Road Ghosts

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: Highway 80-Warsaw Sound
Source: Form Submission

This happened in April 2004. My fiance and I had just gotten together at this point.

We had watched sunset and left the beach. The time was what is known as Civil Twilight--the sun is down, but the sky is not yet dark. We were driving back to Savannah, a distance of 12 miles over a salt marsh. The road goes through the middle of this marsh, which is also know as Warsaw Sound. It looks deceptively like a wheat field, but it is not really solid land because the rivers and creeks that run through it flood when the tide is high. There are no streetlights, or stop lights on this road, which is mostly a two lane blacktop with an occasional lane for passing. There was a death altar by a palm tree with 3 crosses. This had been set up fairly recently.

On the evening of which I speak, there was a ground mist rising, and even though it wasn't completely dark, it was somewhat murky. My fiance was driving. This is so hard to describe. We both actually saw two different things. First I thought I saw someone a little distance from our vehicle, down the road, walking the center line. This would have been suicide, the road can be busy or lonely, but it is very featureless at night. My fiance slowed down to about 25 miles an hour.

He saw: A young man with a blond pony-tail, gold t-shirt and red shorts looked into the window on the drivers side. He said later that the man seemed to be gliding across the ground and his face was lax.

I saw: A young woman in a green dress with a tropical pattern. The dress had a V neck and a wrap skirt. Her hair was black, her eyes pale blue. Her eyes were huge and staring. Her mouth was slack. She also looked into the drivers side widow.

Time seemed to have slowed down. Even though the car was travelling, we both gota good look at these people. My first thought was that a car must of gone off into the marsh. But I didn't see one, and there would have been nothing to hide it. My second thought was that she must have been in shock, maybe raped or hurt bad or something. The truck rolled on a bit. Finally I said to Brian, "Did you see that?" This is when we discovered that we had seen two different people.

We had no idea if what we sw was real or not. Brian flashed his lights to warn oncoming traffic about the people on the road. He kept watch in his rearview mirror, but no other car slowed down. We began to compare notes. First we thought we'd better send back a cop. Next, we thought about what we had seen.

Here are our unanswered questions. Why did we get such clear detail of the faces? The truck was moving past them. Another question is why could we see the colors of their clothes and hair etc in a shadowy mist? The truck headlights could not have been lighting the figures because they were looking in the drivers window and the lights are at the front of the truck. No traffic was coming at the moment that we saw them. Next question, why did we see two different figures at the same time? The whole episode made me think of Zombies. The way they moved, the emptiness of their expressions.

The death altar is still there, but pretty ragged now. This leaves me to believe that they were vistors or students, becaue most local death altars are tended perpetually around here. I think about them whenever I pass through the marsh at Civil Twilight. Sometimes, from a distance, I see a moving shadow in the middle of Highway 80, just at that place.