Long Haul Horror: Ghost Sightings and Creepy Encounters on The Open Road

Written By Kaelyn Moore

From ghostly hitchhikers and terrifying truck stops to suspicious looking roadkill and strange noises in the dead of night, these stories will keep you on the edge of your seat. Whether it’s an eerie sense of being watched or bizarre encounters with the supernatural, truckers share the scariest moments they've had while driving through the darkness. Buckle up and join us for a ride into the unknown – it’s going to be a long, dark road.

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TRANSCRIPT

Last year, a truck driver named William Church was driving down Arizona State Highway 87, a route he had done a bunch of times. 


He was in between Phoenix and Payson, a part of the highway that runs mostly through the desert, with nothing on either side for miles. 


It can be mind numbing driving through the empty landscape, especially at 2:30 in the morning, like William was doing.


So I imagine he was doing his best to just stay awake, when all of a sudden, he caught something out of the corner of his eye.


It was like a flash of light on the right side of the road. Almost like there was a piece of metal or something that his lights reflected off of. a car on the shoulder, perhaps?


But as fast as he saw it, he drove past it. He checked his rearview mirror only to see, nothing, whatever was there was completely gone.


Eventually, he pulled over to a truck stop but was still thinking of the weird white light, so he decided to look at his dashcam. It had been recording the whole time, and Maybe it had caught a clear image


But he could have never guess what he was about to see in the footage. 


There was something on the side of the road near the 200 mile marker, and it wasn’t a solid object. William looked on in confusion and honestly terror as the video showed him passing by a transparent human shape in the road. It looked like a small woman or a child walking.

The footage was picked up by news organizations, and the public couldn’t believe what they were seeing either. No matter which way you look at the footage, it’s hard to deny that it does look like something supernatural. 


Now, anyone familiar with the area, knows that highway 87 is considered one of Arizona’s most dangerous roads. It was constructed in 1927 and has intense looping turns and steep hills, and can be difficult to drive at night. As a result, there have been a LOT of fatal accidents.


William wondered if what he saw was a ghost from one of these accidents, and it didn’t take him long to find that just one month before the sighting, there was a fatal car crash at almost the exact spot where he saw the figure. And now many people are wondering if the two are related. 


But that got me thinking. I’ve heard a lot of scary stories about what truck drivers see while out driving. I mean, I have listeners that are truckers that have reached out with stories. So After I read his story last year, I started compiling these stories, and what I read chilled me down to my bones. Not even just the ghost sightings, I’m talking close calls with scary people, and creatures,  And so, of course, that’s exactly what I’m going to share with you today. I know a lot of you guys listen in the car, so buckle up for this one, it’s going to get bumpy. And as always, listener discretion is advised. 

This is heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries, and boy oh boy is this one in the horrors category today. 


Driving alone on an open road at night, with no other cars around me is something I’ve always been afraid of. Imagine pulling off at a rest stop, it’s pitch black, you’re by yourself, and you don’t know what you’re about to walk into. I remember one time, I was driving in Idaho at like 3am and I saw police lights in my rearview. I wasn’t speeding or anything so I had that very real and terrifying thought of, is this a real cop or is this someone pretending to be one. What’s going to happen when I pull over. Obviously, it was a real cop, my tail light was out and he was actually really helpful, but still, it could have gone south fast. 


And on this show, when we’re afraid of something, we don’t shy away from it, we go all in and read all the scary stories we can, and boy oh boy when I tell you it is so much scarier out there than I ever could have imagined. 


But before we get into it, I just wanted to remind everyone that we have some really fun bonus episodes on Patreon and apple podcast subscriptions and I’d hate for anyone to miss them. For october, I did another episode on horror stories from Appalachia, specifically the caves and abandoned coal mines in the area so you definitely want to check that out. And this month, I’m doing one on haunted and cursed paintings. If you’d like to have a say in the bonus episode, you can sign up for the high council tier on Patreon, where you’ll be able to cast your vote for the bonus episode every month. 


