so now he’s still roaming.
And apparently if you stand in the middle of the bridge, you will get hit.
There was at least one story of somebody who supposedly got thrown into the ditch by this thing.
And lots of people go up and look at it.
One gentleman, I was speaking in the area, and he came up and he says, I went out there.
I was looking for this ghost.
And I honked my horn three times and I blinked my lights three times and I looked in my rearview mirror and what do you think I saw?
And I’m like, he had me going.
I’m like, what?
What did you see?
He says, I saw 30 other cars blinking their lights and honking their horns.
Legend dribbles, huh?
Yeah, legend dribbles.
Big, big place.
But the interesting thing about this is that I’ve got the origin story all wrong.
When we started getting papers digitized, I went and looked to see what I could find about the headless motorcyclist of Elmore.
And the original story was actually a man who was sort of a hermit who lived in a shack in the area, and he hanged himself.
And ever since then, there was a spook light around the area, and young men would go and legend trip and search for it.
And that light would hit people and knock them out.
So that’s the original story, and somehow it morphed into a motorcycle headlight.
A modern-day version, I guess.
I’m always fascinated by the intersection of folklore and media.
So I wonder if the things like that Kolchak episode…
influenced the legend at all.
So I’d be interested in the timing of that.
You know, you are probably right because the first person to tell that story was a local folklorist named Gil.
His last name was Gil.
And he taught school and he would collect stories from the kids in the classes.
And I believe he was the first one to actually tell this as a motorcycle story.
And it was in the 70s, I’m pretty sure.
So it’s very possible he’s gone now, so I can’t ask him.
But I’m just wondering.
That’s a really interesting point.
Yeah, that’s interesting indeed.
Do we think that these stories might be related to tales of headless coachmen and headless horsemen?
Headless horsemen, I think, is a better fit.
The headless coachmen and the headless horses drawing the coach, I don’t connect the two.
They often have a whole coachload of dead people on.
or skeletons or something.
And the motorcyclists are always quite solitary.
So I think a headless horseman is a better fit for that.
And, you know, ghosts seem to be technology adapters.
You know, they’re happy to take whatever they can get.
So perhaps the headless horsemen have gone to motorcycles.
You wouldn’t stick your neck out on that one.
Got it.
Right.
Well,
Yeah.
So now I heard it’s the internet, you know, so, I mean, I don’t know how this works in your local area, but I heard in particular that somehow March 21st is said to be the day.
And so I thought, wow, how timely, you know, we won’t get this episode out in time, but we’re recording just a few days before that, which is really nifty.
That’s true.
I haven’t been up there on that date.
I did go up and you can see the freeway off in the distance and you can see headlights on it, which is one explanation.
People have tried to explain it.
Otherwise, I don’t know.
I didn’t think it was close enough to really look like it was coming down the road.
I wanted to ask as well.
I’ve heard that there is…
some dispute about which bridge this actually occurred on, that there are two or maybe three different bridges and no one quite knows which one it was.
Is that true?
I thought there was just one bridge, but don’t quote me.
I have this in my notes somewhere where I was looking at the story of the hermit in the shack and it was very specific about the location, but I don’t have that at my fingertips and I’m sorry.
No, no, no worries.
Yeah.
But it’s interesting the way these things get put together because what does a bridge have to do with barbed wire?
You know, like that, how does the barbed wire fence associate with a bridge?
But, you know, a landmark, a bridge works metaphorically on many levels.
Oh, yes.
It’s a folklore motif.
Oh, yes.
It’s incredibly popular.
Yes.
So, you know, I’m not going to say liminal.
Ah, see?
You said liminal.
I knew it was going to come up.
But that is, I mean, if you’re driving a motorcycle and do end up going under a piece of wire, there’s…
There’s no defense.
I know, I know, but it’s also true.
But actually, that is interesting, though, because legends that are associated with specific features and specific locations are so interesting because that works in folklore and in…
I don’t know.
It’s funny because I don’t think of haunting lore as necessarily being folklore.
Like sometimes people report cyclical hauntings and sometimes people see like ghost lights don’t necessarily have a date with them all around the world.
Ghost lights are things.
It’s a phenomena you can go see.
Right.
Yeah.
But how do you think place and time intersect so well with these stories?
As someone who’s looked at a lot of these sort of things, why did those two features come up so often, do you think?
Or what do you think the significance is?
I’m not sure.
