Driving a truck on the open road is physically and mentally exhausting.
Meanwhile, the road is an unforgiving opponent you must overcome with multiple cups of coffee and a sharp deadline.
With such late drives you're sure to see things you may not be sure of. Things that may haunt your memories until you feel like you need to talk about them on the internet.
Reddit user, u/smithtiger, wanted to hear the terrifying tales when they asked:
Truckers of Reddit, what is something you have witnessed driving at night that gave you chills?
The Devil's Riding High
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I25 south of Albuquerque, there's a huge dip, straight down one side of a canyon and up the other. I'm a very safe driver, so i took the downgrade slow and crawled up the other side with my hazards on. Looking in my mirror i see headlights from another truck at the bottom, then 2 jets of flame shoot like 20 feet into the air above it. This truck runs past me doing 80 up the slope. I didn't even know it was possible to put nitrous into a semi, i know it ain't legal, but i thought the devil himself was riding up on me.
"Mooseicide"
My mom drove truck for several years with her ex boyfriend. She loves to tell the story of hitting a moose.
Guess she was tooling along middle of the night in N Ontario. Area is well known for dumb ass animals jumping out and killing people.
Anywho, she said she saw this massive beast charge right out of the ditch. Instantly she gunned the gas, and Bullwinkle plows into the edge of the trailer-where the rivets meet the edge. She hears a loud thud. Pulls over, shaken.
Her ex was sleeping in the bunk and woke up when the truck stopped.
Mom gets put, expecting to find the truck totaled. Nope. As she tells it, all she found for damage was a small blood smear and a dent on the 3 inch rivet section. Moose was splayed Bambi style a block behind. Her boyfriend was freaking out when she told him about the moose.
Pretty miraculous actually. Animal commits Mooseicide, and truck still drive able.
They ended up waiting all night for the OPP to drive by and call in animal removal.
She's pretty legendary in the trucking world for it. No one could believe they walked away.
A Foreboding Sense Of What's Coming
Truckie's daughter.
My father told a story of a time he had a horrid nightmare about wheels. He thought it was creepy but brushed it off. Less than a week later, he was on a long haul and it was very late at night. He came down a steep descent into a corner and as he rounded the corner came across a bad accident involving a large truck and it's trailers, flipped upside down. All he could see was wheels.
March Of The Tarantulas!
A tarantula migration crossing the road. Freaky.
Wtf!?? they do that?...did you run them over?
Yes they do. It was like a horror movie. I'm afraid I ran over quite a few, I certainly wasn't going to stop the car in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a bunch of tarantulas. They do that in horror movies and it never ends well.
You Might Say They Were "Of The Corn?"
Driving on a country backroad in Indiana in the wee hours of the morning. Nothing but telephone poles and cornfields all around. Then something at the edge of the corn field. Looked like two kids standing with their backs to the road looking into the corn.
Didn't move
didn't look up, nothin. Just two kids stood there staring into the cornfield at like 2am.
When You Do Everything You Can And Someone Still Messes It Up
My dad, a truck driver in the Netherlands for about 30 years now was leaving our town at 3am-ish to do the deliveries to the stores. He drives off with a colleague and a kilometre outside my town he hits the brakes because there's a horse on the road (alive). His colleague behind him stops as well and is informed about the situation over the CB radio. Two trucks which look the same (both yellow-blue Scania box trucks with an additional blue trailer) are standing still on a B-road in the middle of the night.
A guy pulls up behind them in an Audi A6 stationwagon. He, of course, did not know what was going on and after a few minutes (the horse wasn't moving) he got very annoyed with the trucks standing still so he absolutely floored it to go past them. He crashed into the horse, killing it and totaling his car. Guy went to the hospital and this all happened under the eye of my father. Pretty terrifying sh-t.
The guy ended up surviving but my dad was pretty messed up about it.
So, We're All A Little Guilty Of Being Freaky
The amount of people "driving" while staring at their phones.
Just A Little Time Off
There's another driver where I work that tells a story about driving through the desert in Arizona back in the 80's with nothing around for miles when he broke down in the middle of the night- it was an easy fix (his fuel filter was clogged- he drained it a little to free up the fuel and got the truck running about 15 minutes later), he took off down the highway when he saw a man that was out of breath on the side of the highway that was staring at him as he passed..
he said it looked like the guy had been running toward him until he got his truck running and drove away..
He said if he had been there a few more minutes the guy would've been able to walk up on him with his head in the engine bay. He said the look on the guys face gave him chills and telling the story you could see it still creeped him out.
