Highways to hell

There is a lonely stretch of road on Dartmoor where – so it is said – there have been an unusually high number of accidents. Indeed, Trail’s Ronald Turnbull says his father survived what are known as the ‘hairy hands of Dartmoor’ in the 1950s. A pair of disembodied hands would suddenly appear, grab the steering wheel of your car and swerve you into a ditch if you didn’t fight hard enough. Your vehicle would lie upside down in the bog until next morning, when the mist would clear and your body would be found – with extremely white knuckles.

There were many reports of cars and cyclists being forced off this road, with some reporting those “ghastly pair of hands” appearing on the wheel or handlebars. The accidents had nothing to do with the adverse camber on this particular stretch, honest. Matthew Ryder tells of his own roadside fright: “In the early Nineties, I was on the A628 near Stocksbridge in the Peak District. An old woman was crossing the road with a milk churn in the early hours of the morning. I saw a car hit her doing about 60mph. She just walked out into the road, turned and smiled. She took the impact still smiling, and to this day we have never forgotten her face. The car, an Audi, was badly damaged, along with the milk churn, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. There was no blood either.

“I stopped the car, called the police and a lone sergeant arrived. All he had to say was that I shouldn’t worry about it, as it had a habit of repeating itself – and to put it down as a supernatural experience! I couldn’t believe it, so next day I called the police in Sheffield, who put me through to Broomhill, where I was told that the Stocksbridge police station had been done away with years earlier and they had no record of the incident, nor of me calling them. They said the sergeant from Stocksbridge was also a known ‘entity’ in that area.”