Truck Drivers Share The Creepiest Thing They've Seen On The Highway At Night

If any group of people have had the opportunity to see creepy stuff in the middle of nowhere, it’s truck drivers. These folks spend most of their time hauling cargo across the country, often at night, and often on deserted highways where it seems creepy things are most likely to emerge.

These truck drivers responded to the question on AskReddit, “While traveling through the night, what is the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen?” After reading these stories, I don’t think I’ll be driving on any dark highways anytime soon.

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“Trucker here. The creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced would have to be extreme wind, to be honest. I’ve been blown completely out my lane by sudden gusts.

Once, I was driving down the road and I couldn’t feel the wind of course in my truck. However, the truck in front of me seemed to lift up suddenly, tip slightly to the side, and then set back down again, swerving a little before it regained control. It seemed like it came from out of nowhere.

When you’re driving and the truck in front of you seems to float up and onto its side, it is a little concerning.”

“I haul water, and often drive through a lot of farmland where cows are prone to escaping and walking onto the highway in the dark. A number of times, I have swerved around cows, just to have the water then bounce its weight back and throw me back into oncoming lane.

Of all the things truckers see, mother nature is by far the scariest.”

“I’m not a truck driver, but I am friends with one.

When I asked him the creepiest thing he’s seen, he said it was a strange gathering that he woke up to while somewhere in Oklahoma. He never traveled alone, and this time his wife was with him.

Needless to say, once they looked across a field and noticed a group of people in the dark praying to a giant ritualistic fire, they just hunkered down and waited until dawn.”

“My dad’s a trucker, and mostly he doesn’t see much in spite of driving at night for nearly 30 years. But the strangest thing he’s seen was what he described as bright lights like bubbles, floating around over a forest.

Neither of us believe in UFOs, but we almost started to after he saw that.”

“My uncle has seen some really unsettling stuff. Hitchhikers that are unnaturally tall and ask to be dropped off in strange spots. Hitchhikers soaked in what looks like blood. Human figures in the trees, dragging huge objects.”

“Of all the things my dad has witnessed, my personal favorite is when he went to sleep after buying dinner at a truck stop, only to wake up and find the truck stop completely abandoned and ruined the following morning.”

“In 12 years I really havent seen much that Id call creepy. Ive been tired enough where shadows would look like an animal running out in the road. Ive driven by people walking and then not seen them in my mirrors. Sometimes the creepiest ones are the ones that give you the open-mouthed stare the whole time youre driving by.”

“I had a four-year stint of driving 18-wheelers in between my Navy and Army time.

The creepiest thing I’ve seen? A giant staircase, in the middle of a field, in Detroit. No house, no nothing, just a staircase.”

“Not so much creepy, but the scariest thing I’ve seen was a motorcycle in a high-speed chase going the wrong way on the highway headed right towards me. Good thing my direction of travel was a 2-lane highway and the motorcycle and the 5 cop cars decided to drive past me in the lane I was not in.”

(1/2) “My dad is about as straight down the line as a person can get. No nonsense. In other words, I take him at his word with confidence.

In the wee hours of the morning (he recalls it was around 3am) he was driving his tanker through the Scottish Highlands, with a long slog home ahead of him.

He suddenly notices that ‘something’ is pacing him in the next lane. He said it was a silver craft of sorts, clearly made up to blend in and appear as a car–but it lacked any wheels and was very much hovering a good foot or so off the ground.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “After pacing my dad’s tanker for a short while, it sped off into the distance at a heck of a pace–yet still observed lane discipline.

My dad has no idea what it was. His best guess is that it’s some kind of experimental military tech. Whatever it was, he said it was pretty darn creepy.”

(1/2) “This isn’t mine, but one relayed to me years ago by my father. It’s one of those friend of a friend type stories so it’s very possible it’s just a tall tale. It’s worth repeating just the same.

It was the 1960s or early 1970’s when a trucker hauling a bunch of new cars was passing through the desert on a two-lane highway at night. Suddenly his headlights quit. The truck still runs fine, and he still has parking lights, but it’s not nearly enough light to drive by.

He tried fixing the headlights but had no luck. That’s when he had an idea. The car hauler was one of those that had two layers of cars, and one was up high enough for the headlights to shine right over top of the cab. It wasn’t great but it was at least enough to get him to the next little patch of civilization.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “He climbed up, turned on the lights of that new car, then got back in his truck and started driving kinda proud of himself.

A few minutes up the road he sees a car going the other way, but it stops they pass. As he continues, he sees in his rearview mirror that the car has pulled right off the road.

The trucker is curious so he stops to ask if everything is alright. The other driver sheepishly admits, ‘Well, when I saw how high up those lights were, I wondered just how freakin’ wide that thing might be. So I got out of the car to look.’

They both had a bit of a laugh and went about their business.

Not exactly creepy, but a fun story nonetheless.”

(1/2) “My grandfather was a truck driver at a lumber yard for about 25 years after WWII. He once told a story about how he and a coworker both left at the same time from the yard. My grandfather would often go first and the others would follow, but the other guy insisted on taking the lead.

So they’re driving on the highway, full speed, his coworker gets cut off by a car that just switched lanes without looking. He slams on the brakes.

My grandfather noted this and, being so close behind, tapped the brakes and was able to do an emergency slide into the left lane without slamming into anyone.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “My grandfather pulled over and came running back. His coworker’s truck had swerved and crashed on the side of the road. His friend was badly injured but survived as my grandfather drove him to the hospital.

The weirdest thing? The car straight up disappeared. My dad swears he never saw it pass him after he pulled over, and it never actually crashed into his coworker’s car. His coworker said one minute he was about to rear-end it, and the next thing he remembered was being flipped on the side of the road.”

