Episode 13 - A Lonely Road

Happy Halloween! We're celebrating with our spooky number 13. This one is all a personal story about a late night on a lonely highway. I hope it gives you a case of the skedaddles. 

Songs for today's episode: 

• Seeing Things by the Black Crowes
• That’s the Way by Led Zeppelin
• Highway Star by Deep Purple

Take a listen to all the songs I've put together to accompany each episode's theme on Spotify under the Professional Weirdo Podcast playlist. 

Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.

To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

• https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Happy Halloween, Weirdos! Today I made a little something different for you. Just something quick that I’ve put together so we can share spoooooky number 13 together on Halloween. This will work better if I don’t tell you much about it, so let’s jump in. 

This is Episode 13 - A Lonely Road

This episode is a personal story - no research, no rating system. Just gonna tell you about something that happened to me in the way that it happened. 

I’m taking you back to the early 90’s when I was 17 years old. I grew up about 10 miles outside of a very little town, a population under 600. It’s rural, with lots of wooded areas and hills and valleys and creeks. I drove a large Caprice Classic - a giant box of a car that had been passed down from my parents and featured sun-bleached seats and oxidized paint across the hood. Not great to look at, but I understand my parents wanting to put their teenager in the closest thing to a tank that they could for the first few years of driving. This car would sometimes break down, and while it may seem absurd to people in this day and age with cell phones and triple A, if I broke down I would walk to the nearest house and ask to use someone’s phone to call my parents. I know, I know, that sounds crazy today! A 17 year old alone and knocking on a strangers door? Well, likely they knew my parents so they weren’t a complete stranger. But also, this was just the way in that time and place. Neighbors helped each other. Would I do it today? Oh hell no. But it was just the norm back then. 

My curfew at the time was midnight, meaning II had to leave town at 11 something, which seemed very uncool. Instead of planning accordingly and leaving with ample time to travel the winding, weaving highway between the town and my house, I would delay my departure for as long as possible and then drive my tank like a bat out of hell, rocketing through the few straight stretches, hugging the many curves, launching over the rises enough to get that thing where it feels like your stomach is rising into your chest. This was reckless, I understand now. There’s a large deer population back home and many other woodland creatures who could have zigzagged in front of me at any given moment. And it’s the 90’s so airbags weren’t a thing and I can’t guarantee I was even wearing my seatbelt. This highway - let’s call it highway 92 - had no turn lanes, no street lights, no shoulders on either side. The next step down from this type of road would be one of the large gravel roads that branched off of it and was maintained by the county. In the 10 miles I needed to travel highway 92 there were maybe 2 places straight enough to safely pass another car. Okay - hopefully that helps draw the little atmospheric movie in your mind. 

It’s a Saturday night and I have put off leaving town until the last possible minute and was motoring down highway 92, headlights sweeping across trees, my windows rolled down (yes, manually with that little crank thing), the tape player blaring. If I had to guess, I would say it was the Black Crowes. I’m about 2 miles from my home and expecting to make curfew just in the nick of time. I’m emerging from a long stretch of road with trees on both sides, going over a hill, about to drive up another hill where a newer house sits on the left, and as I’m taking a bit of a turn and going up this hill, my headlights briefly sweep across a woman, walking on the other side of the road, with a child walking beside her. The woman is carrying something on her hip, like you would a small child or a bag of groceries, but before I can get more detail I’ve sped past them. I immediately take my foot off the gas, expecting to pop over the hill and see a car broken down along the side off the road. This next part happens within maybe a second. I’m coming over the hill to see one a straight stretch and there are no cars. I’m also wondering why she’s walking in the direction she is - into the woods and away from the nice, modern house on the hill? Is she FROM the nice, modern house on the hill? Is something wrong there? I happen to know there are 2 children that live there. They’re twins - the boy played little league with my brother. The girl was born with mobility issues. Is the woman carrying her daughter, with the son walking beside her? I’m slowing down now and looking to the house, expecting to see it on fire or lights blazing inside - something to indicate that the mother who lives there has needed to leave with her children in a hurry and is headed for the neighbors house to use their phone. But there’s the house. Normal. Lights off, except for the dusk to dawn light in their driveway, where a truck and a car sit side by side. All is well. This isn’t where the woman came from. But why isn’t she walking to that house? Why is she walking toward the woods? The second of quick calculations and theories are over and now I’m out of plausible reasons why this woman is walking this road nearing midnight with at least one child. But regardless! I’m going to help her. I know, I know, we’re in a world of Forensic Files and Netflix true crime documentaries - I’ve watched them. I listen to the podcasts and I’ve seen the YouTube videos. But this was a younger, shinier me. Remember, I was the 5th grader who cultivated a sticker collection in a Trapper Keeper. Now make that person a teenager. I was a year away from going out into the big wide world. Yes, naive, but also, motivated. Making decisions. Making plans. And also, people help people. That was the way in this time and place. I knew what I was going to do - there was one of those large county gravel roads about a quarter of a mile away and I would use it to turn around, drive back, and see if I could give her a ride somewhere, or get her to a phone. As I reached the gravel road, I was getting a feeling. It wasn’t “what if this is a trap and I’m going to get kidnapped and trafficked?” Nothing like that. It was - stage fright. That’s the best way I can describe it. Like I was getting ready to give a big presentation to the class. But hey, I HAD given presentations in class! And gotten A’s! I just needed to prepare what I was going to say. I worked out a little script, but wasn’t feeling better. I had pulled into the mouth of the gravel road, expecting to do maybe a 3-point turn, and lowered the volume on the music because you know how that helps you drive more carefully? But I still had stage fright and it was getting worse. I started coaching myself - these internal thoughts are so teenager-y and earnest that it makes me laugh and cringe a bit - I remember thinking “I’m in speech and drama! We competed at regionals! I can do this! It’s not like she’s the Queen of England!” But now I’m attempting the 3-point turn and I’m so overcome with nerves - more than I had ever experienced up to that point and I have never felt this since. My legs were literally shaking. I remember thinking that must be what the cartoons were about, when people talked about knees knocking together. My 3-point turn became, I don’t know, a 7 point turn? And I’m starting to worry my foot will slip off the gas or brake pedals because of how badly I’m shaking. But I’m turned in the gravel road, ready to make a left back onto the highway and go see how I can help. Sitting in my car, the music turned down, the windows open and the night noises coming in. Literally sitting at the intersection and pondering my path. And to my utter and great shame, I turned right and went home. Looking back now, I’m thinking “as you should!” But at the time it felt like failure. I had a plan. I was going to help. I was leaving this poor woman and child on the road because why? Stage fright? Public speaking? It wasn’t even public! My parents would have understood if I was late for curfew. I went home, went to bed, totally embarrassed. The next morning my dad had gone to town for the weekly newspaper and come back. Normally he might report any updates from town or the drive, like “someone hit the Hitzfields mailbox” or “a big deer was killed near the James place” but there were no reports on this morning. I was too full of shame to tell them that I had left the woman and kid walking the road the night before. Why I had been so nervous to speak to the woman was an absolute mystery to me. And I wouldn’t utter a word of this story to anyone for 7 years. 