Ok, I really want to share with you guys what I’ve found because people are not talking about this enough, there’s something going on out there on our roads. A lot of these stories come from the book Trucker Ghost Stories And other True tales of Haunted Highways, Weird Encounters, and Legends of the road, which has a lot more stories in it if you’re interested. Ok  let’s get into it. 



One night in 2021, a trucker in Australia was doing an express run on the Newell Highway from Melbourne to Toowoomba (tuh-woomba). Newell Highway is a long stretch of road in the southeast of Australia. And while the landscape at parts is diverse, ranging from rolling hills, to little farms, to small towns, there are long stretches that feel totally desolate with only the occasional roadside stop or sign of wildlife.


So doing long hauls at night in a truck can start to feel mind numbing with not much to look at. Outside of the truck can be so dark that it feels like an abyss is surrounding the driver. 


At least, that’s how the trucker, who we’ll call Jeff felt. The sound of the truck engine and the empty landscape was starting to lull him to sleep after his long day on the two lane road. Earlier, he had spoken to his manager who assured him he could pull over if he got tired. The manager warned him that the stretch of the highway Jeff was currently on was so monotonous that few truckers could do the whole stretch in one night. It wasn’t worth the safety risk for Jeff to keep going. 


So he decided that at the next truck stop, he was just going to pull over and get some rest. his headlights shined out into the darkness as he looked for a sign, when all of a sudden, out in the distance, he saw that his lights were reflecting back off of something. It was the whites of two beady little eyes. At first, he thought it must be an animal, but as he got closer, he could see that it was a woman standing on the side of the road. 


Jeff looked around the landscape, there weren’t any cars pulled over, he hadn’t seen a house for miles. Where had this woman come from? He immediately thought of an old wives tale he had heard about trucking. That sometimes, people will set traps. A woman would stand on the side of the road with her thumb out, waiting for a kind trucker to stop and help her. And just as one would pull over, a man would jump out from the woods behind her and they’d rob the driver, or worse.


But as Jeff’s truck rolled up to the woman, she looked frail and helpless. It didn’t look like there was anyone hiding behind her in the shadows, this woman legitimately looked like she needed help. 


He rolled down the window and gave a nod, “Hop in” .

The woman slowly climbed up to the door and popped it open. Once she crawled into the cab, Jeff got a much better look at her, and he felt the energy inside change. 


She had thin, wiry hair, and her skin was so sunken in she almost looked like a corpse. Dark circles underscored her bloodshot eyes, and dirt was caked around her mouth. Her clothes were tattered and filthy. It looked like she had climbed out of a ditch.


She didn’t say anything to the driver, she just stared forward at the open road, almost like she was looking for something. 


10 minutes went by in complete silence, Jeff was practically praying for a gas station, or a hotel, or anywhere he could drop this woman off, but there was nothing. When all of a sudden, the woman slowly raised her arm and pointed up the road to an unlit area. “Here” she said. 


You want me to drop you off up there? Jeff asked. And the woman nodded her head.


So, he pulled over to the side of the road, the woman got out, and slowly walked off towards som trees, in complete darkness.

Eventually, jeff got to the next town, Narrabri (nare-ah-bry), where he pulled over and fell asleep, the stench of the woman still thick in the cab. 


The next morning he was grabbing coffee at the stop with a group of truckers and he brought up the strange woman he had seen the night before. She must have been on drugs or having a psychotic break Jeff suggested. He thought that would get a laugh from the group, but he saw that one of the guys looked pale, and his eyes were wide. 


Without missing a beat, the guy rattled off the markers on the highway near where Jeff had picked up and dropped off the woman. How did the guy know that?


then, he said something that made Jeff’s blood run cold. “She’s not real.”


He went on to tell Jeff that other truckers had seen that woman in the area, always at the same markers, and she always asked to get dropped off at the same spot near some trees. One driver had done some digging after hearing her story, and found out that a woman had died in a particularly bad car wreck in 2014 on the highway near where the woman is always seen. They all just assumed it was her. 


