REVEALED! The UK’s most haunted roads

As many of us head off this month to squeeze in one last holiday before the Summer ends, we look at the UK’s most haunted highways…

Paul Longstaff and his friend, Gordon, were heading home to Middlesbrough after a show by medium Derek Acorah at a theatre in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. While they were driving along a deserted country road, Paul spotted a young woman aged around 18 standing by the side of it.

‘As we drove past, she stepped off the curb. I lunged forward in the passenger seat and yelled to Gordon: “Stop! You might have hit her!”,’ he recalls.

‘Gordon hadn’t spotted her, but I’d seen her as clear as day in the headlights.

‘He slammed the brakes on and pulled over. He was shaking like a leaf and we were both in shock, thinking we’d hit her. We got out of the car and walked back the way we’d come. There was a really strong scent of roses in the air as we searched everywhere for her, even in the hedges, but she’d vanished.

‘We went back to the car and I described her clothes, which looked as if they were from the 1940s. That’s when the penny dropped. She was a ghost.

‘There was a bus stop by the side of the road where she’d stepped out. I believe she was killed by a vehicle while she was crossing the road to go home after getting off the bus.’

According to a recent survey by car lease company Select Car Leasing, 13% of UK motorists say they’ve seen a ghost while driving.

It seems the capital has the highest number of street spooks in the country, with a whopping 36% of those surveyed saying they’d had a paranormal experience on the roads of Greater London.

And Scotland is the next hottest spot for spectral sightings, with 15% of respondents claiming they’ve seen a spook on roads north of the border.

Paul, from paranormal investigation team Ghost Haunted, believes roads are so haunted because, sadly, many people die in accidents on them.

‘Lots of ghosts on roads are the spirits of people who have been killed in an accident,’ he explains. ‘When a life is suddenly and violently snatched away, the shock and trauma create an energy.

‘The death is then replayed over and over for years, even decades, until the trauma fades and the spirit is able to move on.’

One of the UK’s most famously haunted roads is Blue Bell Hill, which forms part of the A229 between Rochester and Maidstone in Kent. More than 50 supernatural incidents have been reported, many involving motorists claiming they’ve hit a young bride in a white wedding dress who ran in front of their cars. But when horrified drivers stop, there’s no sign of her.

The ghost is thought to be the spirit of a 24-year-old brideto-be who was killed in a crash on the road on the eve of her wedding in 1965.

Motorist Ian Sharpe is among the drivers who thought they’d hit a young woman on Blue Bell Hill. He told The Sun newspaper, ‘I was coming down the hill.

I saw this woman and I thought: “Oh, she’ll go back, she won’t come across.” But then she just ran straight in front of the car and I hit her on her left side. She

was looking at me all the time. I honestly thought I’d killed her. You can’t imagine how it felt.

‘I was so scared to look under the car, but I knelt down – and looked straight through. There was nothing there.’

The spectral bride isn’t the only ghost haunting Blue Bell

Hill. Others include the spirit of a young woman who is said to flag down motorists and ask them to take her to nearby Burnham Cemetery. She gets into their cars, then disappears. Another seriously spooky road is the Stocksbridge Bypass near Sheffield, South Yorkshire. Spectral sightings began while the road was being built in 1987. Two security guards said they’d spotted several young children in old-fashioned clothes playing on the construction site. But when the guards went to investigate, the tots disappeared. Since then, many people have claimed they’ve swerved to avoid a child on the road. According to locals, the spirits are children who died falling down shafts of the mines that were previously on the site.

The construction of the bypass is said to have disturbed the grave of a monk, too. Several drivers claim they’ve seen his ghost standing by the side of the road. Particularly eerie are the reports from terrified motorists who say he’s even appeared in their cars. Paul Ford is one of them. He was driving along the Stocksbridge Bypass with his wife Jane when he spotted what appeared to be someone trying to cross the road.

Paul says: ‘As I got closer, I could see it was like a man in a long cloak. Then I realised it had no face and was hovering above the road. I just slammed the brakes on and swerved to avoid hitting it. It was only through Jane grabbing the wheel that we managed to stop the car from crashing.’

Motorways can be haunted, too. The M6 is thought to be the UK’s spookiest, with numerous ghostly sightings reported.

Eyewitnesses report seeing a translucent figure running across lanes of traffic before vanishing. Marching Roman soldiers are spotted, which perhaps isn’t surprising as many of the old roads they built were later converted to motorways.

Perhaps most spine-chilling of all, though, motorists claim a lorry speeds towards them on the wrong side of the motorway, but a split second before it hits them, it vanishes. The stretch between junctions 17 to 19 is known as one of the UK’s worst accident blackspots… could the road’s many spooks be to blame?

Whichever route you decide to take on your travels this Summer, make sure you take extra care...