OCTOBER 17th, 2014
By LANA CARBON
Ghost Road – The Way I Remember It
As a young boy growing up, unique experiences always seemed to happen in my presence. Quite often I would see things that no one else would, including my own grandmother who had passed away before I was even born. After being ridiculed in school as the guy with the big imagination, I kept my sensations to myself but never let it distinguish my curiosity.
It was about 4 years after my family moved to the Port Perry area that I first heard about the infamous Ghost Road. This is the tale the way it was explained to me at that time.
Back in the 1950’s or 60’s, a young man was visiting a teenage girl when her overly protective father discovered them together. After being threatened, the man jumped on his motorcycle to get away. The persistent father was determined to get his message across so climbed into his truck and gave chase. No matter what he did or how fast he went, the young biker could not lose his pursuer. As a last resort, he turned into a farmer’s field hoping he couldn’t be followed. It wasn’t that easy. The truck just kept on following and slowly gaining on him. He started swerving back and forth in the field, doing anything he could to confused the old farmer and finally thought he saw a gap in the fence just large enough to get through. Unfortunately, because it was so dark, he didn’t see the wire of the fence until it was too late. The wire connected right under his chin and decapitated the biker. His bike skidded across the road crashing into a large rock that sits at the corner…as did his head. They say that the farmer buried the body so that he wouldn’t be held responsible. He took the bike and hid it away but he never found the head. No one ever did.
To this day, the spirit biker is cursed to retrace his ride from that night searching for his head. When you go out to Ghost Road at night, you can sometimes still see the light of the motorcycle as it drives towards you, swerves and disappears. On extremely rare occasions, the light will even pass by you so that, when you turn around, you can watch the taillight zoom off into the night. The other sign of the lethal crash is that, when you go to the rock, you will find it unnaturally warm to the touch as if the collision had just happened.
It would be a few more years before I would find myself sitting in a cold car with a hot coffee in my hand waiting to see the spectral light for the first time. I never have seen the light but I did feel the warmth of the rock. Originally I thought it was just the retention of heat from the sun that day but, on a separate visit, I waited long enough that the heat should have dispersed and yet it was still quite warm.
I have since read the recorded legends and all the possibilities of what could be responsible for the lights (I still find that the theory about the way those other roads line up just perfectly to have a few holes in it) but this version which I first heard will always be my favourite take on the tale of the Ghost Road.