Jeff laughed at the guy, he was clearly just trying to scare him. Every truck driver had some scary story of something they had seen, and most of them were just urban legends 


When Jeff finally made it back home after his assignment, his boss called him into his office. He said he had heard from another driver that Jeff had picked up a woman on the side of the road, a huge no no. Jeff tried to explain himself, the woman looked like she had been in an accident, like she needed help. 


But it didn’t matter, his boss wanted him to come into his office.  He had pulled the surveillance footage from the cab of Jeff’s truck and had it up on his computer, he needed Jeff to show him at what point he stopped for the woman. And yes, I know it sounds strange but lots of truck drivers have cameras inside of their trucks that surveil them as they drive. 


Jeff started scrubbing through the footage until he got to the part where he stopped for the woman. And he and his boss watched in horror as the video showed Jeff pull the truck over, the door opened, and no one got inside. 10 Minutes later, he pulled over again with no one in his passenger seat, and the door opened once more. 


His boss had this look on his face that was almost a smile, like he had seen this before. And he said, Looks like you met the Princess of Pilliga (pill-ih-ga)


So many people have seen this apparition on the side of Newell Highway that she’s earned herself a name, the Princess of Pilliga. Some reports, like what the truckers told him after the encounter, say she is the ghost of a woman who died in a car wreck in 2014, others say it’s the ghost of a woman who was hit by a truck in 1993 named Claire Wibson. Either way, the amount of people who have reported seeing her is staggering.


But maybe she’s there to keep drivers on their toes. After all, it is the most boring part of the drive, the one where the most drivers fall asleep at the wheel. So maybe, in a way, she’s there to shock them back awake, and save another person from her fate.

This next story comes from a driver who encountered something on the road that he thought might be a cryptid, but he’s not sure. He writes:

This was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was delivering and installing machines for the company I was working for.

I was in a 26' box truck with 12 machines in the back. I was having trouble with the truck the day before, had it checked out by the rental company and they said it was all good.

Since I was behind schedule due to the truck and problems with installations, I decided to drive late to my next destination. It was about 11 o'clock at night on a state route through the Upper Peninsula. There were no street lights, there were no other cars. The headlights from my truck were the only thing illuminating the road.

I was already creeped out.

At the peak of feeling like I was in the middle of no where, because I was in fact in the middle of nowhere, every single light on the dashboard of the truck lit up, and then it stalled.

Now it's pitch black, I am stopped and the truck isn't restarting. Rather than eat up the battery trying to turn it over, I shut everything down and started making phone calls.

As I was calling everyone and anyone that would listen, I sat in the dark night, with the only light being from my hazard lights. I looked up and saw something move in front of the truck, just out of distance of the flashing lights.

At first I thought it was my imagination. I finally got a hold of someone and they told me it would be 2-3 hours before they could get a mechanic to me.

So now I am sitting in silence, the only noise is the clicking the hazard lights are making, and I am staring out the windshield into a void of darkness, when I see movement again.

Just as I was getting nervous, my phone rang and  it scared the hell out of me.

It was a mechanic that wanted me to get out, open the hood, and check some things out. "No. I am not getting out of the truck." without an explanation as to why. He was irritated with me, but I didn't care.

So finally after seeing the movement just out of range of the lights one more time, I threw on the headlights with the high beams.

The headlights caught 3 wolves snacking on something that looked like roadkill. I honked the horn and they looked at me like they were irritated more than scared. I was safe, the wolves more than likely weren't going to bother me, but it was spooky just knowing they were there.

So I shut the lights off.

I would turn the lights on occasionally to check to see if they were still there. I was basically just sitting there listening to the hazard flashers click, while surfing my phone. Each time I turned the lights on, the wolves were still there.

Just to remind you, I am in the middle of nowhere, no homes, no business, nothing but trees, wilderness, and wolves.

