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Haunted Road?? You Decide?.


erik5387

Paranormal Novice
I was 16 years old and it was the summer of 1996. During that break I had the privilege of working the late shift at our town Wendy’s. I had spoken to my girlfriend, Tracy, (who’s parents were out of town all week long) earlier that evening and planned to drop by after I got off of work at three am. Tracy told me that she might go to a friend’s house and if she did so while I was in transit she would page me (yes I had a pager, cell phones were not yet cheep enough for a teenager to afford) and that would be a signal for me to show up at that house instead.

I grew up in Richland County, South Carolina and Tracy lived in the next county over, Kershaw. Because I had lived there all my life I knew several ways to get to her house, the shortest of which was Zion Church road. The road is a windy path through dense woods that not many people used. The trees grow together above it in most places making it almost impossible see the sky. It was paved once, long ago, because grass had grown up on both sides making it the width of a one lane road. It is important to mention that at this point in time there weren’t any houses or neighborhoods on the road at all, only a single, old, one room church house, surrounded by a small cemetery.

Three am came and I got off work and headed to Tracy’s house. I am driving down Zion Church road, I slow down to go around the big bend right before you see the church and the first thing I notice is my headlights reflecting on what looks to be broken glass all over the road. The next thing I see is an old white pickup truck with the front all smashed in, windshield busted, headlights busted, and a guy about my age standing in front of it. The guy had on blue jeans and a white tee shirt, blood was all over his face (looked like from a broken nose) and hands. I pulled up next to him and rolled down my window and asked him if he needed help. He looked at me and shook his head no. The look in his eyes when he looked at me scared the crap out of me and still does to this day.

I hit the gas and made it to Tracy’s house in less than three minutes. Right as I pull in the driveway my pager goes off…meaning that she was at her friend’s house, I turned around and went right back the way I came up Zion Church road. I passed the spot where the guy was in the road less than ten minutes after I had been there before. No guy, no glass, no truck.

Now I am sure in the window of time that I was gone someone could have come to pick him up, towed the truck, and cleaned up the glass on the road. But how could he have contacted them? There weren’t any houses with phones within walking distance. He could have had a cell phone but to this day there isn’t a tower out there and no one can get a signal on that end of the county. The only explanation I can come up with is that maybe he hit another car they were able to drive and get help. I also want to mention that I didn’t recognize this kid and that says something. I grew up in an incredibly small rural town and went to high school with the same kids that I went to kindergarten with. I knew most of the kids in my age group because even if they didn’t go to my school they went to a neighboring school that we played baseball or football against. Who knows? After ten years I still puzzle over this.

It took me several years to drive down Zion Church road again, even if it was a great shortcut. I was home one summer from college (I am pretty sure this was in 2001) and had just begun using the road again. One late night my best friend and I were headed to a bar Kershaw and came around the same bend as before. There by the church stood a man-like something in the graveyard. It was dark, pitch black, like a shadow but my head lights didn’t penetrate it, it seemed like the light beams went around it. We both saw it in passing and did not stop to check it out. Again there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this but I am at a loss to come up with it.

When I was home a couple of weeks ago my friend and I drove down Zion Church again. Someone has bought all of the property around it, built some housing developments, the old Zion Church still remains but is now fully restored. These experiences are the only things even remotely paranormal that have happened to me. I welcome any thoughts/comments/questions on them.
 
Someone could have drove by and saw the accident and called for help. Either via cell phone or drove to a pay phone. A cop could have happened on the person too. Or trucker with cb. Did you notice if the blood looked fresh, or was it dried? That may be a loose indicator of how long he had been out there. If he was out there a long time, the help could have been on it's way, though still probably not close because sirens would probably be blasting. Not sure.

As for not recognizing him. Doubt you knew everyone there. I wasn't aware that was a scarcely populated area. I'm a little familiar with it. Regardless, he could have been from out of town.

I live in Charlotte NC. I've lived here all my life. I am 31. Several years ago I heard a loud bang while in my garage at around 2 am. I figured it was a automobile accident. I got in my car and drove to see if I could help. Sure enough some kid crashed into a tree. He was in shock basically and looked it. His radio was still blasting as if he didn't even realize it, or care. Perhaps he left it on for attention. The blood was fresh on his face as it should have been since I heard the accident just 2-3 minutes before. I called for help and in minutes it arrived. Unfortunately I don't recall if they used sirens or not. They probably did though and I just don't remember.

