THE GHOST GIRL OF GANDYTOWN

Davis: A rural road in Davis County, which officials have requested we do not specify, is causing anxiety and fear in motorists around Gandytown. January 2nd of this year, a traveling insurance salesman named Ian Belbo was in the area on business. As he drove down the country road a young woman wearing summer dress emerged from a stand of trees and raced toward his car, arms flailing as though shouting for help. There was no time for Belbo to veer out of the way and he struck her, the body disappearing under the front of the car. He skidded to a stop on the icy road and shakily emerged from the car, afraid he had killed the girl.

     "You don't know how I felt, I was so scared to look under the car...I just knew she was dead....but when I bent down, there was nothing there. Nothing at all. I heard the thump, I saw her face, and there is a dent on my grill....but the girl was gone, I can't explain it." Belbo said at police headquarters.

     "Its happening again." Police Captain Jonas Ortell said gravely, and proceeded to tell Belbo one of Iowa's strangest ghost stories.

     It seems that twice the year before and several times over the past decade the same event had uncannily played itself out on that same stretch of road, all involving a girl in summer dress, racing out in front of a moving vehicle as though shouting for help, and struck down only to vanish. Ortell, in an interview with this reporter, said that he had a thick file on the incidents, and was very confident of the credibility of each of the witnesses.

     On that point, the Captain did know what he was talking about. The Ghost Girl is now firmly enshrouded in local legend, and the accounts differ wildly.

     "I know who she is," Arlis DuPage said, sucking on his pipe, "She's Susie Lofgren. She died the day before she was supposed to marry my nephew, Hank. It was a Friday night, the 13th of June, and she was helping her bridesmaids try on their dresses, then they all went out to get a drink, and coming down that road the opposite way was this fast driving fancy foreign jalopy, and it run them off the road into that stand of trees. The three girls were killed instantly, but Susie, she didn't know she was dead, so she got up out of her body and run to the road, a ghost, looking for help...and that's what she's still doing."

     When we questioned Ortell on the Lofgren accident, he said, "Hogwash. I said we'd done an investigation, there has never been an accident on that road involving a fatality, yet. Old man DuPage told you a ghost story to keep a pretty thing like you in his house a little longer."

     Regardless of the origin of the apparition, there is no question that it exists. The string of unrelated reports bear that out. There is a long history of similar reports of "Phantom Hitch-hikers" or PHHs as they are referred to in paranormal texts. Seemingly disparate Road Ghost stories often have close associations.

     Spectral jaywalkers jump in front of cars around the world in apparent suicidal abandon---for example the A38 "Man in the Macintosh" in England, and "Resurrection Mary" in the famous Chicago case. All seem to share these traits: 1) An ostensibly real presence in motion. 2) Revelation almost exclusively to lone motorists. 3) The sudden disappearance of the apparition following the "impact" with the vehicle. 4) An apparent conformity to an anniversary sub-theme.

     The general presumption is that PHHs are re-enacting their final moments on the anniversary of their demise, at the very scene where the tragedy occurred. Considering the anomaly of there never having been a fatal crash at the site where the Ghost is said to haunt passing motorists, I might put forward the proposition that this is not a reflection of a past event being played out with macabre frequency, but rather a wrinkle in time and a strange reflection of a future event! Portents such as these are infinitely rarer than common PHH stories, but not without precedent. Perhaps one summer night a brown haired girl in a pink velour top will see herself running from a stand of trees, just in time to be warned of an otherwise fatal accident, putting to end forever the eerie legend of the Gandytown's Ghost Girl.

(For further information, see "ROAD GHOSTS", Fortean Times 73, pp. 27-31, and Michael Goss, "Evidence for Phantom Hitch-hikers," W.W. Norton, London, 1982.)