Is My Car Possessed?
a series of short (true) stories about my weird little Honda that may or may not be haunted
I’ve driven the same car since high school. It’s a shabby old thing—always has been, in that I can’t recall a time when it was neither old nor shabby—held together quite literally by a wire that’s been there since approximately 2010. The car’s from 2005; a gold Honda, salvage title. When we got married, my husband and I bought it off my parents for cheap, just a starter car. We immediately planned for its impending demise which, as luck would have it, never came. We’re still driving it now.
The following are a series of short (and entirely true, I swear) excerpts from the life of this bizarre little vehicle ranging from sheer luck to downright unexplainable. Is it possessed? Haunted? Cursed? Blessed? You tell me.
I. The Deer
This first story isn’t really strange so much as fortunate—for us, our car, our insurance, and a very dazed and drunken-looking deer.
It was late, later than deer normally cross roads, and we were almost home. About to turn the corner onto our street, actually. We’d been out in the city dancing, which was something we used to do weekly back when the world still possessed a shred of sanity, and we still had no children. It must have been nearly midnight when this deer comes barreling in front of our car too late for my husband to slam the breaks.
There was no avoiding the crunch and weird little snort as the deer (a young buck) went down below the bumper. We stopped and jumped out, prepared to call someone to come put the poor stupid creature out of its misery, when another vehicle (much nicer than ours) pulls up beside us. “Hit something?” the driver asks. We explained about the deer, although the driver was probably more curious as to why we looked like we belonged in a Fred Astaire movie. “Huh,” he says, “it’s late.” We agree. My husband is about to dial the number for animal control when the deer stands up, wobbles a bit, and shambles off, disappearing into the brush beside the road.
A brief investigation of the scene revealed no blood—no sign, in fact, that the deer had been harmed. Our car, too, seemed fine—as fine as a car whose bumper is held together by wire can be, anyway. This, we determined, was the reason for the deer’s miraculous recovery: our bumper, rather than cracking (since it was already cracked) simply caved and snapped back, meaning that the crunch we’d thought was bones had, in fact, only been plastic.
“Well, that’s lucky,” says the other driver, and wishes us a good night. We get back into our car and drive home, happy there’s no real damage, as we only have liability.
Something that’s important to note about this car is that we’ve never had a problem with it. You wouldn’t think so to look at it, but it’s Ole Reliable, its only demand being more and more oil in its old age. The worst we’ve had to do is replace the starter once.
What did happen was that, one day, the radio stopped working. Just cut. Turn it off and back on—nothing. All the wires seemed fine. It had just decided to give up the ghost. Oh well, we thought, that’s what you get when you drive a cranky old car.
II. The Dead-End Road
One morning in early fall, some friends and I had arranged to take our kids on a nature hike. I loaded up my toddler son and headed out to the location described by a friend who had been before: a small footbridge at the end of a dead-end road at the back of a neighborhood. It wasn’t far from my house, so I didn’t bother with a GPS.
I wasn’t too surprised to arrive and find that we were alone; I’m always early to social functions. So we park the car along the side of the road and wait. Five minutes go by and I decide it’s time to shut off the engine. It’s silent. Not a car nor a soul on the road, but I know my friends and they’re often late. I throw the keys into my purse and we continue to chill.
By the time fifteen minutes pass, I’m getting suspicious that we somehow ended up at the wrong location, as there’s absolutely no one around, and I’m about to pick up my phone and call my friend, when static starts to hiss through the car’s radio—the radio that has been dead for six months, at least. I turn the dial, but it does nothing, and I remember that the car’s not running. But, just as quickly as the static came, it faded. This reminds my son that he wants music, and I tell him that the car doesn’t play music anymore. The static crackles again. We can almost hear voices, but no words. I scan the trees with the keys still in my hand and it goes quiet. Nothing moves.
Determining (rightly) that we must have come to the wrong trailhead, I start the car and call my friend. I don’t tell her about the static or the fact that my car wasn’t running, and we make our way to the correct trailhead where everyone else is already assembled ready for the nature hike. The car is quiet the whole way.