Unless I missed something while reading your story I don't see any reason what so ever to think it was anything other than a real person that had an accident.
 
Maybe I didn't elaborate enough......at that point in time on that end of the county there was no cell phone reception. To this day reception is still very spotty (a buddy of mine lives out that way and I was just down there hunting during the holidays) due to the fact there isn't a tower. Nearest pay phone was at the Exxon station in town (approximately 10 miles away)....also back then there was only one officer from the county police patrolling in Blythewood (the town I grew up in) and he usually stayed near the town. Since then they have built a fire house at the end of the road but back then the nearest fire/EMS was the volunteer fire department in town.

The nearest towing service was Jim Hall's auto in town, in the same area as the volunteer fire department. The house I was headed too was not to terribly far away, at the end of Zion Church road you took a right and went down the road a couple of miles and there it was. I went down there, checked my pager, turned around in the driveway, and headed back towards Zion Church. I feel confident that I would have at the very least seen glow of the lights from either Jim's tow truck or EMS/cops. Also I took the most direct route back to town that night and would have most likely passed them towing the vehicle....the EMS unit would probably have gone a different way, more towards the hospital in Columbia, so I wouldn't have seen it.

A CB was something I haven't thought about (local emergency management does monitor channel 9 because of the interstate) although I doubt it was a trucker because there is no way, even today, that an 18 wheeler would fit down that road. As I said before it is very narrow and trees were overgrown above the road so bad that if you owned a jacked up truck limbs would brush the top of it. I also know that CB reception is pretty bad out that way because my hunt club is near there and most of the guys don't bother with CBs or short waves because the signal sucks. I don't recall if the pick-up the kid was driving had an antenna or not. To the best of my recollection the blood looked fresh.....I don't think he had been there long.

Since I graduated high school that end of the county has experienced an huge population explosion, I went off to college and came back a year later for summer break and my town had two new grocery stores, three hotels, a new gas station, and a bunch of new neighborhoods! Back then though the northeast section of the county and the towns near it (to include Winnsboro, Cedar Creek, and Elgin) were all very small. I am not sure of what our population was (I think it was around 2000 people for Blythewood) it is now a lot larger. There is a good possibility that I would have recognized him had he been from my town or any of the nearby towns but he could have been from Columbia, Rock Hill, Charlotte or any number of other small towns in the area. I guess that is not a reason to be suspicious either.

I guess it boils down to my gut feeling on the whole situation. The way the kid looked at me scared me more than just about anything else I have seen my entire life. Locking eyes with him was like looking into something hollow, words don't do it justice. Suffice it to say that I have seen people in shock, the only person getting a "shock" here was me. The timing for the cleanup is what I ponder the most. I don't know the exact time I was gone, but I will tell you this, it was less than ten minutes. Even going slow it wouldn't have taken me that long and I was hauling ass! In that time someone would have had to hook up a tow truck to the pick-up that was, in my opinion, too wrecked to drive, loaded up the kid, and beat me back to town towing a vehicle on a back country road. Also the glass....there was glass from the windshield all over the road; I remember the crunching noise when my tires rolled over it. Someone had to take the time to clean it up, I realize this wouldn't have taken long but all the same it would have added time on to the response.

Jim Hall (the tow truck guy) was the step-father of a good friend of mine. I asked him later that week if he had towed any trucks, the answer was no...he hadn't had any tow jobs in the past two weeks. When I turned 17 I joined the volunteer fire department. I asked pretty much everybody there if they had ever worked an accident on Zion Church road, again the answer was no.

There are hundreds of ways that the kid could have gotten help. Maybe he was drunk and the person he was in the accident with went to get help that wouldn't involve the police. I don't know. I do know that something just wasn't right about the entire ordeal; something makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think about it, even though I have tried to rationalize it six ways from Sunday. Who knows, I doubt I will ever understand it. Thanks for the input A. LeClair, I appreciate the time you took to write a response.
 
A.LeClair is right.nobody gets left on roads after accidents,some one from another town was probably sent to him after another motorist stopped and asked him if he was ok and he said yes but they got a tow truck anyway.you probably want to think its something else but there is always an explaination
 
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