Many of the "otherworldly" encounters people experience in Bridgewater Triangle happen on dark, wooded country roads. My very unique first experience of the Bridgewater Triangle happened on the midnight-darkened roads of Bridgewater, Middleboro and Lakeville. I knew nothing about the Bridgewater Triangle at the time.
It was 1989. I was living in Hanson and a new friend from Bridgewater and I went to movies in Brockton. I dropped her off around 11:45 and she gave me directions to the only gas station that was open, as I had just realized I was on empty. After driving for about 25 minutes I knew I was lost. Dreadfully lost. And was about to run out of gas at any second. I had no idea where I was, let alone where the gas station was. It was just one dark street after another. I looked at the gas gauge and now I was below empty. My heart was pounding and fear started seizing me. No payphones in sight. In the middle of nowhere. That is where my car was going to run out of gas.
Twenty-five minutes turned into an hour. And I had never been so scared in my life. Any second, this car was going to stall on one of these pitch black roads. I was running on fumes. The car slowed, but kept going. It was like I was being gently propelled along. I started praying Hail Mary’s to calm me. I must have said five hundred of them.
After one o'clock in the morning, I finally came to a road I recognized. Route, 18. I was in Lakeville, a town which I had never been to, but I had heard of. I started heading north to Whitman, which was about 20 miles away. From Whitman to my house, another seven or so.
I passed several gas stations, but they were all closed. I had no idea how my car was still going after all this time and all these miles. Adrenal rushing though me. Forty minutes later I was on my street, and then my car finally quit. I took my foot of the gas and let the car glide on its own. I rolled into my driveway and the car finally came to a complete stop: in my parking spot.
I
always attributed my little miracle to my prayers. But maybe something else heard my pleas for help that night. When I first learned of the Bridgewater Triangle about five years ago, my unexplainable experience that night in 1989 instantly came to mind. I have never heard of a POSITIVE bizarre experience like mine, but it happened. It happened to me. What happened to me simply defied physics. Something was protecting me and got me home safe that night. I felt it and knew it. But most people's experiences on the dark, wooded roads of the Bridgewater Triangle are anything but positive. Sometimes just "odd", these encounters are often times terrifying.
THE MOST FAMOUS ROAD GHOST OF THEM ALL: THE RED HEADED HITCHHIKER OF ROUTE 44
Experiences with roadside ghosts are a common theme in the Bridgewater Triangle. The most famous of all of these is the Red Headed Hitchhiker of Route 44, made famous by the local legends recorded by Rehoboth historian Charles Turek Robinson in his folklore cult classic, "New England Ghost Files." This menacing spirit is said to haunt the stretch of road of Route 44 at the Rehoboth/Seekonk town line. The ghost is said to have red hair, a beard, wears a red flannel shirt, has a “maniacal” laugh…and really, really likes messing with people.
The first red headed hitchhiker story dates back to 1969 and the legends span to the 1980s. My favorite red headed hitchhiker story happened in 1984. A local couple’s car broke down. The man told his wife to stay in the car while he tried to find a pay phone to call AAA. “I was hoping to find a house with a light on,” the man said.
“Suddenly I saw a man sitting on the side of the road. He was a sloppy looking guy, with red messy hair.” The man asked the stranger if he knew where the closest pay phone was. The stranger did not answer. The man asked him again, and again…and again. And still no answer. He just looked at the man with an odd grin. So the man asks the stranger if he is okay. The man said in Robinson’s book, “Suddenly, the man’s face got very strange. He stopped grinning, he twisted his mouth and I noticed that there was something wrong with his eyes. They were all clouded over--no pupils or anything--and all white.”
The man runs back to towards the car only to hear this crazy laughter behind him. He turns and looks and the guy is gone, but the laughing is still really loud, like he is still behind him. But the story gets weirder. When the guy gets back to his car he finds his wife standing outside of it, scared out of her mind. Apparently she had turned on the car radio while she was sitting there waiting when suddenly a creepy voice cut right through the song that was playing. It started taunting her, calling her by her name…and laughing hysterically.
Maybe the red headed hitchhiker finally caught a lift, because there have been no legitimate sightings since those stories initially laid out by Robinson. But the red headed hitchhiker isn't the only game in ghost town. Phantoms come in all shapes in forms in these stories of some older and some more recent tales of roadside encounters with ghosts. Some of these stories come from websites such as Cellar Walls by Chris Pittman and Ghosts of America. Others come from books such as Christopher Balzano's "Ghost of The Bridgewater Triangle" and Charles Turek Robinson's "New England Ghost Files." Some are first hand accounts. But they all happened on a dark wooded road at night. And I know first hand how terrifying it can be to drive those roads. I can't imagine seeing what these people reported seeing on one of those roads the night I should have run out of gas. I can't imagine their terror and what had to be immense confusion and fear at what they were seeing before their very eyes.
GHOSTLY ROAD RAGE
This story is so spooky, it sounds like an urban legend told to warn young teens not to stay out too late at night. A teenage girl takes a shortcut down a very dark country road late one night on the way home from her boyfriend's house. And is terrorized by a team of road ghosts.
"It happened to me in 1967. I was 16. I was taking a short cut from my boyfriend's house in Easton through East Bridgewater on a very dark wooded road on my way home to Weymouth. It was a Friday night. Just before I turned down the road which only had one street light at the time, there was a car behind me taunting me. They sped around me and went ahead of me. Later I got a creepy thought that they might ambush me in the middle of the wooded road.
