A True Australian Ghost Story

This story happened a short while ago near Brisbane, and even though it sounds a little Alfred Hitchcock… it’s (supposedly) true.

John, a Sydney University student, was hitchhiking about 100 kilometres north of Brisbane on an unlit country road and on a very dark night with a severe storm raging. Thunder, lightning, torrential rain… the night was rolling on and no car went by. The storm was so strong he could hardly see more than a few feet ahead of him. Suddenly, in a flash of lightning, he saw a car slowly coming towards him and it stopped just a few feet from where he stood. John, in the dark and driving rain, desperate for shelter and without thinking about it, got in the car and closed the door… immediately noticing that there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn’t on!

Then, the car began slowly moving.

A little terrified by the sudden movement, without any obvious human interaction, John was thinking about jumping from the moving vehicle, but the storm was getting worse… here was a safe haven from the tempest—of sorts…

He looked ahead at the road and saw a curve approaching. Scared, he started to pray, begging for his life. “Do I jump?” he thought, when suddenly—just before he hit the curve—a hand appeared through the window and turned the wheel.

John, in the dark, with only the flash of the lightning and paralysed with terror, watched how the hand appeared every time they came to a curve. John saw the lights of a pub down the road so, gathering strength, he jumped out of the slowly moving car and ran to it. Wet and out of breath, he rushed inside and asked for two shots of tequila. He then started telling everybody around him the horrible experience he had just been through. A silence had enveloped everybody when they realized he was crying and wasn’t drunk…

About 5 minutes later, two blokes walked into the same pub. They were also wet and out of breath. Looking around and seeing John sobbing at the bar, one said to the other, “Look, Bruce… there’s the idiot that got in the car while we were pushing it.”