I mean, I could say it’s liminal, you know, this bridge or that stretch of highway.
And why those?
Yeah.
I mean, locally, we think of every community has like a crybaby bridge or a screaming Mimi bridge, for example.
And this is a place where the teens go to hang out.
They run out of gas on the haunted bridge.
It’s amazing how many dates I’ve run out of gas.
I know.
It’s shocking.
Now, I can give you an example here.
There’s a theory that if you go on a date in a scary place, maybe like on a roller coaster or something or a haunted bridge.
Or Georgia.
What?
Georgia?
That’s where the whole state’s scary.
Oh, okay.
I’m not going there.
See?
It’s that scary.
Anyway, if you go to a scary place, it makes the couple associate that adrenaline rush with each other.
Your heart is pounding.
It must be him or her or love.
And so I think there’s something to be said for these places that are just sort of local scary places.
And who knows how they get started?
We’ve got a crybaby bridge in every county in Ohio practically.
And I’m sure it’s the same in other states.
Why that?
And certainly I’ve read enough horror stories about infants thrown into the river just to get rid of them.
But that’s not usually the story.
The story is usually there’s an accident.
And a carriage or a wagon or a car goes into the water and the bodies are never recovered.
So I don’t know.
It’s one of those social anxieties that bodies are never recovered and you don’t know if someone’s living or dead.
So I think that’s just kind of why the bridges or that sort of thing gets started.
I was thinking it might be also a form of what I call reality anchoring, where it gives you an element that, well, I don’t know if the story’s true, but that’s a real place, right?
In the same way that…
that the friend of a friend, like I heard this from this person.
So it anchors it.
Like, this is not something that I’m just making up.
I, I, I, a person I trust is telling me this story, you know, that it gets, it’s the, it’s kind of, I guess it fits along with the based on a true story concept that like we like, it makes our stories better when we can like literally go there and see it.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
That makes a lot of sense.
I don’t know.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
And the more you see this stuff, and of course with the internet and social media, everybody’s got a TikTok or something about their adventures at this site.
And that just inspires more people to go and see if they can experience the same things.
And I think some of them is self-fulfilling prophecy.
Oh, yeah.
It does encourage people to go places.
There’s a place in Ohio used to be called Mud House Mansion.
And the owner actually had it torn down because they had too many people who had seen something on the Internet come and want to break into the place.
Yeah, that could be.
And I’m just thinking about I’ve lived in a number of different places in Australia and here in the United States.
And every place I’ve lived in has had a haunted road.
When I grew up in Sydney on the northern beaches, there was the Wakehurst Parkway.
And even my brother and a friend of his were driving home one night and they saw this glowing blue man who lunged at the car.
And they both died.
swore that they’d seen this of both very skeptical people and so they weren’t quite sure if it was a ghost or what exactly it was but they’d had that experience and
I’d driven along that road many times trying to see this blue man or something else, and then moving here to Colorado, the local road is the Riverdale Road, and there’s a similar kind of story about a haunted car and that occasionally he will just, when you drive past, you’ll see this vehicle just pulled to the side of the road with the headlights on, and then he’ll start racing you and then disappear at some point.
So it’s just really interesting how every place seems to have a story like this.
And I guess I’m wondering, with so many drivers seeing figures and ghosts and things like that in the headlights late at night, from a psychological perspective, what kind of perception errors or environmental conditions might lead people to believe that they’ve seen a ghost on the road or what might they be seeing?
Well, there could be a number of things.
I think about eye conditions.
I think about headlights in your face changing the way your pupils are dilated and seeing things that way.
There’s a very famous story from James Thurber who saw a miniature admiral in full uniform riding a bicycle in front of the car where he was riding.
Now, he had really poor eyesight.
And it sounds like Charles Bonnet syndrome, where folks with macular degeneration start having very realistic hallucinations.
And I know macular degeneration makes driving at night very challenging.
So it’s possible that at least some of those nighttime road sightings come from that.
Right.
Now, I’ve driven thousands of miles around Ohio when I was touring for my books, and much of the time I was driving in the dark.
I never saw anything out of the ordinary.
I never mistook anything I saw for a ghost.
But the strangest thing I ever saw was in broad daylight.
It was on a two-lane road near Indianapolis.
And for some reason, I wasn’t riding my own motorcycle, but I was riding behind my husband.
And we passed a farmhouse, and there was a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, lying in the ditch in front of the house wearing a 1950s-style dress.