I put the creepy thought out of my mind. But as I got to the one street light in the middle of the dark wooded road. There they were... a line of them on the street holding their arms up and intentionally waiting for me, blocking my path. I was horrified that what I had just imagined was actually happening to me. My foot slipped off the clutch and the car began to buck. I screamed a bloodcurdling scream that hurt my ears. Then a moment of self preservation kicked in just before the car stalled, I stepped down on the clutch and drove straight through them...literally.
Weird thing is, they did not let go or move out of my way. I clearly drove through them as them they were not there. I really did experience this. It felt so dark and frightening that I buried this experience and didn't tell anyone. I thought people would think I was crazy. Could someone please tell me why this happened? I felt like ghosts were trying to trap me there out in the woods on that dark night... It was horrifying to a young girl at 16.
I don't even know why I didn't tell anyone. Many years later I was dating this guy on the cape who started telling me about a friend of his who was with his girlfriend kissing in their car one night that someone had picked up the car and started shaking the car....I was listening to the story and all of a sudden wreaked and remembered what had happened to me that night long ago.I couldn't believe he was telling me this story. It had happened near the area where I had my horrible experience." www.ghostsofamerica.com.
PRISON DEMON
A mother and daughter are driving in the prison complex when suddenly they see that the road in insurpassable: a pine tree is down in the middle of the road. But as they get closer they see that this is not a fallen tree, but rather a living tree bent from the weight of a black winged creature standing on the top of it, causing the unnatural bending of the pine.
One Saturday afternoon a mother a daughter were driving in the Bridgewater Correctional Complex. What they saw that day will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Out of all the stories of the Bridgewater Triangle, this one has to be up there on the list of the most disturbing and bizarre. The first thing that they noticed as they approached "the thing" was a pine tree completely bent to the ground in the middle of the street. As they neared closer they saw what was causing such an unnatural occurrence. It was a black, man-like being with huge bat-like wings standing on the top of the tree that was now on the street. The mother described it as looking like "a tall man hunched down a bit, in a skintight black suit with large and almost bat type wings. He was standing, but hunched down, on the pine tree, his weight was holding down the top. He saw us and we looked at each other for just a few minutes then he straightened, leaped and flew over the top of the trees on the other side of the road. The pine tree he had been standing on, bounced back up slowly, and rocked back and forth a few times before stopping in its normal standing position. That was all we saw."www.cellarwalls.com
GHOST RIDERS
On more than one occasion, apparitions have been seen riding spectral bicycles on the roads of the Bridgewater Triangle. These next two stories happened on different routes, but both happened in the same general vicinity. One happened on Route 106 in Halifax, the other not far on Route 105 in Middleboro.
Carlston Wood is a paranormal investigator who grew up in Bridgewater. More than once, the ghost of a a a bicycle riding on route 105 in Middleboro has appeared to him. Wood describes the apparition as appearing to be a young teenage girl wearing clothing that looks like they are from the 1950s. She is riding a bike from same era.
Wood has witnessed the apparition three times and all three times his car was the only one on the road at the time. All three times the conditions were the same: very dark and cloudy and in the dead of winter when the temperature is at freezing. "Over the course of many years I have seen girl on the bike three times but I have never stopped the car and ventured outside. Each time she peddles by on the opposite side of the street and looks straight ahead. Looking into the rear view mirrors the girl passes she fades away as quickly as she materializes."
Recently, Wood who is also a musician was in Raynham. After a band set, Wood got to talking with two fans, a local married couple. Somehow the story of the ghostly biker of route 105 came up and the girl turned to her husband, jaw dropped. The couple had seen the ghost before too and were shocked that someone else had witnessed this creepy apparition. "He saw it too!" The wife exclaimed.
Last summer, a local couple was traveling down route 106 in Halifax, which joins Route 105 where Carlston Wood had his experiences. The wife was busy texting and wasn't paying attention to the road when suddenly her husband pulled the car over.. She looked over at her husband who looked terrified. She was perplexed as to what had transpired in the last few seconds. At first the husband said nothing. After about thirty seconds he turned to her and told her he just "saw a ghost on a bike." He claimed the ghost and the bicycle were all white. Then drove across the route 106 and simply vanished.
THE MAD TRUCKER OF COPICUT ROAD
The legend is that the ghost of a mad truck driver has terrorized drivers of this dark road at night.
"I recently visited Copicut Woods and my friends and I drove through. There wasn't much that we experienced except the whole time, I had a strange, uneasy feeling. When we reached the end of the dirt road, we noticed that there were these bright blue headlights behind us. It looked as though they were coming from a huge truck. My friend mentioned how it looked like a Mack truck or something because it seemed so big. He said that it looked like it had orange lights on the top of it, which I didn't see. What was funny and creepy about the whole thing was that it wasn't behind us the whole time and as soon as it was behind us, it pretty much vanished. There wasn't a place for a car to pull over unless it pulled into a driveway at the end of the forest. The really weird thing was that we couldn't find our way to the road to get home, so when we turned around to go back through the path, we didn't see any large vehicle anywhere...in a driveway or anywhere in the woods. I researched about the woods and the mysterious lights the next day, which led me to this site. I was curious to know if anyone had any similar experiences or knew anything about it because it scared me."www.cellarwalls.com
Read More