I suddenly heard what I can only equate to a woman's scream of terror that sounded like it came from right behind the truck. Then something slammed into the side of the truck, hard enough to rock it. I wasn't afraid of the truck tipping over, but whatever hit it, hit it hard enough to rock the suspension enough to move me around in the cab. It was a pretty heavy truck.

I turned every light that truck had on. Slipped it into reverse so the reverse lights came on and laid on the horn. I was checking both mirrors, and the only thing I saw was a shadow bolt across the road. I couldn't make out what it technically was, but in my head it was Werewolf-Yeti-Bigfoot-Lizard monster that was going to end my life and it was going to be agonizingly painful the entire time.

I also noticed the wolves were gone. From every nature documentary I've watched, the only time predators leave food is when there are bigger/badder predators around. 

Whatever crossed the road, didn't cross very far off the road. I could hear it thrashing around in the brush, breaking sticks and what sounded to be logs. There was no noise pollution, I only had my window cracked a little bit and I could hear pretty well.

I basically had the steering wheel gripped, all the lights on, and was feverishly looking out the windows, and through the mirrors to make sure nothing was around the immediate area of the truck. I couldn't see off the road, and the flashlights I had were in the back of the truck in my tool bag. I'd have to get out of the truck to get to them.

Finally I saw some headlights through one of my mirrors. It seemed like it took hours for them to close the distance to me. The noise stopped as the headlights approached. It was obviously the mechanic because no one else was stupid enough to be out there besides me.

The mechanic pulled out in front of me, my headlights were shining on him and his truck. As his door opened to step out, we both hear the "Woman screaming in terror" type of  yell again and the brush thrashing intensified. Whatever it was, it was still close and pissed. His door immediately closed and my phone rang.

He called my phone asking me what it was, he sounded more panicked than me. I had no clue what it was, and he had no clue what it was. So the mechanic called the police. He wouldn't work on my truck until we could secure the area, which I don't blame him. He didn't like my idea of him getting out of his truck, just to check things out.

Two Michigan State Police officers showed up. They lit that area up like it was a stadium. I finally stepped out of the truck for the first time since it all started.

We heard that scream three more times while the mechanic was working on my truck. Thankfully they were getting further away. The cops had no clue what it was either, they were kind of spooked too.

The mechanic finally got my truck running, and I made it to my hotel for the night. The next morning I walked the truck for inspection, and the side that was hit, there was an indentation about the size of a basketball. Whatever hit it, didn't hit it hard enough to push all the way through, but it definitely mushed the fiberglass. The indentation was about 7' off the ground.

I have no idea what it was. I probably never will. I do confidently know that I will never ever drive through the Upper Peninsula at night again.

Though a lot of truckers have reported seeing supernatural things while out on the road late at night, sometimes the scariest thing you can come across is something from our world. 


Take for instance, a driver named Digyo, who was doing what’s known as a meet and turn. Basically, Digyo was going to drive halfway to his destination, and then hand over his trailer to another driver who would finish the delivery.


This was a route that he had driven dozens of times, he knew it like the back of his hand. So much so that he could just be on auto pilot while driving, but he made sure to stay sharp, just in case he came across something he wasn’t expecting.


The night that he was set to meet the other driver, he pulled into a truck stop around 3 in the morning.He had been at this truck stop before, a run down, small stop on the side of an empty highway. It had a big iridescent sign that shone through the night like a lighthouse, but some of the letters had burnt out. 

this night, though, something felt different. It was eerily quiet outside, and when he got out of his cab to grab some water, he saw that there was only one other truck, all the way at the other side of the stop. The guy he was meeting hadn’t arrived yet. Usually the area was full of the sounds of people chatting and truck engines, but that night, all he could hear was the fluorescent lights buzzing. 


He decided to just get in his truck and take a nap for a bit. He turned his ringer on loud in case the guy called, and then he leaned his seat all the way back.


