Spooktober Part 1: The Hitchhiker

Have you ever had something creepy happen to you that you just couldn’t explain? A spooky experience that made your hair stand on end and sent shivers down your spine? Are you haunted by some inexplicable encounter with someone or something that scared you – I mean really scared you – and shook your entire belief system to its core?

You might have told yourself that you were just being ridiculous, that the thing you thought you saw, or that noise you heard must have been something you dreamed, or was just a product of your overactive imagination. Maybe you continue to try and rationalize and explain away supposed paranormal activity and supernatural phenomenon, pointing to the lack of empirical data as proof that there is little to no science to support the existence of ghostly apparitions, malevolent spirits and demonic forces. But what if you’re just fooling yourself, constantly trying to convince your skeptical self that these things of nightmares couldn’t possibly be real, because the alternative is absolutely terrifying?

As a fun way to get everyone into the Halloween spirit, and in a nod to comedian Dan Cummins and his wife Lynze, hosts of my new favorite podcast, Scared to Death, I thought I would present a special multi-part blog series to share some of my own “personal tales of terror.”

The following collection of spooky stories are based on actual events that happened to me, my friends and family at different points over an approximately 30-year period. I will try my best not to embellish details, and stick to the facts as I remember them, which shouldn’t be a problem, since like most scary stories, I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the chilling circumstances surrounding these events, no matter how hard I try.

For more spooky stories, check out the Scared to Death podcast on Pandora, YouTube, or at scaredtodeathpodcast.com.

And if you like what you hear, be sure to give them a positive rating or review!

The Hitchhiker

When I was 14, I went on a long road trip with my dad, step-mom Carolyn and my half-brother Tony. We drove down to drop my step-mom off in Sedalia, Missouri, so that she could attend her high school class reunion and visit family, while my dad, Tony and I continued on to Branson, Missouri, to tent-camp for the week near the Lake Taneycomo Reservoir.

Now, because we had planned on tent-camping for the entire week, my dad had loaded a small cargo trailer up full of all of our gear to pull behind his older model Chevy conversion van. Shortly after arriving in Missouri, we started noticing an unusual and  persistent vibration which appeared to be coming from the trailer, and upon closer inspection, my dad realized that the trailer hitch had just been mounted to the van’s bumper, which was now precariously hanging off the rear of the vehicle. My dad decided he needed to address the problem with the hitch before attempting the long drive back to Michigan. So, he took his van to a local auto shop to have an aftermarket Reese hitch welded onto the undercarriage of his van. This detail, as you will soon find out, will become more relevant later in the story.

Well, the rest of the week went off without a hitch (pun intended).

Now, this was in the late ’80s back before Branson had really been built up as this sort of country music Mecca, when it would become known for people from all over the U.S., making the long pilgrimage to  the area to visit one theater after the other to watch their favorite country music acts perform live each night. Well, since none of us were big country music fans, my dad, half-brother and I kept busy doing a bunch of other touristy-type stuff: things like go to the local water park, take a duck boat ride and rent a boat to fish Lower Lake Taneycomo.

Gone Fishing

Just a quick side note about fishing Lower Lake Taneycomo before I go on. As I remember it, Lower Lake Taneycomo draws water off of the bottom of Upper Lake Taneycomo through giant hydroelectric turbines housed in the base of the Powersite Dam which is several hundred feet tall. Because sunlight can’t penetrate the water at that depth, the flow of the ice-cold water being drawn off the bottom of the dam never allows the temperature of Lower Lake Taneycomo to get above 40-some degrees. And did I mention the current? The current that’s generated by the massive hydroelectric turbines is so powerful, that the locals say if you accidentally capsize your boat, you literally have less than a couple of minutes to swim to shore or have someone pull you to safety before the frigid temperatures paralyze your muscles and cause you to drown.