And she looked very dead.
So I pounded on his back to try to make him stop, but he couldn’t hear me.
And he pointed to the storm clouds that were on the horizon, and we just went on and went home.
And I looked in the papers to see if there had been an accident, that perhaps the child had been hit by a car and not immediately found by the family.
And I never found anything that would explain what I saw.
So I don’t know if she was a ghost or a real child who had had an accident.
So it was extremely unsettling, but it was in broad daylight.
Now, driving around at night on my Ohio tours, occasionally my late grandfather would pop into the front seat just to say hi, apparently.
And I wonder if there’s a type of third man syndrome, you know, that thing where there’s a presence that shows up during a time of danger or deprivation and they support you, they give you comfort.
But I wasn’t in any peril.
But there he was.
So I wonder if there might be something where people just start hallucinating another presence in the car for no apparent reason.
Right.
Although, you know, for Phantom Hitchhiker stories where one minute you’ve got somebody in the car and the next minute they’re gone, I kind of wonder about carbon monoxide poisoning.
causing hallucinations you get a bad exhaust you get fumes coming into the car so even if you picked up a real person their vanishing might just be a result of the dazed state of the driver so you know theories uh yeah throwing them out there but um honestly if you know some blue man lunging at the car i just wouldn’t know what to make of that well yeah my my brother um is uh myopic so
Now that you mention it, it could be an eye condition, something like that.
But for my friend who was with him to see it too.
Yes, exactly.
I couldn’t, hopefully they weren’t drinking or taking drugs or anything like that that could contribute to it.
But I know certainly I’ve spent a lot of time driving roads in rural parts of Australia and just trees and animals and other things will kind of just jump out at you at night.
And so really, we always looked in.
I’m sorry?
Luminous eyes like a deer or something.
Oh, yeah.
Or something jumping across the freeway or the highway like a deer.
We know from horror films how effective a jump scare can be.
You only have a moment to see whatever’s happening.
You get a first reaction.
And we also know scientifically that what we experience through our senses has to go through the substrate of the mind.
So our eyes…
report stuff to the brain and then the brain interprets it and that’s not always accurate and so many things happen when you’re driving I think for me I’ve had this happen so many times where something’s in the road ahead and I my first thing is I think maybe it’s an animal and I can sort of see it changing shape to be the thing I think you know like and it eventually resolves itself oh that’s just a plastic bag but it went through several other forms before it resolved into a plastic bag now
As a skeptic, I’m thinking that’s my brain trying to resolve what’s really there.
But there are people who would seriously consider that maybe that was something taking shape, like something that was assuming a form to just, you know, get by, which is it.
We have those monstrous plastic bags.
They’re shapeshifters.
Exactly.
Well, you know, I’m so sympathetic.
to people whose epistemologies, you know, go to the supernatural first.
They don’t think about what else might be going on because they lead very interesting lives.
And, you know, and just as valid as ours, I like to try to push towards a concrete materialist reality, but the,
Some very exciting things have happened to me.
And when you’re driving, you don’t get much time to deal with it.
And you spend all these moments later trying to play it back in your head.
What was that?
What just happened to me?
Right.
Here’s something else, though.
There is this sort of highway hypnosis they used to talk about.
I mean, you’re driving along and you’re just kind of on autopilot sometimes.
Yes.
Now, my podcast partner, Dr. Simon Young, has noted in his fairy census how many people think that they see fairies or gnomes while they’re driving.
So there may be just something sort of hypnotic if you’re on a familiar road and you’re just driving along and you’re in sort of an altered state.
Exactly.
And I think add to that weather conditions, maybe if it’s foggy or if it’s raining or if it’s snowing and that can affect perception even more.
And you both talking about garbage bags and things like that remind me a couple of days ago, I just was driving past a tree and it looked like there was a hawk or a crow or something flapping its wings.
And it just turned out to be a garbage bag, but it was great pareidolia.
Yes.
I once I saw this, I don’t know why I’m suddenly sharing stories, but the.
One of the strangest things I’ve seen, I was driving at night.
I used to drive back from college to my home because I didn’t live on campus.
And it was about a 40-minute drive, and it was late at night.
And this night, it was raining.
One of those rainstorms where the rain’s coming down sideways, and people are putting their flashers on, and you’re driving on the interstate, but you’re only going like 35 miles an hour.
And…
I had to cross a lake to get home.
There’s a very long bridge on Interstate 75.
