Rerouting: The Pale Man of Highway 152

The lane was merging into Highway one fifty two up ahead, and I could see the signs like I had a thousand times before, but this time there were glowing. I had never been around there at that time of night. My dad useduld tell me stories of that road, and no matter what, he would always suggest a detour. But way are round that highway. Take the Coastline road, he would say. Or keep going towards Lyon in County, and then drive the ten minutes back. He understood wrote he had those old maps, the books you would buy at the gas stations or car repair shops. He would be out in the car by himself with a pencil on his ear, flipping through the index and then back to the mac. He was drawing out the route and signs to watch out for. But not me. I relied on the voice that would tell me where to go, and I would turn it on, even to go to places I knew and had been to many times before, like this way back to my college apartment in the six hour drive. Had I left the phone off, things would have turned out completely different. My name is Edwin and here's a scary story. It was late December when I was taking that drive. I figured nobody would be out on the road so close to Christmas, but I was wrong, at least for the parts near the city before the first mountain Ridge had stayed on my hometown a little bit longer than expected because some old friends came home for the holidays. We spent some time hanging out with each other, but even on that day, I left much later, around eight in the evening, against my dad's advice. That road's crazy, we go around to Lyon in County. Listen to me, I nodded, grab the car keys. I knew Dad's story. Well, actually the whole family knew it. And it's not like we don't trust Dad or anything. He's always pulled through for us. But it was his story, this insignificant part of the trip he did out there when he was younger, that really left him shaken up. Mom said that he even stopped driving for a bit, a thing that he normally loved to do. I thought of this as I started on that long path up north and the car started spreading out way out in the distance. I could see maybe two or three pairs of tail lights, no white lights coming back on the other side of the divider. I often wondered where all those cars went after that hill. The car was dark, and the only sound I heard was the humming of that engine of that old Chevy suburban making its way across the state. Again, I could almost hear Dad's voice here. His story turns out that when he was nineteen, he had gotten a job for a car salesman. Whenever there was a buyer out of state, Dad would be called up to drive it to them, and then he would get a bus to get back. Three hundred bucks for that, he would brag. He started saving for his first car. But there was one time when he had gotten a gig to take a truck up north. He was to be delivered to a ranch. The key used to be left on the dashboard. He was supposed to take out his camera, one of those disposable ones, take a picture of everything before leaving, and on his way back, no one would be signing for the car on arrival like they usually did. He didn't find it strange. I wasn't sure what the name of the town was, but he had to take Highway one fifty two to get to it, branch off into one of the side roads, and then hitch a ride to town in order to get to the closest bus station on his way back. He was supposed to take another photo there and along the way that had his maps with him. Bus schedules he would jot down after calling the stations in different cities, So he wasn't nervous about that. And you would think hitchhiking would scare him, but it didn't. I guess it was much more common back then. So he goes out there, delivers a truck at the entrance of a ranch. Not the typical ranch you were imagining, though, but a large place with its own roads and what appear to be shops. He pulls over, leaves the keys on the dashboard, grabs his maps in a duffel bag he had brought with him, takes the pictures. Mind you, this was in the afternoon, so he had time to get back in everything, but he still said that there was something in the air that made him feel uncomfortable. He snapped another photo of it, started walking back to the town. It would be around an hour back to the main road where he would hitch a ride for about half an hour to his next stop. So he's walking back along this lonely road a few hills and rock formations along the way, but he was guiding himself on the fence of the property what he believed was still a part of the ranch. At a certain section, he noticed that there is this huge stitch on the road, a thing that he must have driven past without noticing, but it made him double check his round so right there, takes out his map, begins referencing different places around him, and that's when he notices a man, or what he thinks is a man, lurking on the other side of the trees that divide the road from the property line and the fence. He moves slowly, acting as if my dad couldn't see him. Now, that always makes it a point to emphasize how away he was from everything. At that point, in the middle of nowhere, the sun was still loud, but because of the time of the year, winter or spring, I can't remember that part. He found it strange to see someone standing out there. Hey, how you doing? Spoted this ditch? They didn't see it on my way here, Dad yelled through the trees, trying to make small talk. The man stopped completely and stared in his direction, and Dad, sensing