Have you ever experienced anything weird on the road?

In the hundreds of thousands of miles I've driven, there's only place I never ever want to drive through again.  It was 2008, I-40, Texas.

I was driving to California for a TDY, Hurricane Ike was about to berkeley the coast raw, so at Hwy 231 I had to divert north to St Louis and get on I-40.
All was fine, all was well.
Then I got to Texas. Pretty enough in its own right I guess, but desolate. Then I needed to get gas. Pulled off the interstate (no exit ramps along that stretch of I-40, you just pull off with no place to slow down) and headed into some unnamed hellmouth of a town. Mix between Hills Have Eyes and Tull from the first Dark Tower novel. Middle of the '08 recession so damned near everything in town was shuttered. The only thing moving in the town were old people turning their heads to watch me as I drove past because I was the only thing obviously alive in town. Dead dog in the middle of the road no one had done anything about. berkeleying creepy.

Fuel and park the truck, for some reason I felt the need to put my hand in my pocket to make sure my pistol was there; walked into this general store/feed store/gas station to grab something to hold me over till I get to the next town with some semblance of life. I grab some doritos and a pepsi and wander back through the aisles and find this old man at the register. Wasn't there when I went in, didn't hear him moving around to get where he was, just there.
Skin dry and cracked like old leather. Strange smell to him that hit me even across the counter. Resinous? Rotten leather and cotton. Kind of waxy. He didn't say anything, looked at the stuff I had on the counter and hit a button on the register. I swiped my card and looked up and he was grinning at me. Unsettling doesn't begin to explain it.

Got in the truck and hauled ass. Opened the soda and took a swig, immediately spat it out of the window. Tasted foul, just... bad, wrong somehow. I threw everything I had picked up from the store out the window and floored it till I got to New Mexico.

Couldn't pay me enough to go back there.

Everything about it was off.  From the no exit ramp to the bad soda.  It was like a bad Stephen King short story.

At least the fuel worked...

In reply to Mr_Asa :

Sounds like that Charlie Daniels song about the flat tire.

Weirdest thing I've seen was an abandoned facility I drove through on an offroad rally. It was in the middle of nowhere, it had lots of small buildings that I peeked into as I drove by, they had blackboards and things on the walls that made them look like childrens' classrooms, but they also had huge cages in them!? I glanced in muItiple buildings and saw the same thing, I was wondering what the heck this creepy place was.

Turns out it started out as a US Navy base and was then used as a school, and then as a temporary prison. Mystery solved

Second weirdest was also on an offroad rally, I quickly rounded a corner onto the same street as my navigator's house. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw a guy at a bus stop having an argument with the bus stop sign. I asked my navigator, "Dean, was that guy arguing with a bus stop sign just now?" He calmly answered something to the effect of "Yeah he's crazy as berkeley" and moved on to the next instruction

Not really the same level of creepy.  More ironic.  This is the town of Hope New Mexico

There's really no signs of hope in Hope NM.  The place is pretty much abandoned.

This is the fire house.  It's been unused since, well it caught on fire.

We were doing an overnight run to chicago from Columbus. It's about a 6-7 hour drive and it's just easier to get the kids to sleep in the back while we drive up front. We were on a tiny country road in the absolute middle of nowhere at about 3am and a blue light caught my eye. It was a Pepsi vending machine, in a parking lot, about 20 yards off to the side of the road. And then I noticed that two people were walking up to it, to get a soda. Again in the absolute boonies at 3am in the parking lot of what looked like a run down warehouse. It wasn't creepy just bizarre like a Wes Anderson film or something. 

I was driving north on I-71 around Sparta, KY when I saw a convertible Mustang coming south.  At the wheel was a dude wearing one of those Viking helmets with the horns and everything.  He had one hand on the wheel and the other was a raised fist in the air. 

To this day I have no idea what was going on, but he was definitely having a better day than me.

I saw a guy one pull over.  Punch his female passenger in the head and then speed off.  
 

pre cell phone. 

Welcome to rural America!  It's a big big world out there, and you will see all sorts of strange things.  I could make a list (pages). 