About 10 minutes into the nap, though, he heard something outside of his truck. . It was a dog barking. He tried to shut it out and keep sleeping, but it kept getting closer and closer. It sounded like a big dog too, and it was heading straight towards him. Eventually, it got so loud he opened his eyes to see what was going on.


But when he looked out, he didn’t see anything. Just the empty lot. He checked his phone to see that the guy had not yet called, so he leaned back in the seat. . But there the dog was again, this time even closer. 


That’s it, Digyo grabbed some chips from the passenger seat, he was going to try to get the dog to calm down, maybe it was just out looking for food. 


He got out of his truck, turned in the direction of the barking, and then stopped dead in his tracks. What he saw made his blood run cold. 



Instead of a hungry dog, he saw that the sound was coming from a man, bent over near the back of his truck. The guy was about 35 years old, skeletal and dirty. His clothes were all roughed up and his hair was a mess. It was his eyes that Digyo really remembered though, they were crazed, staring straight at him as he continued to bark like a dog. He was getting so worked up that he was foaming at the mouth.


Not knowing what else to do, Digyo backed away slowly and crawled back up into his truck. He started peeling away, and in the rearview mirror, he saw that the man start chasing him, still foaming at the mouth. Eventually, he watched as the man disappeared in his rearview mirror, but the memory haunted Digyo. He drove to the next stop over and arranged the pickup with the guy there. 


That story gives me the absolute chills because I am so afraid of being alone with someone and not knowing  what they’re capable of. Who knows what was going through that guys mind, but if someone is barking at you so badly they’re foaming at the mouth, I think for your own safety it’s best to get out of there. 


But that kind of brings me to the next creepy story I found, about another man who saw something very much from our world, but was really thrown off by it.


A driver who I’ll call Paul, was making an emergency fuel stop on a dead quiet, pitch-black night. He realized his company had miscalculated his mileage and he was nearing an empty fuel tank. Normally he tried to push through long nights without needing fuel, but not tonight.


To get to the nearest gas station, though, he had to pull off of the highway and get on a backroad. 


He was up in the pacific northwest, so the two lane backroad was lined with tall pine trees that were suffocating compared to the open road of the highway. But it was just going to be a short detour, so he wasn’t really worried about it.


That is, until his headlights caught the glimpse of something up the road, it was pink and fleshy coming up on his passenger side. As he got closer, he could see the white tips of bone sticking out from the mass. It looked like someone had hit an animal, which made sense for how thick the woods were around him, but the question was, what kind of animal looked like that? 


Paul started getting a bad feeling, like something inside of him was telling him to pull over, so, with no other cars around, he slowed his truck to a stop right in front of the roadkill and hopped out.


The scene was so much more grisly than he could have imagined. The creature had no head, no limbs, it just looked like a chest cavity and abdomen that had maybe been hit so hard by a car it exploded. That was the only explanation Paul could think of at the time. Everything that was inside of the dead creature had spilled out onto the blacktop.


But one thing that was very obviously missing from the area, was any fur, and that’s when his stomach dropped. What was left of the corpse on the road, was about the size of a full grown man.


On the chance that this was a person, though. There was no way it was just hit by a car. There were no identifying factors, like a head or hands, those had been removed from the scene. If this was a person, this was intentional…


He wondered if he should call the police, when he heard the howling of wolves in the distance. They must have smelled it and come to eat. Paul needed to get out of there quickly so he jumped back up in his truck and took off. 


He never did call it in. He said it was maybe because he really, really wanted to believe it was just an animal, but there has always been a part of him, to this day, that worries it was something else. 


Now, when I hear stories like that, all I can think about is how some highways are known to be dumping grounds for serial killers. I talked about it in the Help Wanted episode I did over the summer, when the Jack family disappeared after Ronnie Jack met a kind stranger one night who offered him a job.


The jack family was last seen in a truck heading towards the Highway of Tears, which is a stretch of Highway 16 in British Columbia. Since the 1970’s, over 80 people have been found murdered or have been reported missing along this stretch of highway. 


