Old Hook Road

It was Halloween 1998 when I first heard the story about the death, back in the early ’80s, of a teenage girl on Old Hook Road. The girl and her boyfriend had been out driving after a high school dance, and they evidently had gotten into a serious argument. The boy had let the girl out of the car on Old Hook Road and had driven off, leaving her to walk home.

It was a lonely, rainy night, and the girl, dressed only in a white prom dress and a dark jacket, had walked for over a mile with barely a car passing when a big semi came barreling down the road. No one knows if it was because the rain or her tears were fogging her vision, or maybe she just didn’t care anymore, but it was as if she didn’t see the oncoming truck that would change the color of the off-white guardrails to red. The impact was so great that the girl was thrown over a nearby fence and, ironically, into her new home – a cemetery that stood on the opposite side.

It was well past one o’clock in the morning when the girl’s father, worried because his daughter hadn’t arrived home, decided to drive to the school to see if she was hanging out with some friends after the dance. As he pulled his Cadillac onto Old Hook Road, he could see and hear lights and sirens up in the distance. As a parent myself, I can imagine the panic he must have felt as he sped to the site of what appeared to be an accident.

The father pulled up beside a policeman who was standing by some flares and asked him what had happened, but before the policeman could answer, the man seemed to catch sight of someone farther up the road.

“Who’s that walking up there?” he asked, and as the policeman turned to look, he heard the man say, “That’s my daughter! What’s she doing walking all alone out here?” With squealing tires the father gunned his Caddy and took off in the direction where he thought he saw his daughter.

The policeman too thought, at least at first, that he could see someone walking along the road about seventy-five yards away, though later he decided it must have just been lights from the police cars reflecting off a tree in the rain. But what he was absolutely sure of was that no more than five seconds after the Caddy took off, it suddenly swerved on the slick blacktop, made a three-hundred and sixty degree donut, and smashed head first into a telephone pole, killing the driver instantly.

Investigators ruled that the car had spun out because the man had slammed on his brakes, though they didn’t know why he had tried to suddenly stop. The policeman reported what the man had said to him, but no one was found to have been walking along the road at that point.

When I first heard the story, I also learned the legend that had grown up around the incident – that when you drive down Old Hook Road on a stormy night you can see the blood-soaked guardrails and the figure of the girl who was killed there walking along the road, and that sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of a strange car traveling up and down, a ghostly Cadillac driven by a dead father still searching for his dead daughter.

Of course, being an avid self-proclaimed ghost hunter, I wanted to investigate the legend myself. And since my girlfriend and my kid brother were also interested in mysterious and unexplained phenomena, I asked them to accompany me.

I will regret that decision for the rest of my life.

***

The scheduled evening arrived, a cold, rainy night complete with thunder and lightning. My girlfriend and I picked up my brother at about 11 p.m., and I assured my worried mother that I would have him home by 1 a.m. As it wasn’t a school night, she reluctantly gave in. I advised him to dress warmly because we might be getting out of the car to check out the cemetery. By saying that, I almost scared him out of going, but after a few reassuring words, he put on his varsity letterman’s jacket, gave mom a kiss and an “I love you,” and were out the door. As I look back on it now, I’m glad he had the chance to say those words to her.

We arrived at Old Hook Road at about 11:30, but there must have been some sort of power outage, because the road was pitch black, with not a street lamp lit. The only light came from the moon as it occasionally made it’s way out of the dark clouds. As we started up the road, I recalled hearing that if you drove along the road with your headlights off, you would have a better chance of seeing something supernatural, but with my girlfriend and my seventeen-year old brother in the car I quickly washed that idea from my head. It was dangerous enough driving in the rain, let alone doing so without lights. So we kept the headlights on as we pushed slowly down the road.

After we had gone for about a mile, my girlfriend gave a little gasp and pointed at the guardrail to my left. Sure enough, the rail was spattered at that point with a dark-colored substance that looked to be blood. The hair on my arms started to stand on end, the adrenaline began surging through me, and I got the sense that something important was going to happen that night. I wish I had been wrong.