Lots of stories after around two million road miles.

I was coming down the long six per cent grade on the Okanagon connector one night, with 80,000 pounds of freight behind my Freightliner and there was a bull on the highway, long pointy horned and all. I could not stop so I leaned on my air horn. He accepted the challenge and charged my truck, head down. I am so happy I missed him because we were both going to lose.

In keeping with animal stories I  was driving down an empty highway in the wee hours, half asleep myself and a horse galloped by me, full speed in the opposite direction. That woke me up.  

And in 1998 I bought a new Western Star. On my second night an owl came straight through the passenger window. Holy E36 M3 does that get your heart going. Glass weverywhere and a very dead owl on the seat beside me.

Here is the ghost story:

Coming over the Coquihalla one day and i got to the top of Johnson Hill and saw a Ford pickup barrel rolling into a snow bank in the opposite direction. That's when I realized the road was a sheet of black ice. I stopped and ran down to help. There were two guys. One was dazed but functional and one was okay. I talked to them and hung around until the ambulance and police arrived 40 minutes later. Two weeks later i got a call from the RCMP and the officer wanted to know if i knew anything about the third passenger. Apparently he was asleep in the back seat and was thrown out. I was there forty minutes and neither guy mentioned him. The officer thought he was in the snowbank but they had not found him two weeks later. I never got another call so i so not know how that ended.

Anyone who hasn't...hasn't spent enough time on the road.

 

I was traveling from Lexington, KY to NYC on Memorial day weekend.
 

I stopped in a very rural interstate rest stop in Ohio. The bathrooms didn't even have full walls extending to the ceilings. As I pulled into my parking space, I noticed that the car on my right had the trunk lock broken out.

  Traffic was heavy, and it was the only empty space. I'm in my Dodge Dart, the other car is a virtually identical Plymouth Valiant. I noted that it had a single exhaust on the right side, so they were both six cylinder cars, which was quickly going to be relevant.

I went and emptied my bladder, and since I could see over the wall, I was able to see the driver of the adjacent car staring at me. When I got back to my car, I grabbed a sandwich out of the trunk, and saw that he had the door mirror turned so he could watch me.

I got back in the car while considering my next move. I figured I was pretty safe there, since the place was full of travelers. The other driver had adjusted the mirror so he could still watch me. The situation had progressed from, "that's weird," to "I've got to control what happens next. "

I've got my door open in case I need to exit the car quickly, but I'm pretending to be oblivious as I eat the sandwich. Next, some older man walks up, gets within the space between me and my open door, and starts some inane conversation about nothing, travel, the weather, etc. I don't know if the two of them are working together, but I decided I needed to act.

I was watching everything happening in the lot, and behind me I saw a motor home start slowly towards the entrance ramp to the highway.
 

I quickly told the guy on my left to back up, shut my door and started my car, going immediately into reverse and backing out of the space. The other driver had started his car simultaneously, so he obviously had been sitting with his hand on the key. His reverse lights were on, but he couldn't move, as I had him boxed in. I sat there watching the motorhome, then floored it, timing it to just beat the motorhome to the start of the entrance ramp, where the ramp narrowed to one lane. As I cleared the front of the motorhome, I could see the Valiant pull out, but get stuck behind the motorhome. 

I had a fresh long block in the dart, with a big block radiator. It was capable of running flat out without overheating, so that's what I did. By the time I saw the Valiant clear the motorhome, I was doing 95+ and he had no chance of catching me.

I backed down to about 85 after opening up a long gap, and held my speed until he was out of sight. About ten miles up the road, I exited onto another highway and ran about ten miles to the next exit.
 

I got off, crossed the overpass, and parked on the entrance ramp facing back the way I had come. I opened the trunk, unzipped the case on my shotgun, and left it in the trunk with the lid ajar while watching the oncoming traffic.

I sat there long enough to be sure that he wasn't coming, and then got back on the highway and went back onto my original route. Ten more miles down the road, I pass another rest stop, and there's the Valiant.
 