the unease of the whole situation continues. I came to deliver a car, just making my way back just and my dad doesn't get to end his sentence. Upon seeing the man begin to move toward the trees and the property line, the way he looked, skinny, tall, white eyed made him think that maybe this man didn't belong there, and that it was that man who was the intruder. He was crouching down between the trees and slowly making his way toward my dad, and that's when his survival instincts kicked in and he started running across a ditch and down along the road. There was something off about him, he says every time while telling the story, and it was only going to get worse. So he makes it to the main highway one fifty two, and the fourth or fifth car he sees picks him up. The kind couple in that car say that they're going back home from visiting some relatives to happen to live down at Grassborough, the place where my dad needed to get to, because that's where the bus station was. The point is, they agreed to take them all the way there, so they make small talk as strangers did back then, and Dad explains to them what he was doing out in that part of the highway. They both looked at each other. The reds Ranch. Is that where you were going, they asked him. My dad confirmed the name based on the signage she had seen along the way. Glad you made it out. That place has been out in the news lately, well, not the official news, but the town news, right word of mouth, if you will. It turned out to be the focus of an investigation in recent months talks of people disappearing in those areas. Some especially the ranchers from the other side of the highway, have said that they had seen strange lights in the sky. Oh there was another group of serious developers who had scouted the area, saying that they knew for a fact that had belonged to a well known cult. Dad has always been a skeptic ever since he was young, and this was no exception. But he's able to talk about anything with anyone. So he entertained the idea. You know there are ghosts out there, the woman said from the front passenger seat. He don't say, Dad replied, there's a man who disappeared out there not long ago. Turns out there it's likely they have some secret operation or something. It happened to the mail carrier. He lives right along the way. We can stop and ask him. Plus, this lady here has been begging for a toilet for two hours, she yelled, laughing. My dad checked the time. He was a couple of hours ahead of schedule. Plus he had no choice. And even though it feels like he's going to get to the good part of the story here, when they arrive at the mail carrier's house, it turned out to be quite literally a pit stop. The mail carrier didn't even want to talk too much about the situation, but he was relaxed and offered all three of them a cold bottle of coke. Dad says that maybe the guy thought that he was a because as soon as they arrived, he ushered them inside, looked around his property, and locked the door behind them. If it wasn't for the couple that was giving him the ride, Dad would have tried to get out of there by any means necessary, he says, And I believe him. Dad doesn't joke around with stuff like that. Nobody has ever stolen anything from him, and he has a sixth sense that tells him when something's not right. I always tell him that he would have made a really good detective or a spy. He has that eye. But anyway, they asked him about that area around Red's Ranch, and Gary the mail carrier immediately stared that down. I don't go to that place. We leave their mail at a complimentary box at the post office. He said. They get envelopes and boxes from all over the world. He stared at Dad again and then changed his topic. It wasn't long before they were on their way again. For some reason, that story always include this part about the mail carrier, with details the dusty house, the man's miniature city that he was working on that was on the coffee table, yellow coffee stained teeth, and the strange sense that he was being followed. As soon as they left, he shut the door and heard the dead bolt snap loudly. Then the man rushed to the window to look, not to over them, but around the car and off toward the road. Him and Dad made eye contact for the last time just before he was getting into the back seat. People had a reason to not trust anyone out there, but Dad didn't find that out until later. In all the times he told the story, I've come to understand why such a skeptic. The typical logical man that my dad is would be terrified of that area where that highway was, and would refuse to cross it and discourage anyone else from doing so for the rest of his life. Detour ahead, I heard the app blasted on my truck speakers. I had configured a cassette tape box player and hadn't figured out the volume settings yet. Re routing, it said much lower this time. I looked at the map and then straight ahead that road, tail lights in the distance and what appeared to be a clear path up ahead in the straightest road you could imagine. I thought about ignoring the phone's instructions, but I don't know. I felt like it knew more than I did, and I would regret not listening to it. So I slowed down and watched for Exit forty eight in two and a half miles. The sign didn't glow like the others did, but my high beams caught it. Just as the off ramp became visible. I saw the stop sign and blew right past it. Make a U turn, the APP yelled. I stopped the truck put it in reverse, looking behind me. The