Britain's Most Haunted Roads

Hags, Phantoms and Unearthly Creatures (A75 [above], Kinmount Straight, Scotland). Dubbed the most haunted road in Scotland and widely-known as “The Ghost Road,” this location has been a hotspot for supernatural activity for centuries. Among the many entities reported are eyeless phantoms peeping out from behind trees and bushes on the side of the road, spectral carriages, ghosts walking along the side of the road and nonexistent “people” who suddenly appear in front of drivers. Some have reported seeing a monk “staring blankly” over the valley and a few have insisted the apparition appeared beside them in their vehicles. According to Kathleen Cronie, a local paranormal investigator, the A75 is haunted by “screaming hags, eyeless phantoms and a menagerie of unearthly creatures.”

The most haunted part of the motorway is the poorly-lit section between Gretna and Annan via Eastriggs, where drivers have reported seeing an elderly man in tweed standing at the old Kinmount bus shelter. There have also been reports of chickens flying toward vehicles, but the fowls vanish before hitting the windshield. One of the more famous sightings occurred in 1962 when Derek and Norman Ferguson witnessed a flying chicken that suddenly dematerialized before contact. The Ferguson men were also plagued by giant cats and a furniture van that disappeared into the ether. On one occasion when a driver called the police station in Deepcar, an officer advised the caller to phone a priest.

Bigfoot (A370, Brockley, Somerset). In May of 2018, a stunned train passenger reported spotting a creature he identified as Bigfoot loitering close to woodland just off the A370. “To my eye whatever it was seemed to take massive strides, and ‘it’ was covering the ground very quickly,” the witness told the British Bigfoot Sighting group. “As I spun my head to the left to see if anybody else on the train had seen what I was looking at, I was surprised to see that nobody was really looking out from the seats in my direction, or any direction other than down, to be fair. In my carriage was probably 10 to 12 people – most of them with their head in either mobile phones or morning newspapers,” he added.

Spectral Car Crash (A3 at Burpham, Surrey). In December 2002, Surrey police investigated reports of a car said to have swerved off the road. Officers eventually located a vehicle in a ditch containing a man’s remains – but the motorist had been dead five months and this led to speculation the sightings were phantom re-enactments of the fatal crash. Sergeant Russ Greenhouse, of the Surrey Police, said: “The car was discovered as a result of a report from members of the public who thought they saw a car’s headlights veering off the road. The officers could not identify that collision, but they had the presence of mind to search on foot,” which led them to the earlier crash.

Werewolf† (B1249, East Riding of Yorkshire). Wolves roamed the forests of what is now the East Riding of Yorkshire until the 15th century, when they were hunted to extinction. But it’s wolves of the supernatural variety that haunt the location – or at least a part of the B1249 – today. Reports from the 1960s describe how a truck driver was terrified by a red-eyed hairy creature that attempted to smash its way through his windshield as he drove along the remote roadway. More than a half-century later in 2016, Jemma Waller, 24, saw a monster she described as “like a big dog, probably bigger than my car, but it had a human face,” in the same location.

Faceless Ghost and Other Phenomena. (A616, Stocksbridge Bypass, Sheffield, South Yorkshire). The bypass was opened in May 1988, linking the M1 at Junction 35A to the Woodhead Pass. It has been described as an “accident black spot” and in recent years, acquired the nickname “Killer Road.” Many believe it is the land on which the highway is constructed, rather than the road itself, that is haunted. According to local legend, a monk who had fallen from grace was buried in an unconsecrated grave and his spirit roams the desolate moorland on either side of the A616. In 1997, a local newspaper published a report by supermarket manager Paul Ford, who encountered the phantom. “From a distance it looked like someone trying to cross the road, but as I got nearer, I could see it was like a man in a long cloak,” he recalled. “Then I realized it had no face and it was just hovering above the road.”

There also were mining concerns in the location at one time and when work began in 1987, reports of strange sounds and other phenomena commenced. Two security guards claimed to have witnessed numerous unexplained paranormal activity while on patrol, including children in old-fashioned clothing dancing near the construction site. Some believe the apparitions were the offspring of old-time miners. There also have been reports of drivers feeling their cars shaking, hearing banging noises on their roofs and the sounds of rattling chains.