I got off at the next exit, called the highway patrol, and explained my experience.

That was the last of it until about 10 years ago when I happened to see a picture of this guy. He was living in that part of Ohio at the time. I can't ever be sure, but the moment I saw his picture, I was sure it was him.

You mean like an alien in the road in the middle of the night  of the most desolate part of the drive when I was headed back to college?  Nah!

In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :

Jesus Christ, man.

Driving down the 401  to Toronto I passed a naked guy  on the shoulder who was jerking off to traffic going by. Does that count?

Not my story, but a great uncle.

He was a CHP motorcycle cop in the 60s and 70s.  He pulled over this hippie van and the driver as none other than Charles Manson.  He admitted to speeding, but he was contrite and articulate.  They stood next to the van talking for a few minutes until the side doors opened and several young girls hopped out.  The question on their lips was "can we start?"  Manson shooed them back into the van and my Great Uncle, feeling shaken, let them go with a warning.

A couple of weeks later, Sharon Tate was dead.  

I was driving the ~50 mile commute to work one morning in my 96 Miata. It was all rural 2-lane roads, in November after the harvest.

About 4 miles from home I had to make a left turn onto another road that was slightly more than 90*. This corner had a median between the right turn lane & other lanes. Since it was still dark & the fields were bare I could tell there wasn't any oncoming traffic, and since I was running a bit late I took the shortcut by going the wrong direction through the turn lane. 
 

So I'm going about 35mph & hit what was likely a little bit of spilled corn, causing the rear to break loose. No big deal. Except as my headlights pointed toward the ditch they caught a figure. I expected it was a deer, especially given the location & time of year, but the more I oversteered & my lights washed over it, the more concerned I got. 
 

The best way I could describe it is basically about 3'-5' high - there's a ditch there, but not a very deep one, and I'm not sure if it was in the ditch, or on the shoulder of the road. It was nearly featureless, with a bit of wrinkling over its surface, and fairly large red eyes that glowed from the reflection of my headlights. About that moment I decided I should really catch the back end before I ended up in the same ditch, so I did & proceeded to work at a rather brisk pace. 
 

It appeared bipedal. I couldn't make out any limbs, extremities, facial features, or even discern its head from the rest of its body. I've never seen anything like it before or since. I'm not into the whole ghosts/monsters/aliens/bigfoot/etc. stuff, but I have no idea what it was. It wasn't there when I drove back home that evening, and I never saw it again. There weren't any bears anywhere near our area, probably for at least a couple hundred miles, and although it's rural, it's nearly all farmland, so it's not unoccupied. If there had been a bear(or any other unusual creature) in the area it's quite likely someone would have seen it, and news of it would have spread around. 

carguy123 said:

You mean like an alien in the road in the middle of the night  of the most desolate part of the drive when I was headed back to college?  Nah!

And of course I'm picturing this (the lyrics are 'NSFW': it's Tool, and note the blue redacts below)

Coming back from San Diego to NH I had just purchased the Cayman and my wife flew out for the drive home. First stretch was to visit an uncle in Moab. Almost to Moab and we are sucking fumes, need fuel.

It was late as it was a haul from SD, windy AF, and we pull into this creepy ass gas station. 

There were cats everywhere, sand blowing in the wind, lights on in the building but the blinds/shutters were closed. The Mystery Machine and Lightning McQueen were just plain weird.

I splashed in about a gallon of overpriced gas and wheels spinning shot back onto the road.

I will never go back there.

I'm not gonna say that the people who reside in Lucas Kansas are pod people.   But the people of Lucas Kansas are pod people.

In 2019 I had the whole fam damily in a minivan coming back from Colorado.  To break up the monotony of Kansas I asked the kids to find the coolest roadside attraction.   Some sort of "the worlds second biggest ball of twine" or the like.

