The Phantom Hitchhiker

We all know the story. It is an probably the most told ghost story of all time. There are endless versions. They are as old as the automobile itself. Maybe even older. The most well known is Resurrection Mary. There are others as well but this is the one I know and have told to countless others.

Jack is driving on a lonely country road late one rainy night. He is startled to see a young woman walking along the side of the road. He pulls over and asks her if she wants a ride. She appears a bit dazed and she is soaked to the skin. With a mumbled word of thanks, she gets inside. The man reaches behind him, grabs his jacket from the backseat, and offers it to the hitchhiker.She smiles her thanks and drapes the jacket over her shoulders, informing him that she has to get home to see her parents. The driver notices for the first time that her face and hands are scratched and bleeding, and he asks what happened to her. She explains that her car slid off the road and into a ditch. She had been standing there for what had seemed like hours, hoping for help, before she decided to walk the rest of the way to her parents’ home.

He tells her that there is no problem taking her right to her parents’ front door. She thanks him, gestures into the darkness ahead and says that the house is only a few miles ahead. After a few minutes, she points to the lights of a house down a very short lane. She asks him to stop, and she gets out of the car. He protests that he would be happy to drive her the rest of the way, but she is already running away into the night. As he drives on, he berates himself for not asking her name, but then he remembers that she still wears his jacket. That will be his excuse to drive back to her parents’ home and formally make her acquaintance.Two days later, Jack drives back to his mystery girl’s home and knocks on the door. He is surprised when a very elderly woman opens the door and invites him to step inside. As he looks about the interior of the front parlor, he notices a framed portrait of the beautiful young girl, and he asks the woman if her granddaughter is home.

Following the student’s gaze to the portrait, the woman begins to weep. Her darling daughter, she said, is still trying to come home. The student listens incredulously as the woman tells him that her daughter had been killed in an automobile accident on a dark and rainy night over 40 years before. He leaves the old woman, concluding that she must be crazy. The hitchhiker he had picked up that night was no more than nineteen years old. And she was very much alive.As he passes a small rural cemetery, something blowing in the wind on one of the grave markers catches his eye. When he enters the graveyard to investigate, he finds his jacket draped over a tombstone that marks the final resting place of a young woman who had died forty years ago.

The Spook Light of Clark’s Fork

Clarks Fork, a region south of I-70 in mid-Missouri, has dirt roads which twist around on themselves and send the traveler down byways not often explored. It was here in the early 19th century that a man built a cabin near a spring, and lived his life alone. One day, some hunters happened by and found the hermit’s cabin deserted, the dogs in the yard and the fire cold. No one ever saw the hermit again — at least not in human form.

For more than a century, families in the area reported that each autumn a ball of light would appear near the hermit’s old cabin, “looking” in the windows and then moving slowly up the road to nearby homes. The Spook, as it was named, enjoyed teasing local dogs by drifting up to the animal and then bouncing away as the terrified canine fled. Some families said the Spook would shoot through the woods, making a high-pitched cry and setting trees on fire, although no damage was ever found the next day. As told in the book The Haunted Boonslick, one man reported that the light came close enough to his house that he could see figures and hear talking but could not understand the conversation. The light was reported well into the 20th century, although the Spook may still be visiting the hollows and hills with no one to see him.

Haunted Church

Ashley, Mo

Rumored to be haunted as well as the cemetery near by.

Aurora Haunted House

Aurora, Mo

Was once an old morgue. It’s rumored that a dark presence haunts the building.

Haunted Nursing Home

Aurora, Mo

An elder man and woman, who never seem to converse, have been seen from the hallways, just as they enter rooms. The kitchen area has poltergeist activity: heavy coffee container thrown to floor when no one was near it, stove burners turn on by themselves, and objects disappearing and reappearing. Most chilling was when a small juice glass appeared in midair, hovered, and then crashed to the floor. The shards were real but no such glasses were in the kitchen. These events have been witnessed by more than one person at the time and never explained.