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The Drive That Never Happened

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Anonymous

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Sean H., U.S.

While not experiencing the following anecdote directly, I have reason to believe in its merit due to the fact that several different individuals, my mother included, all tell me the same exact details when questioned about it seperately... Either way, it's odd, so take it for what it's worth...

http://www.forteantimes.com/happened/drive.shtml

Link is dead. See post below for complete text.
 
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I am curious - what made them keep driving straight for two hours when they knew they'd easily traveled the five miles and well beyond?
 
well where else were they gonna go?
i know if i was in the same situation i'd be more interested in keeping going to try and find out what i'd stumbled into.

[edited for spelling and puncturation]
 
Maybe our reality is just a cartoon drawn by people a dimension, or several dimensions, removed from us. In this case they needed to depict a long drive on a budget. Thus you get the same hallway, or the same boulder, passing by in an eternal loop. Just like in the cartoons.
 
kaer said:
Maybe our reality is just a cartoon drawn by people a dimension, or several dimensions, removed from us. In this case they needed to depict a long drive on a budget. Thus you get the same hallway, or the same boulder, passing by in an eternal loop. Just like in the cartoons.
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I like this theory a lot. If the people in the car made a cycle of hand gestures or facial expressions, that would lend credence to it as well!
 
The link in post #1 is long dead. Here's the complete text, salvaged from the Wayback Machine ...

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The Drive That Never Happened

Sean H., U.S.

While not experiencing the following anecdote directly, I have reason to believe in its merit due to the fact that several different individuals, my mother included, all tell me the same exact details when questioned about it seperately... Either way, it's odd, so take it for what it's worth:

While in her early twenties, my mother was fond of travelling with friends up north to a particular cabin in the heavily forested woods of northern Michigan.

The entire group of friends were extremely familiar with the place, seeing as how they went there all the time.

The cabin itself was situated about ten miles from a small logging town.

Here are the odd events as everyone tells them to me:

After spending a night and the following day there, the group decides to take off the following night.

As they are driving down the lonely 10 mile forest road, which, by the way, is simply a straight shot to town, no turns or curves, they pass the road sign that indicates that they are 5 miles from the town.

As soon as they drive past this sign, the radio stops.

They end up driving on this straight road for about two hours, the town never in sight.

After the two hours of driving on this straight road, they pass the sign that says they are 5 miles from town, AGAIN. And to make matters even more confusing, as soon as they pass this sign, the radio starts up again at the same spot in the same song that it stopped on.

Naturally enough, they never travelled to that cabin durning nighttime ever again.

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SALVAGED FROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20030919022436/http://www.forteantimes.com:80/happened/drive.shtml
 
I've driven through northern Michigan and it is indeed a lonely place - even in broad daylight. Still there's something fishy about this story. You would think that, once they realized something wasn't quite right, the girls would have at least considered returning to the cabin and trying the trip again in the daytime. I certainly would have asked the poster for additional details. This is also one I would have referred to our Google Maps experts to confirm the alleged route.
 
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It would have been a big help in the OP had specified a location (e.g., the name of the logging town). The allusion to 'northern Michigan' is not helpful, because this may refer to 2 different regions: the northern portion of the lower peninsula or the Upper Peninsula (aka 'the UP'). The latter is by far the more 'lonely' of the two.

At face value, this story sounds like a 'lost time' or 'road hypnosis' episode - particularly in light of the way the mysterious two-hour middle part is simply a blur punctuated on each end with perception of the radio playing.

Specifying this intermediate blur as lasting some two hours implies checking watches or some clock (perhaps within the vehicle), but there's no explanation for how the informants determined the time lapse.

I agree with you (SkepticalX) that it boggles the mind that no one in the vehicle questioned why they hadn't reached the town yet. Since the riders never stopped nor retraced their path there's no indication they had a chance of realizing they weren't where they thought they were (and / or providing an explanation for the time loss).

As I understand the storyline, these folks decided to leave the cabin and go home after spending the day there. There's no explanation as to how far they had to drive, nor why they undertook a potentially long journey at the end of the day rather than the following morning. My point is that the decision to leave could well have been a spur-of-the-moment thing when everyone was fatigued (drunk, whatever ...), making them vulnerable to mis-percaptions and / or mis-remembering.

Another angle I can't rule out is that the folks forgot about having to turn back to the cabin on a first departure attempt (e.g., to retrieve some forgotten item(s)), and somehow encountering the road sign twice was mis-remembered as happening on a single trip in the vehicle.
 