Now, this sort of exaggerated grown-up scare tactic doesn’t always work or have the intended effect on young, impressionable kids, unless of course, this thing that the adults are telling you seems as plausible as it does terrifying. Of course, the potential threat  seemed much more real after spending a day fishing Lower Lake Taneycomo from a small 3-person boat, and experiencing first-hand, what it’s like to constantly work against the lake’s fast-moving current. Every twenty minutes or so, we would have to open up the throttle on the outboard motor to power our fishing boat back up towards the dam, before switching to the trolling motor, which we would use to keep our rig centered between the two shores as the current took over and sent us drifting back in the direction from which we just came. The current was so strong, that you would have to repeat this process over and over and over again, making the body of water we were fishing resemble a turbulent river more so than your typical tranquil lake.

Well, the day after we rented the boat to fish Lower Lake Taneycomo, we were just hanging out down by the shore. Tony was screwing around down by the water’s edge, walking from one half submerged rock to another, when he lost his balance and fell into the lake. Now the water was only eighteen inches deep in the spot where Tony fell, but I think he was so freaked out by the previous day’s talk of the lake’s fast moving current and frigid temps that he panicked. In a flash, Tony sprung up from the water and onto the shore with cat-like reflexes, visibly shaken by what his brain was obviously still processing as a close call. It was one of the funniest, and simultaneously, one of the most impressive physical feats that I have ever seen.

Okay, now back to the spooky shit…

Riding Shotgun

After our week’s long vacation in Missouri it was time to head back to Michigan. I can’t exactly remember why, but instead of going back through St. Louis, we followed a more southeasterly route that took us through some rural parts of southern Illinois. Shortly after crossing over the state line, my dad, who had been up since 5 a.m., asked my step-mom if she would take over driving for a while so he could get a few hours of sleep. Since I was wide awake, I volunteered to move up front and ride shotgun to keep my step-mom company while my dad napped in the back seat next to Tony.

It was just starting to get dark when Carolyn took over driving. The Chevy conversion van’s headlights didn’t have much to illuminate, except for the long barren asphalt road surface stretching out before us. I don’t know if it was because it was late on a Sunday night, or if it had to do with being out in the middle of nowhere, but there was so little traffic on the highway, I could literally count on one hand the number of vehicles we saw in either direction. My step-mom and I talked about it afterward, and agreed that for the approximately 2.5 hours that she was driving, we maybe saw three or four cars headed south, and could only remember having passed one car in the northbound lanes of traffic. We were almost certain that no vehicle had passed us at any time. Of course, we couldn’t be 100 percent sure, but it just seemed like something we would have remembered because of the unusually low volume of traffic on the road that night.

About a half hour into Carolyn’s shift, the last remnants of dusk had disappeared, replaced by an oppressive darkness made more intense by the cloudy, moonless night sky. We drove on, mile after mile down the desolate highway, listening to the radio and making the occasional small talk.

It was just about then that up ahead on the distant horizon, I saw the faintest of objects coming into focus. As we got closer I could more clearly tell it was a man. He was walking on the shoulder of the highway, and as he saw us approach, he turned toward us to thumb for a ride.

At this point, I still didn’t think anything out of the ordinary. 

Personally, I myself would never hitchhike, but hey, it’s a free world, so who am I to judge? Actually, I’m pretty sure hitchhiking is illegal, although most hitchhiking types probably aren’t concerning themselves with some petty civil infraction. My guess is that they have much more, and considerably worse shit to worry about. I also would never just willy-nilly pick up some stranger, and I don’t believe that any rational, sane person ever would. The fact is that the world’s a scary place, and there are too many true-crime shows that end with bad things happening to good people, so why put yourself in a dangerous position in the first place? 

Admittedly, it would be different if it was a stranded motorist situation or the scene of some accident where the person is in obvious distress, but this guy was neither. He was just some random dude walking along the side of the highway in the middle of the night. You know, completely normal behavior…for an escaped felon! 

As crazy as it seemed, this guy was proof that there were still people out there who hitchhiked, and I’m sure he had his own perfectly good reasons for doing so, which thankfully, I’ll never know since you’ll never, ever find me picking up a psychopath murderer. I mean hitchhiker.

Now this is when things started to get weird.

