After our conversation, I vaguely recall dialling 1471 and getting no number, at least not one I noted. This could all be put down to imagination had it not been that very soon after the incident - no more than a day or two - I wrote a story called “Dread Country” in which a protagonist very much like myself is repeatedly called by an old woman in distress. Something about the process of writing this eerie story expunged any need I had to think about the incident that had inspired it and I never gave it much thought again until now. My attitude at the time was that it had even chances of being a prank, one of those weird metropolitan-life things that happens, yet with every similar tale that emerges I am less certain of choosing to explain the incident as a prank (either played by the caller or my own mind) rather than a genuine cry for help or a more paranormal event.
If pressed, I would look towards a theory that defines a kind of psychological ‘phase-shift’, something on the lines of a waking-dream that is created by psychic stress. This kind of event is quite distinct from hypnagogia, dreaming, or sleepwalking, since the subject always remains fully alert and conscious. At such times the mind ‘intersects’ with reality, creating an event that is, to all ‘objective’ understanding, both real and unreal. The key is that the receiver of the call is always alone (at least in all the reports I’ve seen). Having experienced vivid states of altered awareness in my childhood, all of them involving a strong auditory aspect, I cannot discount the possibility that I may still be susceptible to these ‘interjections’. How can we ever know all our own minds? Unless a few of these strange calls are recorded or the callers are backtraced, we will never know what or who produces the Little Voice, and maybe not even then.
Jerry Glover, by email, 2005
HELP ME, SUSIE’S DYING
Back around 1975 when I was nine, some of the kids I knocked around with insisted we all pile into the nearest phone box to hear a spooky message. By dialling a number - I think made up of zeros, ones and twos - and without needing to insert two pence, a woman, speaking in a curiously monotone voice, could be heard saying “Help me, help me, Susie’s dying”, over and over. Some of the lads said she sometimes said “Help me, help me, Susie’s drowning”. Was it some weird engineer’s test signal (hence no money needed)?
Rob Dickinson, Worsthorne, Lancashire, 2000
I can remember once cramming into a phone box in the Stoneyholme area of Burnley with various other kids to hear the strange message related by Rob Dickinson. I cannot remember the number dialled. Could this be an early example of EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon), or just explicable interference on the telephone system, filtered through the active imaginations of young witnesses?
Christopher McDermott, London, 2000
I remember the spooky message when I was a child playing with the old red phone boxes in Burnley. Two phone boxes in particular were prone to mysterious scary voice messages - one at the top of Dalton Street on Planetree Estate and the other at the end of Harold Street on Stoops Estate. As I remember, you put 2p in the slot and pressed 20 20 20 20 and the voice on the other end would be crackly but audible: “Help me, Susie’s dying”, which would send us kids running in all directions.
AG Russell-Dallamore, by email, 2003
I am from Burnley and have a vivid memory of the said phone message. In either 1980 or 1981, three other girls and myself were loitering with the intent not to go back to school after lunch. We were messing around in a phone box near to school, calling random numbers and talking rubbish if anyone answered (well, we thought it was funny!).
One of the girls said she knew a number you could call to hear a “spooky message” - I think there were 3s and 2s in it. When she called this number we all heard the message as quoted in previous correspondence. I have no doubts as to the phrasing of what I heard. It was a clear voice with no audible distortion. Needless to say, we were all a bit freaked out by this and when a British Telecom van pulled up nearby we made a hasty retreat and returned to school.
Tracey Maclean, Knaresbourough, North Yorkshire, 2003
On the road
Roads - those liminal spaces between one place and another - are the location for all sorts of strange encounters, especially late at night when they can take on an eerie sense of strangeness. Spooky travellers’ tales abound: the driver who sees a monster silhouetted in his headlights, a goblin reflected in his wing mirror, or a phantom materialising in the path of his speeding car...
Haunted highways
GETTYSBURG STRAGGLER
The only ghost sighting of my life took place in the middle of a road, around midnight in the dead of winter. I was around 10 years old, which would make this the mid-1970s. I lived with my family in a small town in central Virginia. We would often drive to Pennsylvania, especially around the holidays, to spend time with our relatives there.
This particular trip found us driving late at night down a lonely stretch of Highway 81 about 30 miles (48km) north-west of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My father was clutching the steering wheel and staring intently at the patch of light thrown out by the headlights.
The next few moments were what he recalled recently as “still the strangest thing that ever happened to me”. I remember seeing a figure in the gloom up ahead, a man walking, an odd thing to be doing on a major highway on a very cold night miles from anywhere. As we came closer we realised to our horror that he was walking down the middle of the lane we were on and we were going to hit him. No one screamed - there wasn’t enough time.
That moment before we were going to flatten him seemed to stretch out for minutes. I could tell it was a man by the width of the shoulders and his gait. He was wearing a very long grey coat that came to about his knees. He had pants of the same colour, which were tucked into beat-up, dirty leather boots; in fact he seemed kind of dirty and ragged all over. On his back was a backpack with a bedroll attached. He wore a small cap, also grey, of the type I’ve only seen in pictures of Civil War soldiers. In his left hand he carried some very long object that from behind looked exactly like a rifle butt. The really bizarre thing was that although he was walking very purposefully and erect, not staggering or weaving, he seemed to be completely and utterly oblivious to the fact that we were closing on him at around 60mph (96km/h).