Hmm... I was excited by the title of this thread but I'm also slightly confused as to the exact story. As has been mentioned above, did they really just drive for two hours straight, on a road that was only ten miles long (so would have taken, what, 10 minutes?) without being at all confused?

Perhaps they did talk it amongst themselves and figured "well, if we keep on driving, we're bound to get there"? Some people don't take situations with an analytical mind, they may well have just not known what to do other than to keep driving.

But it's strange, and it would be worth knowing what, if anything, they discussed about the problem while it was happening.
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Hmm... I was excited by the title of this thread but I'm also slightly confused as to the exact story. As has been mentioned above, did they really just drive for two hours straight, on a road that was only ten miles long (so would have taken, what, 10 minutes?) without being at all confused?

Perhaps they did talk it amongst themselves and figured "well, if we keep on driving, we're bound to get there"? Some people don't take situations with an analytical mind, they may well have just not known what to do other than to keep driving.

But it's strange, and it would be worth knowing what, if anything, they discussed about the problem while it was happening.
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I think that's the most likely explanation. I well remember a female friend with her mates took 2 hours to do a 20 minute journey . They were on the right road but going in the wrong direction. When I asked they said they were busy chatting and didn't realise the time had slipped by. Recently someone I know heading east to Leeds on the M62 again with friends drove all the way to Hull before realising that they had missed the right junction. Observation is sometimes missing with drivers.
 
PeteS said:
I think that's the most likely explanation. I well remember a female friend with her mates took 2 hours to do a 20 minute journey . They were on the right road but going in the wrong direction. When I asked they said they were busy chatting and didn't realise the time had slipped by. Recently someone I know heading east to Leeds on the M62 again with friends drove all the way to Hull before realising that they had missed the right junction. Observation is sometimes missing with drivers.
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They went to Hull & back.
 
Born and raised in northern michigan (of the lower peninsula) and am curious to know more but i don't think we'll be getting any. A shame.
 
I once got on the A1(M) rather than the M1 and found myself half way to London rather than the very familiar drive from Yorkshire to Devon, and didn't realise I was wrong until I was nearly at Peterborough, whereupon I realised what I'd done.
 
That is the difficult thing about a 15-year-old post with no real details - it's just a campfire story at this point.
 
catseye said:
I once got on the A1(M) rather than the M1 and found myself half way to London rather than the very familiar drive from Yorkshire to Devon, and didn't realise I was wrong until I was nearly at Peterborough, whereupon I realised what I'd done.
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I've done similar - so many familiar journeys and sometimes the familiar gets followed and the destination is temporarily re-assigned.
 
ive learned from similar mistakes to always check half-familiar routes before i leave

still never do it
 
SkepticalX said:
That is the difficult thing about a 15-year-old post with no real details - it's just a campfire story at this point.
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A campfire story ... That's a good way to put it.

Then (years ago), as now, the story one tells is all the story we have to work with. One thing I noticed during my complete sweep through the dusty back pages of the IHTM section is that many of the stories - including ones eventually published in FT - are similarly frustrating for their lack of 'check-able' details.
 
Gotta say it reads like a work of fiction..
 
If you scan sites like NUFORC, there seems to be a minor cottage industry in reports like this that have just enough detail to peak your curiosity, but are still vague enough to prevent any serious investigation.
 
SkepticalX said:
If you scan sites like NUFORC, there seems to be a minor cottage industry in reports like this that have just enough detail to peak your curiosity, but are still vague enough to prevent any serious investigation.
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Playing Devil's Advocate here, and I see what you're saying, but... it could be the case in some cases, even if not all, that the witness simply doesn't want to give away their location? A lot of people (me included) are very wary of what details we give out online and just might not want to be identified in that way?

I know that won't be the case for all of them, but... just offering it as a possibility :)
 
I am willing to extend some benefit of doubt because there are times when someone is trying to recall an event many years after the fact. Understandably, some details could get fuzzy. However, if you are reporting an event with the idea of being part of the solution, there's plenty of quantifiable details you can provide and still protect your anonymity.

No, I think there really are personalities out there who get a thrill out of poking the bears with a stick. They're aim is to get the faithful all stirred up about their story. I used to call this the "Fat Kid Sees Bigfoot" Theory - they come up with these stories because they need attention they don't get in other facets of their lives. May need to come up with a new name in these overly-sensitive times.
 
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