As we began to close the distance between us and the hitchhiker, I found my gaze transfixed on the stranger. I couldn’t help it, I was curious, and wanted to use those fleeting seconds as we passed by him to gather whatever information about him I could, maybe try to understand what it was that he was doing there.

Just before we passed by him, the widening beams of our headlights momentarily lit him up from head to toe, and it was then I got my first, and only real good look at the hitchhiker. He was wearing big, heavy boots, dark pants and a military or hunting style jacket. He also had on a large backpack which was bursting at the seams (probably full of his dis-membered victims, I surmised). He was of medium-build and average height, with long, dark hair, and from what I could tell, appeared to have a scruffy beard and mustache.

Above all else, there was one feature of his that I will never forget. His eyes.

I know it had to have been my imagination, but it was as if his dark eyes and vacant stare seemed to pierce through the night to look directly into my soul. Even now, I realize how ludicrous this sounds, since from his perspective, he was looking directly into the bright head lamps of a van speeding toward him, so it would have been impossible for him to see anything other than an unrecognizable blur of streaking light and steel.

The rational part of my brain understood this, but it didn’t change the fact that it felt like he made eye contact with me as our van sped by, as impossible as that seemed.

Before I could even react, my step-mom let out an audible gasp. I turned to look at her and gave her an inquisitive, “What?”. She responded by telling me that she got a strange feeling that she had made eye contact with the hitchhiker as we passed him by, which was made even more creepy when I shared with her that I had experienced the exact same feeling. We talked about the strange occurrence for a few more minutes, trading whatever details about the guy that we could remember, and then eventually shrugged it off, chalking it up to our imaginations working overtime as we drove through this dark, eerie and unfamiliar landscape. It was creepy, but just a strange coincidence, that’s all. At least, that’s what we told ourselves in an attempt to explain away the uneasy feeling that we were still trying to shake off.

Exactly Where In The Hell Are We?

We drove on in relative silence for the next couple of hours, continuing north on this remote stretch of  divided highway that didn’t appear to connect, well, anything. I recall thinking how odd it was that for almost two hours, we continued to drive on through the vast emptiness, seeming as if we were making our way across no place and nowhere in particular. 

While there are still many parts of the U.S. that I have yet to see, including the expansive lands out west, I have done my fair share of traveling over the years. We have made the long trip down to Florida multiple times, and driven down to Texas on two different occasions. We have visited family in Nebraska, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. We even made a trip out to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, one January, and opted for a southern route on our return trip which took us through Iowa on the way to my sister’s place in Terra Haute, Indiana, which I estimated got us within an hour of something like eight or nine Big Ten campuses by the time we had completed our sweeping, multi-state loop. I figure that I have traveled through something like 23 of the 50 states at this point in my life, mostly in the central and southeastern parts of the country. 

I tell you all of this, because in the years since, I have thought often about this desolate stretch of highway in southern Illinois, because I can’t recall another stretch of road anywhere else that was quite like it. Sure, I have traveled the interstate that cuts through the windmill dotted plains of the Iowa cornfields, but despite the lack of people and buildings and noticeable population centers, even these rural routes tend to always have heavy truck traffic, not to mention an assortment of 24/7 gas stations and truck stops to service weary travelers. My sister Pam and I once had to take this remote two-lane highway through the Texas desert south of San Antonio on the way down to McAllen, Texas, but that was different. We were traveling during the daylight and it wasn’t your typical divided highway. No, I struggle to come up with a good comparison, even to the point that I have thought about going back to try and retrace our route to research the area on the map and figure out exactly where this all took place, hoping that a broader scan of our surroundings would offer up some clues as to why this section of interstate would be in such an eerie setting like something out of a Stephen King novel (no offense to those people who actually have to live in southern Illinois, I’m sure it’s a lovely place in the daylight)!

Our approximately two-hour relative silence was finally broken by a loud clanking sound coming from the rear of the van. My step-mom woke my dad, alerting him to the rattling noise and suggesting that it sounded like something might be wrong with the new hitch. My dad told her to pull off onto the shoulder so that he could get out and inspect the hitch and trailer.