only real risk there was that I would fall into the bushes just off the road. There were no other cars around, and through the dim white reverse lights, I saw the dried up bushes get closer and closer until the red brake light took over. I turned my head back to the front, and that's when I saw a figure dash across the road. Everything was dark around the car except for that area in front of me. I felt my hands broke cold as I shifted the car back into drive. I tried to turn the truck around, and it was then when I realized that my hands were shaking. This thing must have been an animal, I thought to myself, even though it moved nothing like one, it seemed to have flown or floated down the road before disappearing. I finally turned it around and was heading back to the Enwrap when make A left the app scared me. I looked at the ramp and then craned my neck to the road the map wanted to take me. It was leading up to the hills, in the opposite direction of the main highway. I grabbed my phone while keeping my eyes wide open in case something else showed up around me. I pressed a lock button twice to make sure that everything was closed in the car. The map seemed to want to take me down the road, loop around one of the hills, and then stop it. That changed my destination. I took it out of the phone holder and went to change it, but it was impossible. The map wouldn't load, the signal was weak. But I knew how to get home. I had taken that route many times before, so I took my foot off the brake and started going forward when the thing, the same figure from before, appeared right in front of my truck. It was a man who would appear to be a man, thin, pale, wide eye, staring right at me and bothered by my high beams. What I did notice was the steam coming out of his body in all directions, giving it a way that it wasn't wearing tight fitting gray clothing, was wearing nothing at all. It was Dad's phrase that I remember at that moment, When it comes down to it, you gotta move. It was Dad's quick thinking that had saved us all. Sometimes he was ruthless when it came down to making a choice. He would say that not choosing something was also a choice, and that's the one that would get you in trouble. So, almost shutting my eyes completely. I stepped on the accelerator until I saw the thing up close, almost on my windshield. I opened my eyes wide this time and got a clear look. It was a man, wrinkles everywhere. He had no expression with this big vehicle coming toward him. It was only a split second after that when he appeared right in front of me, just as the headlights struck him. I heard nothing, the car hit nothing. I kept going past the same crooked stop sign by the on ramp, and soon I was back on the highway. I kept going for almost an hour before I spotted the truck stop with the McDonald's, the same one I would always stop at on my way home. I pulled over, getting a strange sense once I saw the stop sign by the ramp. As I looked to the last for uncommon cars, I saw it the same man again. I stepped on the gas and pulled over to the drive through, looking around. It was the first time I felt paranoia like that, the same thing Dad, I tried to explain to us every single time with that story. I ate in the parking lot, my eyes scanning everything around me the whole time. There was no way that that thing had followed me this far. I finished up, started up the truck, and got back on the highway, lost in thought about this thing that I had seen, just as Dad had described it many times, A pale man, unnatural expressionless face, and a lingering thought telling me that it wanted to say something to me. It was around mark seventy when the first junction came up, and just there, right after the bridge, I saw the familiar blue and red lights behind me. I must have been driving distracted or swerving or something. I looked at the time on my phone. There was almost one in the morning, but I wasn't feeling tired. Once I pulled over, the police officer rushed up to the car, his flashlight by the side of his face, and then he ran toward the right side of the road, an area with nothing but a ditch and dried up weeds. A couple of minutes later, I saw his lights coming up toward the car, and almost out of breath, he signaled me to roll down the window and shot off the truck. He asked me if I was traveling with anybody. I shook my head no. He asked if I knew that there was someone latched onto the back of my truck by the license plates. I could tell he was realizing as his words were coming out that it made no sense. The truck didn't have a bed, there was no space for anyone back there on the bumper. They'd have no word to hold on to. In a near panic, now, I asked if it was a pale, thin man, and that I had seen him near the car two times. He stood still for a moment, then turned on his flashlight around and behind him toward the darkness. He looked at me. Are you going home, he asked quietly. I nodded, be on your waist on. He turned around, grabbing his radio from his shoulder, and walking back to his patrol car. I made it home around three in the morning, carefully looking around the truck. When I arrived and took out my bags, something felt different then, a strange, peaceful stillness of the night, and I thought of Dad's experience. Dad and that delivery to Red's ranch and his encounter with a strange, thin, pale man. He had always said that there was something going on there, a group of people or beings, aliens maybe that were in disguise trying