19/01/2024
I received the following listener email today, and they gave me permission to share their story on my social media. I’ve heard several similar stories over the years, with the strong sense of foreboding and darkness closing in while on dark roads at night. It’s so intriguing. Thank you for the story, AB! 💗
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Hi Candis!
First of all, I love your show! It's so much fun hearing about tales specifically centered around Appalachia.
I have a followup to the first part of the story sent in by Anonymous that you read in the listener submissions vol 2 episode. Back in 2006, I had a very similar experience. I was about 50 miles east of where Anonymous's story takes place, in Maryland on the stretch of River Rd by Blockhouse Point.
It was the middle of summer, around 7:30 or 8pm. The sun was still up, but starting to get low on the horizon. My friend and I had gone out for dinner and decided to go for a drive afterwards to enjoy the warm night.
We were driving with the windows down, blasting Linkin Park while singing along and chatting. As we got into a more wooded area, it got so dark, darker than it should have. I remember the beam of the headlights seeming to narrow to the point of not illuminating anything. Even the interior of the car seemed darker, no longer lit by even the dash or radio lights. The night was warm, it was the middle of summer after all, but all of a sudden, I felt cold. So cold that my whole body broke out in goosebumps. Then I noticed a smell, like we were sitting on top of a pile of roadkill, dozens of rotting bodies; so pervasive, I could taste it. Next I realized that the radio had gone silent and we had gone silent, no longer singing along or talking. I couldn't even hear anything outside the windows. Still moving forward, I started to get this intense feeling, a certainty that I was about to die. I turned to my friend who was driving and told her we needed to turn around. She turned to look at me and there were tears streaming down her face, at which point, I realized that I was also crying. She said she felt like she was going to die and I screamed to turn around. She pulled a three point turn in the middle of the road and for the moment that my open window faced the direction we had been heading, I swear I felt something barrelling down on us. Some massive, dark, oppressive pressure rushing towards us. The feel of it was crushing me and I couldn't draw a breath.
Once she got the car turned around, she floored it back the way we had come. Within about two hundred yards, the radio and dash lights came back on. The headlights once more illuminated the road. Then the sun came back and I could see everything around us again. Finally, I could hear wildlife in the trees on either side of the road and the overpowering stench of death and rot had vanished.
We made it back to my house in record time and both flung ourselves, sobbing, into my mother's arms. We told her the story and then my mom followed my friend home to make sure she got there safely. The next day, my mom and I went back out to that same stretch of road to investigate and there was nothing there. No smell, no darkness, no feelings of impending doom; everything was perfectly normal.
I brought the experience up recently to the friend I had been with that night and she still remembers it as viscerally as I do. We are both certain that if we had kept driving forward down that road, we would have died. Neither of us knows what was out there that night and Anonymous's story is the first I've ever heard of someone experiencing anything similar.
You don't have to share this on the show, but if you do, I would be very interested to know if anyone else has a story like it.
Thanks for reading!