After slowing to a stop, my dad exited the van through the rear passenger door that was located right behind where I was sitting. A couple of minutes passed as my dad continued to inspect the hitch and trailer, looking for any obvious issues with the ball, receiver and pin assembly, while also getting down on the ground to peer under the van to see if he could detect any evidence of a faulty weld on the newly installed Reese hitch.

While all of this was going on, my step-mom unbuckled her seat belt and started getting up from the driver’s seat to crawl through the opening between the two front seats. Now that my dad was awake, she assumed he was probably going to want to drive again, so she would  just move to the back for a while. Just as Carolyn was balancing a knee on the console between the two front seats, awkwardly contorting her body to allow her to step through and into the back of the van, I caught something in my peripheral vision that made me just about lose my shit.

Walking right on by my window, just a couple of feet away from me, was that same hitchhiker from earlier in the night.

I instantly screamed, which in turn startled Carolyn, since she was still in a prone position right next to my seat. After pulling herself the rest of the way through the opening, she turned around to ask what was going on, and quickly saw for herself what had caused my reaction. We looked in disbelief at the hitchhiker, and both of us agreed that it was the same guy that we had seen some two hours earlier. The two of us just sat there and watched as the hitchhiker continued walking on ahead, eventually disappearing off into the darkness beyond the reach of the van’s headlights.

After what seemed like forever, my dad finally made his way around the opposite side of the van, opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. We quickly brought my dad up to speed, asking whether he noticed the hitchhiker while he was back checking on the trailer and hitch, curious if the guy had stopped to say anything to him, because it seemed odd that he had just continued walking on by, when I would have expected some drifter out in the middle of nowhere to stop at the first vehicle that had come by in more than two hours, and maybe rap on the window to ask for a ride (which by the way, would have definitely made me shit my pants).

But, my dad hadn’t noticed him. The hitchhiker hadn’t stopped to say anything to him or to us, which didn’t make sense, and just served to creep us out more.

In fact, he hadn’t heard anything. Not the sound of the guy walking by, no scuffs of heavy boots walking through gravel, nothing. Granted, my dad had been making quite a bit of his own noise as he shook and banged on the tongue of the trailer and hitch. But still.

And where did the guy come from? We hadn’t noticed him as we pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway, and surely, we would have driven right past him for him to be able to walk on by our vehicle just a few minutes later. My dad, believing that we were being a bit hysterical, suggested that we somehow missed seeing him on the side of the road when our attention had turned to all of the commotion going on with the trailer. My dad theorized that he had likely hitched a ride with another vehicle that must have passed us at some point. This other vehicle probably dropped him off somewhere down the road, and that’s how he wound up ahead of us. But that didn’t make sense either, as we explained to my dad that we had only seen one other vehicle heading north like us, and we had passed it, and not the other way around. My dad had an explanation for that too, saying that we had likely got distracted as we were talking and carrying on, so hadn’t noticed the other cars or trucks passing us by.

But Carolyn and I weren’t buying any of it. We stuck to our story, and insisted that there was something very strange about this hitchhiker. My dad, still unfazed by our claims that all of this weird stuff had happened, seemed more annoyed than freaked out, while we were eager for him to get back on the road and catch up to the drifter so he could get a good look at the guy for himself. Eventually, my dad turned off the hazards, shifted the van into drive, and started to gradually accelerate as he merged back onto the highway. As we got back up to cruising speed, we started to nervously scan the horizon for any signs of the hitchhiker off in the distance, expecting at any moment to see our headlights illuminate his creepy silhouette walking along the side of the road, but to our dismay, that didn’t happen.

We never did see him again. It appeared that he had just vanished into thin air, which of course, just added to the creepiness of the whole episode. 

I have always considered myself a skeptic. I’m not someone who necessarily believes in the paranormal. But it’s been more than 30 years and I still don’t have any other plausible theories for what it was that we experienced that night. Part of me believes that there must be some logical explanation, but the other part of me is truly frightened to consider the alternative, afraid that I might not like knowing what it actually was that we encountered on that dark, desolate stretch of highway in some remote part of southern Illinois.

That mysterious night that we crossed paths with the hitchhiker.