Phantom Vehicle

**Phantom Vehicles** are purportedly haunted vehicles (including...cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes). In various modern and ancient folklores.

## History

Phantom Vehicles refer to the phenomenon related to vehicles that supposedly haunted, more than often operated with no visible driver. The most notable case being ghost cars that emerged in the twentieth century. The nature of ghost cars is neutral because it depends on the myth or legend.

They usually appear on lonely roads, in abandoned streets or within rural places, or even in lonely bodies of water. Sometimes the spirit of the driver is seen, and in others it has no visible drivers but mostly ghost cars appear on lonely roads. These tales can be of various global origin.

In addition of cars, phantom vehicles also take forms of ghosts trains (a locomotive or train that would keep going and they are fully operational but without anyone at the helm) and ghost ships (ghostly vessels such as the Flying Dutchman, or other ships found adrift with crews either missing or dead, such as the *Mary Celeste*). They also includes vehicles that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped, such as the *Clemenceau* (R 98).

## Trivia

* Phantom Vehicles are usually the ghost of a haunted Vehicle

## **Cars and Trucks**

* In 1982, two people in Lanikai, Hawaii reported seeing a mysterious black car which disappeared and reappeared again a second later.
* A 1960s car that had bumper stickers; the witness passed the car but it mysteriously reappeared ahead of the witness's car at several stoplights. Also the witness noticed that the driver was a man in his teens and that he never turned his head and he never moved the steering wheel when the man drove around the "dead man's curve" the witness said.
* 2004, In Cape Town, South Africa, a Renault Mégane sedan mysteriously rolled up an embankment and hit a fence, despite the fact that the handbrake was engaged and the engine was off. Some say the car was "jumping".
* Clinton Road of Passaic County, New Jersey is said to be host to numerous paranormal phenomena, including phantom pickup trucks and floating headlights that pursue drivers and then disappear.
* In the mid-1980s, three people in a sedan reported seeing a gray van heading straight towards them. Then suddenly the van vanished.

* Little Bastard Brad Dean's car is said to be cursed after the accidents in which it was later involved.
* In Australia, there is a story of the ghost truck of Kaniva where a driver was 'driven through' by a mysterious, 1940s' style big rig truck painted green.
* In Germany, a car mysteriously started up by itself and rammed a wall.
* In 2000, an eyewitness claimed that an old truck started up by itself and blinked at him as he walked past an old house to where some are skeptic that someone was pranking them.
* Early 1980s - a British motorist crashed his car in order to avoid a truck that suddenly appeared coming straight towards him and then vanished.
* The curved road at the junction of St. Marks Road and Cambridge Gardens in Ladbroke Grove was reported to be haunted by a phantom bus with a route marker "7" which caused numerous accidents, one of which was fatal. The reports subsided when the area of road was straightened.

* Along the E8 Expressway also known as the Kuala Lumpur-Karak Expressway, in Malaysia, various supernatural phenomena have been reported, including headless ghosts, phantom hitchhikers, pontianaks (vampires), and a mysterious yellow Volkswagen beetle that follows you and disappears and reappears along the road, sometimes causing accidents.

## **Trains**

* Silverpilen (Silver Arrow) is a Stockholm Metro train which features in several urban legends alleging sightings of the train's "ghost".
* The St. Louis Ghost Train, better known as the St. Louis Light, is visible at night along an old abandoned rail line in between Prince Albert and St. Louis, Saskatchewan. Two local students won an award for investigating and eventually duplicating the phenomenon, which they determined to be caused by the diffraction of distant vehicle lights.
* A phantom funeral train is said to run regularly from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, around the time of the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death, stopping watches and clocks in surrounding areas as it passes.
* The now abandoned Rimutaka Railway Incline in New Zealand is the setting for a number of paranormal episodes. The most famous of these is that the sound of a hard working Fell locomotive can reputedly be heard echoing through the Valley, and the sound of three short whistles can be heard some nights from Featherston. The Siberia tunnel was also the setting for a single sighting of a running male human figure carrying a child, on the anniversary of the accident on 11 September 1880.

## **Planes**

* In 1997, eyewitnesses from the eastern USA claimed they saw a single-engine aeroplane crash. But when the coast guard searched the waters off Connecticut, they could not find any wreckage or bodies. Also none of the airports reported any planes missing.

## **Ships**

* The *Flying Dutchman*, a ship manned by a captain condemned to eternally sail the seas, has long been the main legend of ghost ships.
* The *Mary Celeste* is perhaps the most historically famous derelict.