For instance, plenty of long haul trucks drove past a watery ditch on the side of the highway on October 10th, 1981. There was an anomaly in the lake, but no one noticed  until a man collecting firewood stumbled upon it later in the day. There, he found the body of Jean Mary Kovacs, a a 36 year old woman who had been picked up and murdered by serial killer Edward Dennis Isaac. Edward would go on to kill two more girls near the highway, both young teenagers, before his girlfriend turned him in to police. 


While people hear about these stories, no one expects to come face to face with it, but that wasn’t the case for one driver we’ll call James, who thought he might have stopped a murder from happening. 



This last story comes from a driver we’ll call James. Now we’ve heard a lot of stories today, supernatural sightings, the eerie, the unexplained, the downright chilling, but James’ story offers us something a little different. Still terrifying, though. James’ story remind us how important it is to pay attention, and how sometimes, stopping to inspect something, can make a huge different. He writes:


I service fire equipment, so I drive a box truck, and cover parts of PA, NY, OH, MD, and WV. I was in rural NW PA, returning from a service call and heading towards the interstate to go home.

On the way to this customer, I saw a small pickup truck on the interstate whose right rear tire was steadily deflating. A mile or so before my exit, they pulled off to the side. I didn't stop to see if they needed help, and felt a little bad about it.

As I drove down this dark, twisty road, I passed a Dodge Durango pulled over into a barn driveway. There was a person lying on the ground behind it, struggling with something. It looked like the guy was trying to change a tire or get the spare out from under the Durango.

Remembering the pickup from earlier, I decided to turn around and see if he needed help. I pulled into the first driveway I saw, about 1/4 mile down the road, turned around, and headed back. Halfway back, the Durango passed me, going the direction I had originally been headed.

I got back to where I had seen the Durango, planning to turn around again, but as I swung into the driveway, my headlights caught a figure lying motionless in the snow.

I stopped and jumped out just as the figure sat up. It was a woman, maybe in her 40s, in a thin, torn black skirt and top. Her hair was mussed, her eye was starting to swell, she had red marks on her throat, and her lip was bleeding.

I helped her up, got her into my truck, and cranked up the heat. I had taken my jacket off, so I gave it to her, and she covered her torso and arms.

She didn't want to say anything. Her throat was sore, and she was badly frightened. I called 911, and they dispatched a police car.

I gave her a bottle of water, and she whispered, "Thank you", then sat with her head bowed and eyes closed. It took about 15 minutes for the police car to get there, and she stayed silent.

As the car pulled in, she said, mostly to herself, "He's gonna arrest me." The trooper walked up and motioned me to exit, asked her if she needed an ambulance (she declined) then asked me what had happened.

I explained what I had seen. He wrote everything down, then talked to her for a few minutes. He helped her out of the truck and into his car. She quietly thanked me for coming back, because she thought that guy meant to kill her.

A far as I know, she wasn't arrested. She was pretty beat up, and the trooper spoke and handled her as if she were the victim of an assault. It was almost certainly a transaction (sex or drugs) that had gone badly.

I never found out what had happened. I watched the news outlets for that area for a while, but never found anything.


I think the thing that really gets me about that last story, and it’s a common theme with most of these, is the NOT KNOWING. Not knowing if you’re coming upon a stranger who just needs help with a tire change, or on a murder taking place. Not knowing what the man barking at you is capable of, not knowing what the flash of light is on the road, even not knowing if the thing you found dead on the road was person or not. 


And the last place I want to encounter the unknown is in the middle of nowhere at 2am.


So, be careful out there. I know a lot of you are driving as you’re listening to this, but just, don’t stop for any hitchikers if youre in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. I feel like I don’t have to say that but JUUUUUUSt in case. 


What’s the creepiest thing you’ve seen out on the road? You can always submit your stories to heart starts pounding. Com. Next week we’re going to dive into some mysteries. Specifically internet mysteries, ones that were solved this year. Until next time, stay curious

Kaelyn Moore
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