to establish a settlement among them. Another theory was that it was a government installation with technology that could lure in potential recruits. The cult was also an idea that he floated. But it was around then when he would think that his story was just that, a story, something that is mine morphed. That's the years went by and his brain tried to combine it into this logical, coherent experience, like what happened with me. I think of it as a crazy man trying to hitch a ride on the back of my car, and that's it. Now. I could leave it at that and look no further into it. But I still wonder if that thing was even human, if the police officer knew it, if everyone around there did as well, Because that story, like the mail carrier's experience, all felt like pieces of an odd puzzle he was trying to put together, but now they all fit. His story felt real now, But answers those were not likely to show up anytime soon. Because remember that disposable camera he had taken as proof of delivery. He developed the photos in order to get his money from his boss, and in the photo of the hitchhike ride to the bus station, you could see the same figure in the trunk of the hatchback, and then at the bus station when he was sitting on the benches, it was out by the security guard booth, and then once again on the rear seat of the empty. Bus just as Dad got to a spot. Now that's where the story ends. But I have a short commentary little section here, because this story is based on trips that I used to make from southern part of California to the northern part where I went to college, and most of those rides were at night or early in the morning. One time, the GPS, it was Google Maps that I was using at the time time, rerouted me to this dirt trail, like this dirt road along some hills and stuff. Some other cars were also following blindly. We're all following the path of the GPS. And then once we got back to the regular highway, I saw no construction or anything like that, and I actually saw cars passing by, and it really made me wonder, what if, like, how easy is it for a GPS system to i don't know, be tweaked somehow so that it could just change where you're going and you would just blindly follow it. This is where it was based because this was also late at night when I got rerouted. It was a very interesting night, and I always thought like, what if we encountered something else that night. But also the. Story also deals with inherited fear right. The father has this instinct, this way of looking back or sensing something thing and being able to completely ignore a situation, like not investigate into a thing, but instead avoid it. That's what I'm trying to get to here, And this is what everybody in the story also did. They knew something was there, they say, hey, let's go ask the mail carrier, but really was to use the bathroom, and then the know the mail carrier also has answers, but doesn't really want to investigate into it. They actually now send the mail somewhere else for them. This is all about avoiding right, which brings in the idea of roads and what they are liminal spaces also places you just transit through. You just go through it. That's it. You don't need to go into anything else into it, don't stop, don't investigate anything, just get through it. So that was kind of like the main idea, how many things are we ignoring? How many things are we not searching? Through or just because we're not supposed to do that, or it would be a bad idea to do so. So that was the main central point of the story. Now about this figure, right, this figure thing that showed up. What could it have been? Now, when I think about it, there's a lot of strange things out there that we don't know, right, things about forests, the bigfoot, skin walker ideas and aliens or little beings that are spotted out into the woods, and you hear about these often. This is what it's supposed to be, at least in my opinion, although this can change. Right, what was this figure that was appearing? There are hints there at a government operation, government installation that might have hinted something from out of this world, but we don't know. All we know is that it didn't harm anybody, but it was there to kind of be noticed, like be seen. And I think that's a really creepy thing, because that might be what all these paranormal entities, all these creatures out there are doing. They just want to be seen. And that's that that's where it ends so very interested to think of, you know, to find out what you think about this story. As always, we can keep the conversation going for you. For you're to DM me, email me, leave a comment on Spotify because it has a comment section on there, and we can just keep it going. So you have questions or ideas for similar stories or things that actually happened to you on roads out there, I'm interested in finding out. You can also get all these episodes at free over at scary plus that you can find it at scaryplus dot com and it really supports the show as well. If you want to dive even deeper into the whole Scary FM universe. We have a Paranormal Club podcast. It's over on YouTube. We can find our YouTube channel Paranormal Club Pod All one word and you can find it there. It's a video podcast where I talk about really creepy mysteries, listener submitted stories and more stuff on there, you can find it Paranormal Club. It's also available in the podcast podcast form. But that's all. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.