My daughter finds such on her phone and we start trekking WAAY too far off the interstate to get to the Worlds biggest museum of the worlds smallest models of the worlds biggest things.  (Seriously)   
 

And this town is weird.   Really weird.   We only saw a couple of actual humans but the movie theater was playing Spider-Man (10 years after the release)  and at 2 in the afternoon on a Monday the theater was full.  My son snuck in (nobody selling tickets) and said that damn near every seat was occupied.    Cars and trucks on the Main Street almost all had their keys in the ignition.   Weird town.

When you're on the road a lot, you see things. Sometimes you think you're seeing things.

I'll share one example. It wasn't as weird as I thought. Maybe.

https://www.ohiomagazine.com/ohio-life/article/-the-futuro-house

Not the road, but other forms of travel:

Flying across the country with my dad. Pretty sure we were going from CA to Oshkosh. We're going across Wyoming and my dad's looking at the map when he goes, "What the hell?"

Points to an entry on the flight map:

Of course we had to check out the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. 

It was just a big dirt runway in the middle of Wyoming. Apparently in 1994 the Green River city council designated this landing field as the "Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport", for inhabitants of Jupiter who might wish to take sanctuary in Green River in the event their planet is threatened by collisions from comets or meteors. So not weirdos, just people with a sense of humor.

Sailing up the Caribbean... 

Because rich people can be weird shiny happy people too.

In college in 2004, my step brother and I helped my dad ferry his boat up Island from the USVI to Ft. Lauderdale. We pulled into a harbor at Nassau to rest. We'd been making blue water passage for a couple days and wanted to get onto dry land, talk to someone other than each other, and get a drink.

We look around the harbor at the buildings/wharfs... "Private villa. Private villa. Private villa... That one looks like a resort."

We approach in the dinghy and this resort starts looking weird. There are giant stone urns along the beach, a disco building, Swiss Family Robinson treehouses, volleyball courts, a giant cobra head. It looked like a bizarre fever dream mashup of Disney Adventure Land and a Las Vegas casino.

We pull up and are greated by a tastelessly rich couple.

"Hey, is this like an all-inclusive resort? Or is there a beach bar where we could come ashore and get a drink?"

He looks at her. She looks at him. They smirk at each other. He turns to us and responds, "This is Lyford Cay, an exclusive private community..." and proceeds to suggest we plebs pull up anchor and sail around to another cove.

So we pirated his Wifi connection (internet pirates of the Caribbean!) and looked up to see what this place was. Turned out this place is full of ultra-rich people - the Bacardi family, Sean Connery, Henry Ford II - and this particular eyesore is the gaudy sex villa of a Canadian fashion mogul who had apparently pissed off all his neighbors by building such an atrocity.

...

I also have the story of how my grandfather nearly murdered a corrupt, racist southern cop on the side of the road back in the 50's. But that's not really "weird".

Maybe not odd to some?

Driving to Haleyville, Alabama on a road trip to see wife's Grandma.  It's late and we get off I65 to drive 2 lane highway through Bankhead National Forest to our destination.

It's pitch black and a hot summer night when I come across a 6' snake folded over in half as somebody had previously hit it.

Wife says those are common in 'Bama and as it was the late 1980's I didn't have a cell phone so the plan was with any car trouble I'm staying in the car all night.   

With creepy gas stations you know there's also a fuel truck that comes to refill them. Is that guy just as weird or does he refill and take off as fast as possible?

preach (dudeist priest) said:

Coming back from San Diego to NH I had just purchased the Cayman and my wife flew out for the drive home. First stretch was to visit an uncle in Moab. Almost to Moab and we are sucking fumes, need fuel.

It was late as it was a haul from SD, windy AF, and we pull into this creepy ass gas station. 

There were cats everywhere, sand blowing in the wind, lights on in the building but the blinds/shutters were closed. The Mystery Machine and Lightning McQueen were just plain weird.

I splashed in about a gallon of overpriced gas and wheels spinning shot back onto the road.

I will never go back there.

Oh we've been there. I think one of my kids had an accident in the car on our trip to Moab and we stopped there to clean it up. 

Yes weird, yes very overpriced gas (which we bought a couple gallons because of what we left in their bathroom garbage can), but overall I didn't find it creepy.

If we had been there at night I bet it would have been different.