The Transdimensional Gas Station

After a recent crisis in his life, the witness (named David) started to realise how fundamentally odd an experience that he had in the early nineties really was. He remembered how deeply it had affected him, and decided that the best course of action would be to reach out to people who may have gone through similar things online. As far as he can remember, it was July of 1993. He was 18 years old at the time, and was working at the civic department of the smallish county of Mjolby in mid-Eastern Sweden. He worked there over the summer, and was going mainly street and park maintenance tasks.

## The Incident

Dave and a coworker had just finished pruning hedges and mowing lawns in a remote community some 15 kilometres away from their home office, and were on their way home for the rest of the day. They were driving in a Volkswagen minibus along a road through quite a rural area, surrounded by fields and the odd smattering of pine forest. It was the only tarmac road in the area, with all other roads connecting to it being either gravel or dirt paths. There were only a few, separated farmhouses and cottages along the road, and Dave and his friend must have driven along that road at least a hundred times that summer alone - so they knew it very well.

They had only driven approximately 5-7km along the road when Dave’s coworker, who was driving, noticed that they were running low on gas - with the needle on the gauge not even moving from the bottom position. Although the car was still running smoothly, the pair doubted that it could run on petrol fumes alone for the next ten kilometres. At this point, they had entered one of the only areas on the road where it was entirely flanked by woods on both sides, as opposed to just being open farmland.

Obviously this took place a long time before mobile phones, but the car was equipped with a long-wave radio with which the duo were considering radioing back to the home office in case they got stranded and needed to have some gas brought to them. However, Dave seems to remember that the road lay in some kind of radio shadow (with the regular radio stations always breaking up at some point along the road) and so they eventually decided to keep driving under the assumption that what little gas they had would be enough to get them home.

They were only driving for a few more minutes before they suddenly came across a small collection of buildings on the right side of the road. There was a dilapidated-looking farmhouse covered in grubby Eternit plates (an asbestos-like substance used in house exteriors in the 50s and 60s). Right up against the edge of the tarmac road and in front of the farmhouse sat a long, shed-like structure covered in corrugated metal sheets and roofed with tar paper. On the shorter end of the shed, facing the way that the witnesses were coming from, was an anachronistic-looking gas pump with orange stripes. There was an open door set into the side of the shed, as well as a large and grimy window cluttered with various cans of motor oil and other nondescript objects. A large plastic sign hung in this window, simply reading ‘Gas’ (or ‘Bensin’ in Swedish).

The witness and his coworker had travelled along that same road many times, but they had never noticed the gas station. Despite the buildings seemingly sudden appearance and its strange-looking exterior, the witness insists that there was no ‘*eldritch feeling of strangeness*’, and the two people in the car simply wrote it off as a trick of the mind. David says that he certainly didn’t give it much thought at the time, and was just glad that he would be able to get some gas for his car. They stopped alongside the orange pump, only to find that the mechanism was locked with a padlock. In response, David went inside the building to find the person who ran the station.

Inside was a small, square room bisected by a counter - behind which there were shelves with oil cans and bottles of car wax. Although the only window in the room was the grimy-looking one that had been seen earlier, the area was still lit up fairly brightly by a naked flourescent lamp. The room was empty, and so David called out, prompting a ‘*strange little guy*’ to emerge from a door in the back wall after a while. Looking back on it, David thinks that the man was likely around 60 or 70 years old, but seeing as he was much younger at the time he admits that he probably would’ve probably just labelled anyone above the age of 50 as ‘old’.

The man was wearing a Greek fisherman cap of a brownish colour with a button on the front, and had coke-bottle glasses with thick rims of black plastic - meaning that his eyes were magnified to around twice their normal size. He had a black and white chequered shirt and beige pants held up by braces. David got the impression that it had been a long time since the man’s last bath, seeing as all his visible hair was pretty greasy and his clothes were described as grubby and wrinkled. David told him that they needed to buy some gas, and the man just looked at him for ‘*an uncomfortably long time*’ before David came to the conclusion that he hadn’t understood what he had said, and thus started to repeat himself. However, the strange man curtly cut him off with ‘*a kind of rapid, stuttering manner of speech*’ - mumbling a phrase that contained the word ‘yes’ while nodding exaggeratedly. He continued to mumble under his breath as he began to rummage around beneath the counter, before finally producing a key on a piece of string. In a really odd gesture, the strange little man held the key out on a completely straight arm and came out from behind the counter, pushing rudely past the witness and moving ‘*with some speed*’ out through the door. According to David, the man walked with a lurching gait that he had seen in old alcoholics. Another member of the forum on which David posted his story suggested that this behaviour is bizarre enough to warrant a question as to if this old man was even human - as opposed to being an MIB-like entity poorly mimicking human mannerisms.