But before I made that confession:  I was at a side job during college and we were having a slow night in the souvenir t-shirt shop where I was working.  We started telling ghost stories. I had none. I’d read all about ghosts but never had any encounter of any kind. Unsolved Mysteries had made some solid stories that said otherwise, but I wasn’t really convinced they existed. Then one of my coworkers was telling a story about helping a friend move a large mirror out of an attic for the friend’s grandmother. As they approached the mirror he was overcome with fear. When his friend threw a blanket over it before touching it, he realized his friend was scared of it too. They grabbed it and started rushing down the stairs and then he said this, “You know how in cartoons when they’re afraid and their knees knock together - my knees were doing that! I thought I was gonna fall down the stairs.” I hadn’t thought about my night on hwy 92 for a couple of years, and I didn’t mention it then. But this was the first time I wondered if there was some other reason I had been so anxious about speaking to the woman on the highway. 

Now we come to it. Years later I’m at grad school, sitting in a circle with friends and people start telling ghost stories. Incidentally, in the group of people were a couple of guys who grew up near where I did. They went to a rival school in a town on down the road which was also along highway 92. When the storytelling made its way around the circle to me, I first said I didn’t have any kind of ghost story. Pressed further, I timidly said, “I think I saw something strange on highway 92 one night” and one of these people said “Was it the woman walking with a little girl?” I’m not sure I have the words to describe how I felt hearing that. My chest felt hollow? My ears blazed hot? I think I might have teared up? Maybe it was relief - I had spent 7 years feeling like a silly chicken, an absolute asshole, for not helping this woman and now I maybe had a good reason to have listened to my gut that night and just taken myself home. 

So now we have another story to tell, right? How did these guys from the next town know about the woman and, apparently, the child who was a girl? About 3 years after my night on hwy 92, they were in a car with some friends and had been cruising the roads late. Yes, drinking, but not the driver. Music is playing, merriment is happening, and suddenly the driver swerves, slamming on his brakes, and yelling profanity along the lines of “what is she thinking?! Is she trying to get herself and that kid killed???” He stops the car and gets out, yelling back down the road. Everyone else in the car is completely lost to what’s going on, but they quickly learn from the driver, who is astounded that no one else in the car saw it., that a woman was walking on the road with a little girl. And he was rattled because he felt he had nearly hit her. Scared and angry at this close call, he  wanted to give her a piece of his mind and tell her to stay off the road. But no one was there. He walked back down the road, looking in the ditches and into the woods. They eventually got back in the car and drove the hwy slowly to try and find them. The others in the car, probably thinking this woman isn’t likely to come out and face a car full of teenage boys. She was probably hiding on purpose and pressed the driver to just drive on. While they hadn’t seen anything themselves, he was rattled and they believed what he had described. Reflecting on it the next day, they started to feel like it was spookier than it had felt the night before. How had none of them seen the woman and girl? How had they just disappeared so suddenly? If they went into the woods, the guys would have heard them running. You can bet I’ve tried to research any tragedies that happened along that road, but it’s an old route that existed long before it was paved and named. Looks like this is an Unsolved Mystery. 

So that’s it. I’ve changed the name of the highway, but everything else is true as it happened or was told to me. I hope this story maybe gave you a major case of the skedaddles. Not to be mean, but because I actually enjoy getting the skedaddles, especially around this season. Stay safe, have fun, and eat too much candie (especially those Reese’s peanut butter cups!)  And hey -  if you like stories about creepy things happening on highways - you’re in luck! The next episode is going to continue with this theme, but back to our normal format. We’re just going to keep the spooky themes going all through the fall. 

Thank you for listening to my weird stories. Tell your weirdo friends to listen too and come see me on Instagram for more fun. My handle is professionalweirdopodcast. You can also email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Songs I recommend with today’s episode can be found on the Spotify playlist I made to accompany this podcast. For each episode I’ve done or will do, I’ve pulled together a few songs. The ones for this episode are:

Seeing Things by the Black Crowes

That’s the Way by Led Zeppelin and

Highway Star by Deep Purple

I’ll list these, along with the link to the playlist, in the show notes.