(1/2) “I saw 4 hitchhikers out in the middle of the night in winter, walking towards a straight-away that was about 40-mile stretch. There was no way they could walk in the freezing cold for that long, and I don’t think anyone was coming down the road for a while.

So I decided to pick them up. I slowed down in front of them about 100 ft ahead, and looked into my rear-view mirror.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “They just bolted as soon as I came to a complete stop. All 4 of them took off running into the night.

It was probably in the low-20s and this was the middle of nowhere–there was no town for at least 35 miles. Not sure what happened to them but I never could find anything in the papers.”

(1/2) “It was like 2:30am-ish. This was the middle of nowhere in Arizona. I hadn’t seen another vehicle for at least an hour. It was kinda dangerous territory, because when you’re the only car on the road, tiredness comes creeping in no matter how well rested you are. That lack of stimulation will make you sleepy a lot faster than you might think.

I was always taught that if it was on 4 legs and walked in front of my truck to just brace for impact and hit it. Yea, it might tear the crap out of the tractor, but dynamiting the breaks can cause a jackknife or a roll-over.

It’s cheaper to fix a tractor than it is to fix a tractor, a trailer, and replace the destroyed cargo if you roll over. Not to mention if you roll a truck, good luck getting hired by any company worth working for.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “This next part may have been exaggerated by my brain, but I am not embellishing for story’s sake. All of the sudden, apparently out of nowhere, what seems like a hundred tumbleweeds come rolling into the middle of the highway. Including a couple that seemed to be the size of a large SUV.

I prepared for impact before realizing that these were not animals, just clumps of hay. Still, those tumbleweeds freaked me the heck out.”

“There’s a person I used to work with who worked evening shifts, and walked home afterwards. Part of his walk went thought a road surrounded by trees, so at night, driving through it looks sort of creepy and isolated. When a car would drive by, he told us he would start walking like a zombie to freak people out.

I saw him one time going through there at night. I saw him start doing the zombie walk. I immediately burst out laughing, as I had thought he was just making it up.”

(1/2) “The most scared I have ever been was going over the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains, one night in late April.

I had checked the weather reports and the only concern was supposed to be light snow flurries at the highest elevations. California State will issue mandatory restrictions indicating you have to put chains on your tires, so I checked the CA DOT website and no restrictions were called for.

I went through the inspection station at Truckee and they were asking if we had chains on the truck, but there was still no call to put them on. About 10 miles up the road, the sky opened up into the worst whiteout blizzard I have ever been in. I could barely see 50 feet in front of me, and there had been another truck ahead of me but I lost sight of his lights completely.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “I could see his tracks in the snow. I slowed down to about 20 mph. Then just to make it worse, the wind was blowing and the snow was swirling in all directions and I began to experience a strange vertigo, like I was flying and tumbling in the air. I had to glue my line of site on those tracks in front of me and hope that guy in front didn’t drive off the road.

I made it. It only lasted about 30 miles and then it turned to heavy rain. I told my dispatcher if I ever had to go through there again at night and any snow was forecast, I was going to shut down until daylight.”

“I work nights for a job that requires me to drive around my town without stopping for hours and hours and hours. There are some weird things that happen around the time I work, from 11:30pm to 8:30am. Among other stuff, I’ve seen lots of wildlife. Mostly the normal stuff: deer, coyotes, raccoons, skunks, foxes, etc.

I was driving slowly down a street the other day and noticed a coyote near the road, so I pulled over to look at it. It immediately looked over at me in the eyes, walked directly in front of me, and stood up on its hind legs without breaking eye contact. After about a minute of this, it trotted away. I have no idea why it did that. It was weirdly kind of majestic and creepy at the same time.”

“I was so tired once, when I first started driving and pushed things too far, that I saw a large boat on a trailer driving beside me WITHOUT being pulled by anything. Just literally a boat driving next to me. Somehow I couldnt register the truck pulling it.

Add that to the giant tree that was growing suddenly in the middle of the highway just ahead of me and it was way past my bedtime. I never pushed sleep deprivation that far again.”

“My uncle from Guatemala drives trucks across the country, and his stories still make me lose sleep at night. By far the scariest one is when he said he was taking a nap on top of the bed of the truck, when he looks over and sees a very elderly woman.

He described her as having very long nails, long white stringy hair, and being extremely hunched over. He was in the middle of nowhere, but he could see her entering into a small cave with a candle in her hand. He jumped into the truck and sped out of there. That’s some real witchcraft business that I don’t even want to know about.”

(1/2) “I’m not a trucker, but once when I was driving from Texas to California, in the middle of nowhere, up ahead I saw flames. As I got closer there was a car in the middle of the road on fire. Normally this wouldn’t be very creepy… Except for the fact that I was in the middle of the desert and had been driving for hours through it.

There was no one and nothing around for miles and miles. I was in the middle of a wasteland. I got out of course to check and see if someone was in the car. No dice, couldn’t really see inside through the flames and smoke. Then I thought I heard something in the trunk. A couple of banging sounds… Of course it could have been something in the trunk maybe exploding… But I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe something or someone was in it.”

(Story continued!)

(2/2) “The fire was way too hot for me to get in there and try to open it… so I whipped out my phone to try to call 911, but I had no signal. At that point it occurred to me that this fire may have been intentional. That the person who did this might be watching. So I got myself out of there.

As soon as I had a cell signal, I called the police and told them everything that I saw. A few hours later they called me back to confirm the area that I was in… They didn’t find a thing. No car, no evidence of fire, no nothing. So yeah… That’s my creepy story.”

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These comments have been edited for clarity.