There was no time to hit the brakes. My dad jerked the wheel to the left and the car lurched toward the passing lane. It was too late, we were going too fast and he was too close to us. We expected a sickening dull thud, but it never came. My dad got control of the car and slowed down. If we had missed him, it was by a matter of inches. As we swerved, I looked out the side and then rear windows of the car expecting to see him in the glow of the taillights, but I could see nothing but road.
The fact that he was dressed exactly like a Civil War Confederate soldier and that we were near Gettysburg, the site of the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the Civil War, was forgotten for the moment. We decided that he was a drunk and/or insane drifter bent on suicide. At that time we didn’t even consider that this might not be an actual flesh-and-blood person. He was too solid-looking for us to think that he might be an apparition.
Several miles down the road we stopped at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the last leg of our journey. My father talked to the man in the tollbooth and told him about the crazy man wandering down the middle of the highway. The toll taker very unexpectedly laughed and said something like, “Ah! I guess the ghosts are out wandering again tonight!” My dad got mad at his levity and we didn’t leave till he got an assurance that there would be a Highway Patrol car sent out to investigate. The toll-taker probably never did send out a patrol car because he knew what we didn’t until much later, that around Gettysburg people seeing wandering Civil War soldiers isn’t really that unusual.
Michael Mcquate, San Francisco, 2002
PHANTOM STAGECOACH LEAVES TRACKS
In 1968, I was working as the driver for the mail clerk of the US Army’s 560th Signal Battalion stationed at Caserma Ederle in Vi
cenza, Italy. My duties included driving the clerk and his assistant to several outlying radio relay sites to deliver the mail.
A sudden snowstorm had dumped two or three inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground by the time we left Caserma Ederle at half past ten on the morning of 24 January. As we entered the countryside on the outskirts of Vicenza we were travelling on a two-lane road atop a 12-ft-(3.7m) high dyke running straight down the middle of a large, open field. The blanket of white covering the road and field was broken only by a small, single storey building to the left of the road a few hundred yards from the edge of town. Ours was the first vehicle to travel this road since the snow had begun falling. There were absolutely no tracks of any kind on or near the road.
Suddenly, about 70 yards (64m) ahead, I saw the black silhouette of a stagecoach crossing the road from right to left. Perched in the driver’s seat was a man wearing a top hat. He too was in silhouette. His arms were extended out in front of his body as though he were holding a pair of reins. Neither reins nor horses, however, were a part of the silhouette, which disappeared at the left shoulder of the road.
“Did you see that?” I yelled to my passengers. Engaged in conversation, they had not. I explained what I had seen and stopped the jeep as we neared the spot where the silhouette had crossed the road. There, in the freshly fallen snow, were two parallel tracks approximately 4ft (1m) apart, each being about 2in (5cm) in width! The tracks began at the crest of the dyke on the right, crossed the road, descended the embankment and ran another 20 yards (18m) before disappearing into a jumble of bicycles parked against the building mentioned above. There were no footprints or other tracks in the area. Neither was there a nearby door through which two particularly agile cyclists might have escaped. The nearest door, in fact, was around a corner some 60ft (18m) away and there were no prints leading in or out of it.
Later that year while visiting Borlum Farm overlooking Loch Ness, I met the owner’s father, John Gordon-Dean, a retired RAF officer. His unsolicited account of a similar experience went as follows. He was driving through the Midlands just prior to World War II when a stagecoach, complete with horses and driver and in full, living colour, simply materialized in his pathway. He took to the ditch causing considerable damage to his Bugatti and slight injury to himself. Certain of what he had seen and unwilling to accept hallucination as the cause, he scoured local records until he was able to establish that the spot where he had seen the coach was located along one of the major north-south stage routes of the 19th century. The coach itself left no physical evidence.
Mike Owens, Pekin. Illinois, 1989
HIGHWAY APPARITION
In October 1971, when I was 26, single, and living in Oulton Broad, Lowestoft, I spent an evening in Yarmouth with friends. We had a few beers, but as I was driving, I kept my intake low. I set off alone for home in my Opel Rekord car. It was a clear night, and I just about had the road to myself. I may well have been going over the speed limit; after all, the road was clear and there wasn’t a soul in sight.
At about 12.30am on the Gorleston Road near the old Oulton Primary School, an elderly woman suddenly appeared in front of the car. She half turned towards me, but because of her hood, I couldn’t see her features clearly. I slammed on the brakes, knowing there was no way I could miss her. Horrified, I got out of the car, convinced there would be a mangled body - but when I reached the spot there was no body, no blood, nothing. Nor did the car show any signs of impact. I went back further along the road in case I had misjudged the place, but found nothing. By the following morning, I was certain I’d seen a ghost. In the local library I found a story of a hooded woman being seen in Gorleston Road. It was suggested she had been killed on her way home after visiting someone in Lowestoft.