And as I’m driving along, I saw this will be a very strangely detailed thing that I saw.
I saw two people walking hand in hand, wearing yellow raincoats like the like the Gordon Fish guy.
Right.
And they were actually as near as I could tell they were elderly women because they turned and looked at my car and I couldn’t stop.
And then I was stuck in a strange situation.
Now, I’m thinking I would love to render aid to these people because that’s a terrible place to be.
Why are they walking across this huge, long bridge over the lake in this rainstorm?
It’s very dangerous.
But it was one of those things where the next exit where I could possibly turn around was like two miles away.
And then I would have had to have gone.
And I was really thinking it through.
There was really no way.
Yeah, I do anything about it.
It would have been, you know, a 20 minute trip basically to get back to them if they were still there.
But it was so peculiar because I’m like, wait a minute.
Why?
Why were they walking down the road?
I didn’t see any car pulled over to the side of the road.
There’s no exits around there.
It was just so odd and mysterious.
And it was like so easy to start thinking, you know, of a haunting rather than two real elderly people having a terrible night.
Yes.
So I don’t know what happened to them or what was really going on, but I just could not help but think it was easier to come up with a mysterious explanation than to accept that they happened to have this incredibly good rain gear for this incredibly bad situation, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And that’s the kind of thing that leads you to be haunted yourself for the rest of your life.
I’ll never know.
I’ll never know what happened there.
It was just really, but like a snapshot or a jump scare in a movie, it’s there crystal clear in my mind, but never resolvable.
Yes.
Which is kind of fun.
Yeah.
I hope they made it wherever they were going.
If they were indeed people, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely right.
They may have just been garbage bags.
Yes, flapping their wings.
Well, I’ve got one final question before we wrap this part of the show up or this episode up.
So we’ve talked about a number of different –
Road ghosts.
I don’t think, and we’ve mentioned vanishing hitchhikers, so I don’t think we can talk about this topic without mentioning one of the most famous road ghosts in the United States, and I think that would be Resurrection Mary from Chicago.
So she’s the one I always think about.
She supposedly appears near Resurrection Cemetery and asks for, I guess, a ride home and then just…
disappears when the the driver passes the cemetery and uh that if you go there the the gates are i think wrenched open or burnt open or something like that there’s supposed to be burn marks on them where where her hands have touched yes that’s right yeah yeah so um can you tell us a little bit about that that legend how it developed and why it’s one of the most enduring stories in american folklore
I often wonder about Vanishing Hitchhikers.
The whole thing has multiple folklore motifs.
There’s like eight or so variants.
What does that mean?
What are we dealing with?
There’s several theories about who Resurrection Mary actually is.
One was a lady named Mary Bregovi, I believe I’m pronouncing that right, who died in 1934.
She had an accident, an automobile accident.
Others think that she was on her way home from a dance.
Chicago author Ursula Bielski documented a woman named Anna Norcus who died in a 1927 auto accident after a dance.
So that seems almost plausible.
But I look at Resurrection Mary almost as a variant of things like cautionary stories like the Frozen Charlotte Ballad.
We’re talking about somebody who was out going to a ball and they did something their parent didn’t want and they paid the ultimate price and they died.
The story, I think, first appeared in the 1940s.
And I’m looking at it almost as this strain of urban legends that appeared in the 1950s and 60s that reflect anxieties about young women’s behavior.
You know, they’re promiscuous and going to dances everywhere or they’re vain.
And there’s the stories about women poisoned by prom dresses saturated with embalming fluid or the spiders in the hairdo, women in lover’s lanes attacked by hookmen, women hitchhikers.
And it just seems to all go with this anxiety about women being out on their own.
So that’s kind of where I see it coming from.
Perhaps there really was a woman.
There’s an awful lot of people who have reported this.
And as I say, when you’ve got folklore motifs like this, they’re always asking, a lot of them are asking for a lift home.
She gives the address and you go there and, oh, it’s the cemetery and, boof, she’s gone.
So what does that mean?
You know, there’s just too many people who have seen this.
But at the same time, it’s just got this undertone of we want our women to stay home and not be out hitchhiking at night.
Right.
Yeah, I could definitely see that.
And I also want to point our listeners to a previous episode.
Blake, you’ll remember this one, the Telly Savalas story.
I do.
Because when I think of prototypical stories like this, it’s the vanishing hitchhiker, so the person who’s getting the lift, who’s getting the ride.