The man unlocked the pump and David and his cohort drew around 150 SEK-worth of gas, which took a long time due to the weak and aged nature of the pump. While they did this, the weird old man just stood there and watched, while rocking from side to side as if he had a ‘*motorical dysfunction or something*’. David and his friend both looked at each-other several times during this process, not really ‘*knowing what to make of this guy*’. Once the car had swallowed its fill of gas, they pooled their loose change and piled it up into the hands of the old man ‘*until he seemed satisfied*’. He put the money away in a pocket of his trousers before withdrawing a wad of blank receipts from a breast pocket and filling it out with a ballpoint pen (ballpoint pens were invented in 1953, this will become interesting later). David’s friend took the receipt without a word once the man handed it over, and they both said goodbye to the strange man and got into their car - leaving as quickly as possible. While they were turning out onto the road, they could see the old man walking out to the edge of the tarmac and waving both hands in the air in a good-bye gesture.

As they were driving home, David lent forward to look into the side mirror, where he saw the man in the distance - still waving and rocking backwards and forwards. The two men in the car didn’t say a lot on their way back home, but David still insists that there was no sense that something odd had happened. The only thing that happened which could be considered strange was the car running raggedly just a few kilometres after leaving the gas station. The engine was misfiring ‘*in the manner it does sometimes when one or more cylinders fail to ignite*’. Apparently this is a fairly common phenomenon that most Volkswagen owners will know about. The pair commented on this, and said that the man at the gas station had probably given them diesel instead of the required 96-octane petrol. Seemingly confirming their suspicion, the car’s exhaust gradually turned into thick black smoke trailing along behind them, as it normally does when diesel is poured into a petrol car.

The car was coughing and spluttering constantly by the time they arrived back at their home office, and so they took it to the civic department’s repair shop. They were convinced that they had been sold diesel instead of petrol, and were ‘*rather pissed*’ because they would have to empty the gas tank by hand. The guy at the repair shop helped them empty the gas tank into a large plastic tub using a hand-pump, and the liquid that they pumped out of the tank was neither pinkish (as would be expected of petrol) or clear (like diesel oil would be), but was instead a milky, opaque orange colour, and apparently it smelt almost sweet - like turpentine.

Luckily, the man at the repair shop was ‘*an old fox who probably knew everything there was to know about mechanical stuff*’’, and he commented that the fluid resembled ‘war-time gasoline’. This stuff was used as an alternative to petrol when it was scarce during World War Two. It was by mixing a crudely refined form of fuel oil with turpentine or ethanol, and old petrol engines could be jerkily run on it. The repair man asked them where they’d got the gas, and they told him about the strange gas station - even adding how they’d never seen it before. They were expecting the guy, who ‘*was really familiar with all the strange people of the area*’ to laugh along with the chuckling duo and explain about the weird guy - but instead he looked utterly bewildered before asking something along the lines of ‘*what gas station?*’

All of a sudden ‘*it was like a bubble had burst*’ and David was overwhelmed by how strange it was that they’d never seen the gas station before, and he became increasingly certain that it had never been there on all the times that they had previously driven along that road. Judging from the expression on David’s friend’s face, it was obvious that he was thinking the same thing. They asked the repair man if he was certain about the lack of a gas station, but he stuck by his assertion that there was no gas station on that stetch of road. ‘*He actually began to look quite spooked as my friend and I became more and more agitated*’.

They eventually left to change out of their work clothes and decided to drive back the way they had came using David’s friend’s car to see if they could find the ghostly gas station. They drove all the way back to the town that they’d worked on that day and back again, but never came upon the small open area that had contained the anomalous gas station. David described that he and his friend were feeling ‘*spooked, scared and exhilarated*’. He sat in the passenger’s seat and held the receipt that the old man had given them, saying that it now ‘*seemed to emanate an almost palpable strangeness*’. David had difficulties sleeping for several nights afterwards, and he spend most of his waking hours rerunning the situation in his head.

In the days following the experience, David and his friend did some research of their own. They talked to 5 or 6 people with whom they worked, and who had a good knowledge of the area and its history. However, no-one had heard of the gas station, and nor had there been a gas station there at any time within the previous 50 years. Now that their questions had come to a dead end, they lost interest and returned to their normal lives. When the end of the Summer came, David left the area for school and didn’t think about the bizarre building for while - despite still sometimes getting flashbacks and feeling a ‘*falling sensation of strangeness*’. Although he didn’t tell anyone else about the experience, he has kept the receipt until this day.

Several years later (1995 or 1996), David got into a conversation with his grandfather who had lived and worked in that area about his extraordinary experience. Fascinatingly, his grandfather told him that he’d had a ‘*strange experience*’ on that same road while working as a book-courier in the 60s or 70s. However, the grandfather was a devout Baptist and wasn’t comfortable discussing the paranormal - and so he took the secret to his grave in 1998.

## Physical Evidence?

As a quick footnote, there was plenty of interest in this story throughout the forum thread, and it lasted for over a decade. However, David kept saying that he would upload a scan of the receipt given to him by the old man - but never did. Although he says this was because of messy circumstances in his personal life, he had several years to try and find it and consistently failed to do so. If there was physical evidence for this bizarre happening, I would be far more inclined to believe it.

## found?

recently a user of the forteana forum, found a building similar to the one in the story, sadly there are some differences between the 2, so if they are the same building is currently unknown

## Source

https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-transdimensional-gas-station.23173/