Spooktober Part 2: The Stranded Snowmobilers

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 thirty-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 Stranded Snowmobilers

This next tale isn’t actually something that happened to me, but is a story that was relayed to me by a guy I used to work with. Everything about this story gave me the chills the first time I heard it, which is probably why it has stuck with me over the years, and why I wanted to include it here.

When I was in high school I had a job working in the warehouse for Witmark Catalog Showrooms. Part of our responsibilities in the warehouse was to receive twice a week semi-truck deliveries of stock from our main warehouse and distribution center on 28th Street in Grand Rapids. Ironically, Witmark had two main semi-truck drivers, a guy named Steve Whittenbach (I’m hoping I got that right?) who went by “Whit”, and another guy named Mark something (for the life of me I can’t remember what his last name was)—so “Whit” and “Mark,” if you’re playing along at home.

Well, since a steady stream of merchandise was the lifeblood of Witmark and other catalog showrooms like Service Merchandise and Best Products, us warehouse guys spent a lot of time unloading trucks and breaking down and putting away freight. As you can imagine, we got to know the semi-truck drivers pretty well, since at a minimum, you’d spend a couple of hours every few days conversing with them as you helped them unload their trailer two or three pallets at a time. After you had done it a while, you could maneuver the pallet jack onto the hydraulic scissor lift almost as good as they could, to the point that most times they would just let us warehouse guys do all of the work while they ran to use the bathroom or refill their travel mug with fresh coffee from the employee break room. Without fail, we would always treat both of them as if they were just one of the guys, and we would tend to include them in whatever riveting subject that we happened to be discussing that particular day.

They were both good guys with infectious personalities and great senses of humor, but Whit was by far the more outgoing, boisterous of the two, while Mark tended to be a bit more reserved. Whit might drop a dirty joke on you or unexpectedly bust your balls, while you could spend two hours with Mark, and only get six sentences out of him. Don’t get me wrong, Mark would talk to you, but he just wasn’t the type of person to talk just for talk’s sake – an important detail that will be more meaningful later in this story.

Well, on this particular day Mark was the driver delivering the semi-truck trailer full of freight. Shortly after pulling up to the loading dock behind the building, he came into the receiving area to find that all of us warehouse guys were taking turns telling various spooky stories. I had shared my encounter with the creepy hitchhiker guy that I had talked about in part one of this blog series, while my friend Mike Dinter told numerous blood-chilling stories about growing up in a house in Owosso that he was convinced was haunted by a little kid ghost, who seemed to want nothing more than to have Mike join him in the afterlife, so the two of them could be junior-sized specter playmates for all of eternity. Story after story, we each took turns trying to one up each other. And the whole while, Mark just stood there listening.

After about an hour, Mark broke his silence, saying that he once had something happen to him that he couldn’t really explain. As you might expect, considering the source, this completely caught us warehouse guys off guard, and we were all ears as we anxiously waited for him to continue with his story.

The Teenage Broncin’ Buck

Mark started his story by telling us about  this time he attended a dance at his high school. Typical Americana teenager stuff, some winter formal or homecoming dance held in the school’s gym. I can’t remember where he said he had grown up, but I believe it was a rural community in west Michigan somewhere, and that he had lived way out in the boonies.

When Mark finally left the dance that night, he walked out to the school’s parking lot to find his pick-up truck covered in a heavy blanket of snow. I don’t know why, but the combination of him leaving a high school dance and the image of him as a teenager driving away in a pick-up truck always reminds me of that line from Don McLean’s song, “American Pie”. Now all of you will have that in your heads for the rest of the day. You’re welcome!

Mark said that they had gotten a pretty big blizzard that night, and that conditions were poor, which he knew would make things move slowly for him on his way home. As Mark described it, he lived way out in the country, out in the middle of a bunch of farm land.

Well, there was this one part of his regular route that took him through an area with some property that was owned by the airport. He described it as this two or three mile stretch with tall, chain link fence on either side of the road, running the entire length of the airport property.

About half way down this road that intersected the airport property, Mark said that he passed a couple of snowmobilers who were broken down on the side of the road. He said that he remembered thinking that because of where they were, way out in the middle of nowhere, it might be hours before another vehicle came by, so he decided he needed to turn around and go back to see if he could help them.

He did a three-point turn around in the snow-covered road, and drove to the snowmobilers in the process of troubleshooting the problem with their sled. He parked some fifteen or twenty feet behind them on the shoulder of the road, exited his pick-up truck and approached the pair.

As he got closer he saw that it was a man and a woman, a husband and wife he presumed. They exchanged pleasantries, before Mark asked them what was going on with their snowmobile.

The man said that they had been running along fine, and then all of a sudden, the sled just sputtered to a stop. He was sure they had plenty of gas, so it wasn’t that. The man had tried several different times to fire up the snowmobile, but couldn’t get it to where he could keep it running.