As we continued driving, we noticed, in the distance, the headlights of a car, and we all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, realizing that we weren’t the only ones on the road this lonely night. We got gradually closer to the other car, but when it was only about a quarter of a mile away, it seemed to start speeding up, and as it drew even closer it changed lanes so that it was heading straight for us. My girlfriend started screaming, and my brother was yelling too, asking the other driver what he thought he was doing, though of course the driver couldn’t hear him.

I switched lanes and the other car did likewise, so I switched again, and the other followed, At that point, I decided that the other car must contain a group of teenagers who were playing a dangerous game of chicken with me. Back and forth we went with only about one-hundred and fifty feet separating the two cars. My girlfriend was crouching down in the front seat and my brother was in the back covering his head with his beloved letterman jacket. As for me, I could feel the sweat pouring out of my palms as I gripped the wheel.

With a steep embankment on one side of the road and a deep ditch on the other, there was little room to maneuver, so I decided the best thing to do was just get in my lane, stay there, and slow down. By the time I had done that, the other car was only seventy-five feet away. Surely, I figured, it would now veer away.

But at that point the other car suddenly turned off its headlights. I had no idea where it was now, so I closed my eyes and hit the breaks. My car spun one-hundred and eighty degrees before coming to a halt, and the other car passed without hitting us. As it did so I tried to catch a glimpse of its license plate number, but almost immediately the car swerved off the road and straight into a telephone pole. At that point I could see, by my headlights, that is was a black Cadillac.

All three of us watched as the driver’s side door of the Caddy opened, and what appeared to be a man walked up the embankment and into the brush, then disappeared. At that point a patch of fog drifted between the two cars, and when it drifted away a few seconds later, the Cadillac was gone.

I checked to make sure everyone was okay. They were, though frightened, of course.

“I can’t believe what we just saw,” I said.

“I want to go home,” my brother said, and I had to agree. Both he and my girlfriend – not to mention myself – were clearly shaken up.

The fog had started to roll in heavily, and I asked my brother to get out and watch for any cars that might emerge from the fog and try to wave them down to help us while I tried to push my car out of the mud. My girlfriend took the wheel while I got out and began rocking the car back and forth. We were stuck pretty good, and I was still trying to jar us loose when I noticed, shining through the fog, the blur of two sets of headlights, one coming from each direction. Then I heard my brother yelling at some one.

I looked left and there, right in the middle of the road, was a young girl about my brother’s age. She was drenched and appeared to be wearing a prom dress, and she was singing something and dancing around. In another second the two cars were almost upon us, and at that instant, I saw my brother rush up to the girl and push her against the embankment.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed with my mother and my girlfriend by my side. I knew from what I had seen and from the looks in their eyes – especially the eyes of my mother – that my brother had not survived the accident.

“He was a hero,” I said to my mother. “I saw it. He saved that girl’s life.”

“What girl?” my mother said, looking first at me then at my girlfriend. The way my girlfriend looked at me and gave me a subtle shrug, I gathered that she had not seen the girl in the road. I then tried to explain to both of them what I had seen.

“The driver of the car didn’t say anything about a girl,’ my mother said. “He said there was an oncoming car with its high beams on, and he couldn’t see. And when he saw your brother in the middle of the road it was too late. He couldn’t stop. He hit your brother first, then slid and hit your car. The only other thing he knew was that the other car was a black Cadillac.”

I lay there as astonished, not knowing what to think, then my mother looked at me accusingly: “Why was he in the middle of the road?” she asked.

“To save the girl,” I said.

“There was no girl!” my mother said hysterically, then she broke down crying.

***

Two years later I married my girlfriend. We have both tried to forget that night on Old Hook Road, but it’s not easy.

Recently we were invited to a cousin’s Halloween party, and after it ended some of us hung around to exchange ghost stories. Someone I didn’t know started to talk about Old Hook Road and how if you go there on a stormy night you can see the ghostly Cadillac and a girl and a boy walking down the road. I quickly broke in, fully aware of the story and thinking about how my brother had lost his life on that road.

“I don’t want to hear this story,” I said. “But next time you tell it, tell it right. It was only a girl, not a boy. Believe me I know!”

Everyone was silent for a moment, then the other guy said, “I’m sorry, but the way I heard it, it was a girl in a white prom dress holding hands with a boy – a boy in a letterman’s jacket.