But in the Telly Svala story, he talks about the vanishing driver, how someone gives him a ride.
So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this tale.
No, no, I don’t know that one.
I’ll have to put a clip of Matt doing the voice because it’s really funny.
I hear a voice.
Very spooky, yeah.
So the guy has a high-pitched voice.
And it’s said that he’d taken his own life and he’d shot himself in the voice box in the larynx, and that’s why his voice was so high.
But, yeah, it’s very spooky.
And to hear, you know, Kojak telling the story, it’s a really interesting one.
And, you know, we unpack that in that episode.
But it’s just interesting.
It’s the complete opposite.
It’s an inversion.
But I’ll say that also is you bring a hitchhiker and I’ll bring a ghost.
That’s the Chicago way, to paraphrase.
I want to get Capone.
I don’t know how to get him.
You want to get Capone?
Here’s how you get him.
He pulls a knife.
You pull a gun.
He sends one of yours to the hospital.
You send one of his to the morgue.
That’s the Chicago way.
Yeah, that’s the Chicago way.
Well, can I tell one more story about a hitchhiker?
Absolutely.
This is, again, a very local story.
There’s a place in Claremont County known as Dead Man’s Curve.
And it was a very dangerous two-lane road, narrow, lots and lots of fatal accidents.
The authorities decided to widen and straighten it, make it nice.
And a month later, five people died in a car crash there.
And one of my friends was the only survivor.
Oh, wow.
And he lived with that till he died.
He never, never got over it.
A little survivor guilt kind of thing.
Not to diminish it.
That’s horrifying.
He was a teenager and just he never got over it.
But ever since then, the creature that they called the faceless hitchhiker has haunted that dead man’s curve.
And it’s a dead black figure of a man.
It’s sort of a three-dimensional silhouette, as he described it.
And he and his friends saw it at least six times over the course of maybe 25 years.
Wow.
Like a shadow person.
Yeah, it was like a shadow person.
Yeah, yeah.
This friend of his who was a nurse, she was out driving her mother’s station wagon along the road early one morning.
And the thing ran out of the woods, threw itself in front of her car trying to block it.
And she hit it, felt both sets of wheels running over.
And she said, my God, I’m a nurse.
I could have killed somebody.
So she stopped and she started backing up.
And as she looked in her mirror, she saw the thing putting a foot on the trunk and grabbing the luggage rack.
to climb up on the top of the car.
Oh, my gosh.
So she floored it, and it fell off, and even now she gets the shakes when she talks about it.
Oh, it’s intense.
I’ve never heard anything like that.
So that’s the faceless hitchhiker of Dead Man’s Curve.
Wow.
That’s a bit more aggressive than I would care to deal with.
Yeah.
Legend tripping that one.
I think given that we talked about Resurrection Mary, that’s a really wonderful transition to what we’ll be talking about in our part two of our interview with Chris Woodyard.
So tune in next week to hear about Haunted Cemeteries.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard the first part of our interview with folklorist and author Chris Woodyard.
She’ll be back next week to continue our conversation as we branch off the highway and into haunted cemeteries.
I know a single episode can’t plot every road spook or haint onto a single map, but I wanted to mention a couple more rest stops if you’d like to explore this topic on your own.
First, and I can’t say it’s to everyone’s taste, but I’m incredibly fond of the 1973 supernatural motorcycle film Psychomania, also known as The Death Wheelers.
It’s an absolutely bonkers film that combines British horror’s fascination with pagan revival and satanic tropes with the scary teens on motorbikes energy of that era.
It’s wrapped in the kind of post-mod fashion sensibilities that you might expect from an amicus or hammer production.
And while I’ve never seen a direct confession that the film inspired the goth legends The Damned, they do have a track titled Psychomania on their album Anything,
with lyrics that suspiciously evoke that same blend of the supernatural and the motorcyclic.
So check it out if you’ve got a taste for pre-Satanic Panic era occult cinema.
The other item for your consideration was brought to my attention by the late Jerry Coleman, brother of cryptozoologist Loren Coleman.
Jerry wrote two books around the title Strange Highways that collect roadside paranormal accounts.
In the first volume, he discusses the Highway Troll, an entity that feels like it stepped right out of a Twilight Zone episode.
I’ll put links to those in the show notes.
Now come back next week for more with Chris Woodyard.
And in the meantime, be sure to wear your seatbelts and your safety helmets.
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