Mark knelt down to get a closer look at the snowmobile’s engine and tinkered around with a few belts and hoses, looking for anything that might be a possible source of the problem. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, Mark floated this idea that when you have a bad spark plug, you can try moving the spark plugs around, and sometimes that will temporarily fix the problem. Well, seeing as if they were fresh out of other things to try, they agreed to let Mark test out his faulty spark plug theory.

Mark walked back to his pick-up truck, and after retrieving a small tool box out of the cab, proceeded to loosen the spark plugs with a ratchet.

After he was finished tightening everything back down and had reattached the spark plug wires, he gave the man the go ahead to try starting the sled.

Of course, it fired right up. The man and woman thanked him profusely for all of his help, and before parting ways, Mark cautioned them that it was just a temporary fix, and as soon as they could, they should probably replace all of their spark plugs with new ones.

After climbing back onto their sled, the man and woman gave Mark a final wave before taking off, as he turned around to walk back to his truck.

Even before he reached the door of his pick-up, Mark had noticed how he could no longer hear the trailing off sound of the snowmobile, which he thought was odd. Once he was inside his truck, peering out through his partially snow-covered windshield, he noticed that he could no longer see it anywhere either.

He figured that the couple must have cut across the airport property through some undetected break in the chain-link fence that he hadn’t noticed before. Out of curiosity, he decided to drive down a little ways to confirm his suspicions. He began to methodically scan both sides of the road, but he couldn’t see any breaks in the fence, and no signs of the snowmobilers anywhere. Even more strange, he couldn’t see any evidence of snowmobile tracks.

At first, he thought this must be because of how hard it was snowing and that the amount of accumulation must have covered over the tracks before he could get to them. He would soon realize that wasn’t the case.

He went about a quarter mile down the road before proceeding to do another three-point turn around to get his truck headed back in the direction of home. When he drove back to where he had stopped to help the stranded snowmobilers, he got an intense chill. He threw his pick-up into park, and got out so he could walk over and take a closer look at what he thought he was seeing.

As he walked across the snow-covered road he could clearly see where he had parked his truck on the opposite shoulder. He could see all of the tracks he had made when he got out of his truck, and could see his footprints from going to meet the snowmobilers. But that was it.

He couldn’t find any snowmobile tracks, not even where the broken-down sled had obviously been parked while he worked on it. And no footprints from the man or woman he had helped. It was as if they had never been there.

Not believing what he was seeing, he circled the area one more time. Again, he could see both of the places where he had done his three-point turn arounds, where he had stopped to help the stranded couple, but no evidence of them or their snowmobile.

Eek!

Okay, when Mark had gotten to this point in the story I had giant goosebumps all over my arms – just like I have right now as I retell his tale.

I remember immediately asking him how he reacted, thinking that if it was me, I would have probably lost my mind. But in typical Mark fashion, he just nonchalantly downplayed his encounter with these probable paranormal entities, like it was some normal thing that happened all of the time.

Whether they were ghosts or something else, Mark never felt frightened before, during or after his encounter with the snowmobilers. As he explained it, he thought his run in with the man and woman that night had been some sort of test, that he believed God will occasionally put us in these types of situations to see how we will react.

Well if it had been me that night, and God was wondering whether I would react by involuntarily scharding at the sight of some winter recreation loving apparitions, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

All jokes aside, Mark’s is an interesting take on the whole guardian angel concept. Mark had done the right thing, he had helped the couple out, so in his mind, he must have passed the test. Nothing to be afraid of, right? 

Besides that, why should he be scared of an entity who could have been anyone else that he would have done the same thing for on any other day? In other words, using his logic, there might be all sorts of other forces from the spirit world living among us, interacting with us from time to time. So, who’s to say how prevalent these sorts of supernatural experiences are, and how many times our good deeds were actually being directed at a ghost, and we hadn’t even known it? 

Eek! I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.

I suppose the take-away here is to just be a good person? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which is especially important when you are talking about something that has the potential to haunt, torment and relentlessly scare the shit out of you.

But I guess he’s right (I say with zero confidence and conviction in my voice). Ghosts aren’t necessarily something we need to fear. I think mostly what we are afraid of is the fear of the unknown. 

Mark’s is an interesting theory, but for me personally, I’d prefer to just leave it at that: A theory. Nothing against guardian angels or whatever those things were, I’m just not that into ghosts, even benign ones like those of the stranded snowmobiler or Casper the friendly ghost variety. 

I’ve thought long and hard on it, and I came to the conclusion that I don’t ever need to undergo one of these divine intervention character building tests. If anybody’s listening up there, no thank you, I’m good.

At the end of the day, I’m  just glad that there are good Samaritan types like Mark out there who keep pushing their way to the front of the line. As far as I’m concerned, I’m perfectly fine with them having a monopoly on late night encounters with phantom snowmobilers.

Thank god for Mark and the others like him, because I’m not exactly sure what I would do if my number ever got called.