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Ghost Vehicles

'Animism is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things - animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words - as being animated, having agency and free will.'
 
ChrisBoardman said:
Have there ever been cases of people following a vehicle then it vanishes in plain sight?
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Yes, the Ghost Car of Skye, which I've posted about elsewhere, has several sightings of this type.

The "wee black car" is supposed to haunt the road between Portree and Sligachan and accounts of it were first recorded in the late 1940s. Most were at night, and a few are of lights rather than a vehicle, but there was a daylight sighting by a lorry driver in 1948 of a car approaching which then vanished. The car is usually described as an old Austin.

The car was later interpreted by locals as a foreshadowing of a tragic accident in 1959, when the Rev D A Maclean accidentally drove a car off the ferry 'Broadford' at Kyleakin, causing the deaths of four of his parishioners (he survived).
 
The story was featured in the extraordinary BBC documentary The Ghostman of Skye some years ago. There are a couple of YouTube bits of the relevant clips:



There's a full version of the documentary too but the audio quality is terrible, although a longer version is available from the filmmaker under the title Second Sight.

Note that the Rev D A Maclean ghost hunting in the documentary isn't the same Rev D A Maclean as the one involved in the accident!
 
Aydee_Aitchdee said:
WHAT? FORTEANA IN AN ALREADY FORTEAN VIDEO?

synchonicity!
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Well the ghosthunter was Donald Angus and the other one was Donald Alick - I get the feeling Hebrideans tend to have a fairly limited set of names (not just surnames).
 
Paul_Exeter said:
There a quite a few ghost vehicle accounts within the UK Paranormal database:

https://www.paranormaldatabase.com

And I seem to recall @RuthRoperWylde features some in her books. I also recall ghost vehicles being associated with WW2 airfields, will see if I can find any online.
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Yep, I have a number of ghost vehicles in my books, and several more recent sightings from witnesses I found for he ghost car of Skye, as well as a couple of other Scottish locations. There's a ghost Daimler type car around north Bedfordshire / Northamptonshire, and a ghost lorry in Warwickshire, that I can think of off the top of my head. I have several accounts of ghost motorbike headlights coming up fast behind cars too.
 
Friend of mine - someone I haven't seen in years so I can't get hold of him to get him to re-tell it for the details - saw a very old car (40s or 50s?) going at high speed through my old village, on the old Great North Rd, late one evening. He'd know the make of car, no doubt, as he happened to have a vintage car himself. (Which also meant he happened to go to the local meet ups and knew there was nothing going on, locally). He saw it at a point very close to the house where I grew up and knew it was paranormal (I forget the details, last told this story maybe 15 years back) because it wasn't entirely solid or "there" IIRC. If I ever bump into him again, will ask him to re-tell it to me.

This point is a big bend in the road and as there was a bikers' cafe in the village, there had been numerous accidents at that same point. (Including a possible urban myth about a motorbike in the 1960s crashing into a house on that bend, and the biker's decapitated head being found on the front room floor).
 
My grandparents had an encounter with a phantom motorcycle in the 1960s.

According to the story told, my grandparents and great aunt (grandma's sister) and great uncle were out for a drive in the Warwickshire countryside on a Sunday afternoon. The two men were in the front and my grandma / Great Aunt in the back. The four were driving down a long, straight road which had several turn offs connected to a farm estate that spanned the area, when, approaching one such junction, my grandma and her sister saw a helmeted motorcycles steaming towards them from one of these feeder roads. Bracing for impact because they thought their car was about to collide with the bike, my grandma shouted out and, just as it should have slammed into the side of the vehicle, the bike seemed to vanish into thin air.

Oddly, both my grandma and great aunt saw the bike - neither of the men in the front saw, or heard. a thing.
 
BS3 said:
...There's a full version of the documentary too but the audio quality is terrible, although a longer version is available from the filmmaker under the title Second Sight....
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For some years after I first saw this on TV I regularly, but unsuccessfully, tried to find it online.

For a while it was up on some obscure Russian or Eastern European site - and the quality wasn't much better than that terrible YouTube upload.

But for a while now there has been a decent version on Documentary Heaven - see here.

Very much worth watching.

(Edit: The audio goes a bit out of sync after about ten minutes - but it's bearable.)
 
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On today's Quora was an account of a ghost lorry.
In the late 80s a large articulated delivery lorry arrived at a supermarket in Newport Pagnell, although the supermarket wasn't scheduled to receive a delivery that day. The lorry was witnessed by several people and someone noted the registration number. The lorry entered the yard - and then promptly vanished. The reg no. turned out to be that of a lorry destroyed in a crash on the motorway the previous week in which the driver was killed.
The story was posted to Quora by a guy who worked at the depot where the lorry and driver were based. He wasn't a personal witness to the incident, but heard it from some colleagues.
 
NomDeGuerre said:
My grandparents had an encounter with a phantom motorcycle in the 1960s.

According to the story told, my grandparents and great aunt (grandma's sister) and great uncle were out for a drive in the Warwickshire countryside on a Sunday afternoon. The two men were in the front and my grandma / Great Aunt in the back. The four were driving down a long, straight road which had several turn offs connected to a farm estate that spanned the area, when, approaching one such junction, my grandma and her sister saw a helmeted motorcycles steaming towards them from one of these feeder roads. Bracing for impact because they thought their car was about to collide with the bike, my grandma shouted out and, just as it should have slammed into the side of the vehicle, the bike seemed to vanish into thin air.

Oddly, both my grandma and great aunt saw the bike - neither of the men in the front saw, or heard. a thing.
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My first wife and I had a possible encounter with a phantom bike in 1980. We were driving home late on Sunday night after a weekend with my parents. After turning off the A127 we were followed by a motorcycle headlight along the A130 as far as Battlesbridge - the A130 there was pretty straight (the whole road layout is different today).

Just before reaching the turn that led into the village proper the light simply vanished. We'd both been watching because although the bike was quite close and we weren't going fast it never tried to overtake. We'd surely have noticed if it had slowed down to turn off into a lane or something.
 
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