"Don't worry about it."
Not me but a friend, saw a naked kid walking at night on a long stretch of empty stretch of highway 41 south of where it meets highway 285, in New Mexico.
He picked the kid up and called it in to local law enforcement. The kid wouldn't speak. A State trooper showed up, and according to my friend, acted like it was no big deal, like he had seen it all before. My friend asked the officer to hold up, and what was going on. The officer said, "don't worry about it", and just turned and walked away, loading the kid into his vehicle.
He tried to find a newspaper articles about it in papers from nearby cities but never found any anything. He looked and couldn't find anything in any missing persons filings.
He told this story with a haunting simplicity and air of dread.
G'day Mate...
A friend who is a truck driver told me this one. He was driving through the edge of some bushland on his way back to Perth, Western Australia when he hit a kangaroo. He stopped the truck, grabbed his knife (in case he needed to dispatch it), his flashlight, and got out. He went over to the kangaroo. It needed to be dispatched, as it was alive and in immense pain, but he got this weird feeling that he was being watched.
He flashed his light around and saw dozens of pairs of red eyes watching him. The whole mob of kangaroos was just standing there watching him kill one of their mates (kangaroos have red eyeshine). He quickly dispatched the kangaroo, bolted back to his truck, and took off. He said it was the creepiest thing he had ever seen on the road.
Send In The Clowns
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In the 90s, I lived in a logging camp in northern British Columbia. It was a big one made up of trailers and had about 300 people living there including families.
I drove a water truck on weekends when the camp was on days off. When driving on logging roads you radio your kilometer markings with the name of the road to avoid collisions. "Empty on Windfall 10" to say you were 10 clicks on the Windfall road heading away from camp and "Loaded on Windfall 10" to say you were coming back.
Anyways, being a weekend I didn't expect anyone to be hanging around except a skeleton crew. I had no idea that there was a kids birthday party up on the top end of the windfall road. Its beautiful up there with a clear landing and a pond, so why not. The family hired two clowns from a nearby town for the kids. Apparently the clowns wrapped up their show and were heading back to camp but they were not using the radio.
I'm on the road in a big water truck doing 50 kh and they come bombing around a corner doing 50 kh in a clown car and we almost collide. I blasted the horn as this car with a plastic star on its roof goes whipping by with two screaming clowns inside and I could just not figure out what had just happened.
A Different Kind Of Haunting
It was the night before Thanksgiving a few years ago. A woman was crossing a busy highway and got hit by a car. Police were there but paramedics had not made it yet. The sight of her family holding her lifeless body with blood everywhere while cry hysterically is something I will not forget.
What Were The Drunk Stories?
Where do you want me to start! I'll stick with a story from when I was straight and sober...
Coming back from Kununurra (very northern town in Western Australia) to Perth one night. Seen no one else on the road for hours, but every now and then, on a long straight, I could see a set of tail lights in the distance. All of a sudden, there's the tail lights, attached to a trailer that's stopped dead in the middle of the road. I slammed on the brakes and swerved around it, and that's when i realised that the truck, towing 3 trailers had run off the road into the only large tree for miles. If not for how this ended, I'd laugh my arse off at the irony.
I pulled forwards, off the road, and jumped out. My co-driver (who'd been asleep, but got thrown out of the bunk when I slammed on the brakes) was already calling emergency services. As I got to the back of my 3rd trailer, wisps of smoke started from under the cab of the Volvo wrapped around the tree. I raced back, grabbed a fire extinguisher and was running towards the wreck when I heard a groan from the ditch, about 10 metres in front of the wreck. The driver had been thrown clean through the windscreen, and while he was an absolute mess, at least he was alive. The Volvo was, by now, in flames. But that just gave me some light to inspect old mate for injuries.
And then I heard the sound that, even now, tears me to the core. A thin, high pitched squeal, gradually progressing into the most soul piercing scream I've ever heard. His co-driver had also been asleep in the bunk. And with the truck wrapped around the tree, he was stuck. And I hadn't thought to fight the fire. And now some poor man was burning to death, trapped in a steel coffin, while I just collapsed. Impotent and broken.
I still drive trucks now. It's my life. It's cost me several relationships and a marriage, but I don't know anything else that I can do. I love the life, I love the freedom, and I always know that I can lose everything in the blink of an eye. But I never again, and never will, drive as a two-up team. I could never live with killing a workmate because I f-cked up.
George Takei's Halloween Costume Contest 2019