Clive Thrower, by email, 2002
PERSON-SHAPED HOLE
I was a student at Birmingham University at the beginning of the 1980s, but used to drive home to Nottingham most Friday nights, returning to Birmingham on the following Sunday. The journey was about 50 miles (80km) each way, and it was on one such drive home that I witnessed a phenomenon for which I have absolutely no explanation.
Part of my journey used to take me along a straight country road through the village of Lount in Derbyshire. Just before the village, there is a steep hill (downhill in the direction I was going) as it passes Lount landfill site. It was dark, though the moon was out. There were no streetlights on that stretch of road, but my car headlights were lit. As I passed the entrance to the landfill site, I was suddenly aware of a figure running into the path of my car from the opposite side of the road. The figure wasn’t so much a shadow as a silhouette. The edges were clearly defined, but there were no details to be seen. It was just as if someone had cut a person-shaped hole in space itself.
From the size and shape, I estimate that it was a boy of maybe 13 years old. The shape ran in front of my car before I had a chance to take evasive action. In that instant, I hit the brakes and braced for the impact. The car slewed to a halt, but there was no bump. I pulled the car into a lay-by a little way down the road, and made a good search, but there was nobody to be seen. No bump, no body and no signs of anything untoward. I sat in the car, upset and shaking for a good five minutes, and then continued on my way.
Chris Shilling, by email, 2003
Terrifying Travellers
TENNESSEE DOG-MAN
I live in the eastern mountain region of Tennessee and work second shift at a factory in Dayton, a town about 25 miles (40km) away, with a mountain in between. I usually don’t start for home until at least 12.30am. We don’t all get out at the same time, so sometimes I’m the only one on the highway.
One night during the winter of 2003/2004 I was coming across the mountain. There are quite a few houses along the way, and a lot of them have outside lights on all night long, so it’s not pitch black. Anyway, I was coming down a straight stretch of highway when I saw a man on the side of the road on my right walking toward me. He was wearing a light-coloured shirt with dark pants. As I got closer to him, he suddenly turned his back toward me and bent over. I slowed down quite a bit and went toward the centre of the highway as I was about to pass him. When I got close to him, I saw that this person was now a huge dog and he peered around to look at me as I passed. This ‘thing’ had a long snout and large teeth like a dog or wolf and was sort of grinning at me. I passed it and tried to look at it in my rear view mirror, but couldn’t see anything. I was flabbergasted and I’ve gone over and over it in my mind ever since trying to figure out what I actually saw.
Patricia Law, Pikeville, Tennessee, 2005
A SHAGGY SHAPE
About two years ago, my husband and I visited friends in York. We left them at approximately 12.45am and I drove home while my husband slept in the passenger seat. The last stretch of road before home is about 1-2 miles (1.6-3.2km) long with two roundabouts roughly 1 mile (1.6km) apart. The road between these roundabouts is a gentle hill with wide grass verges and low banks lined with trees.
About halfway to the bridge, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I was overcome with terror. Having crossed the bridge, I saw, standing on the kerb to my left, a 7ft (2.1m)-tall “shaggy shape” about 4ft (1.2m) wide and covered from head to foot in long dark hair; it had no visible face or limbs. In the split second that I saw it, I turned away, as I got the feeling that if I looked directly at this ‘thing’ I would die. I accelerated past it and glancing in my rear-view mirror I saw it shuffle off the kerb and into the road where I had just been.
Mrs DJ Singleton, Farsley, Leeds, 1997
DARK PASSERS-BY
One day some 20-odd years ago, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I was bicycling in Sheffield along Ecclesfield Road, known locally as “The Woodbottom”.
It winds along for about a mile and a half (2.4km) between Wincobank and Shiregreen, with no turnoffs. On one side of the road is a wooded hillside (Wooley Woods) and on the other a line of trees behind which is a railway line and, further bac
k, some industrial units. It was Saturday afternoon, around 4:30pm, when the incident occurred. I can confirm this as when I got home the football results were on the telly.
I was cycling back from Shiregreen towards Wincobank where I lived. The Woodbottom was empty of traffic, which in retrospect seems odd for that time on a Saturday. As I peddled along, something made me look round. As I did, a car came around the bend behind me.
The car drew up alongside and kept pace with me. It was black, with all the windows blacked out or heavily tinted. I had no interest in cars and could not identify a make or model. It looked a little like a taxi-cab without the taxi light. However, the strangest thing about the vehicle was what sounded like a cacophony of shouting voices coming from inside it.
As the car kept pace and began to get nearer to me, I began to panic. My front wheel jammed against the kerb and as I tried to turn the handlebars I was catapulted over them, landing on a grass verge, dazed and frightened. I lifted my head to see the car shoot off towards Wincobank.
Some moments later, as I lay on the grass, I heard the sound of an engine, and saw a man on a moped coming along the road from Wincobank. He looked straight at me, turned in the road and pulled up alongside. Without saying a word, he checked me for broken bones, stood my bike up and put the chain back on.
Fortean Times: It Happened to Me vol.1 Page 11