The radio did eventually start working again. And then it stopped. And then it started. To this day, it cuts in and out, playing music sometimes before falling stubbornly silent for stretches of weeks or months. No amount of button-pushing or dial-fiddling or turning the car off and on again has fixed or explained this. We’ve just learned that it is what it is when you drive a cranky old car, I guess.
III. The Tow Truck
This story, while not particularly eerie or paranormal, is nothing short of miraculous, as it happened one evening while I was driving my son home from a party after dark. We were on the highway, not far from our home (at this point, we live in the country, so everything is particularly dark and particularly quiet—not a lot of traffic, even on the main roads).
We’re going at least seventy—respectable highway speed—when a tow truck creeps up in the lane on our left. I drop back to let him pass because he must be going at least eighty, when all of a sudden, he’s breaking and swerving; I’m in his blind spot with only the shoulder to my right, so I make the half second calculation and start to move away, when—crunch.
My son’s crying and I’m screaming, and I know he’s hit us. A tow truck at seventy miles an hour. Somehow there’s no glass, and we’ve come to a stop, so I dig my phone out my purse and call my husband, who’s on the road some minutes behind us. I tell him what happened, and that I have no idea how, but we’re not hurt. The car still drives, so I pull back onto the highway and crawl to the exit, where the tow truck is waiting, its driver panicked and apologetic. He explains that he’d swerved to avoid some damn fool who’d been opening their passenger door in the middle of the highway; he’d seen my sad, shabby little car too late.
My husband arrived a few minutes later and we inspected the damage—except, there was no damage. Not even a dent where I knew the front of the tow truck had collided with my driver’s side. Upon closer examination, we spotted a bit of scratched paint, and a piece of loose trim from contact with the tow truck’s hubcap. The truck’s driver, still apologizing profusely, asked us if we wanted him to pay for anything, but we assured him that we couldn’t possibly care less about cosmetic damage to a car whose bumper was [somehow still] held together by wire.
IV. Late Night Party
And now for, by far, the strangest and most unexplainable of all the events in this car’s unnaturally long and bizarre life. It must have been around 11pm, and we were just settling into bed when we heard the unmistakable thudding of bass from outside our window. It was a weekend, and the weather was decent, so we figured our neighbors must be having a party, though we’d seen no traffic on our back-country gravel road earlier in the evening to suggest such an event. We’d heard music coming from their place before, however, so we thought nothing more of it and went to sleep.
Sometime around 1am, we’re jolted awake by more heavy bass—something metal or classic rock, maybe. Must be one heck of a party¸ we thought, and my husband gets up to peek out of our window, but, looking out over our driveway towards the neighbors’ property, there’s nothing to see. The bass quiets and we go back to sleep.
Three o’clock AM rolls around and once more, there’s bass crashing through the window. We begin to think this is really odd, as our neighbors have small children; even on a weekend they surely wouldn’t party all night long.
Morning finally comes and my husband heads out to run an errand. It’s all quiet for a few minutes, before he comes bursting back through the front door: “IT’S THE CAR!”
“What?” I ask, confused.
“The bass, the music, it was our car.”
Sure enough, that ghostly little car had been playing the classic rock station at random times throughout the night—we knew this because when he went out to run his errand, the music began playing again, with no key in the ignition.
If you enjoyed these little anecdotes (all true, as I said!) I may try and do more creative non-fiction like this, and maybe, maybe some fiction in the future as well.
Until next time, friends!
This was a fun read! My mysterioso car was an ‘87 Volvo sedan. Very similar stories about its otherworldly properties.
This is amazing. Being something of a "car person" I could make a stab at explaining the radio issues, but the incredible luck? haunting? that's prevented damage when there definitely should have been damage is harder to suggest a rational explanation for.
My daughter's first car, which she purchased just a few weeks ago, is an old Honda with the front bumper held on with zip ties... I hope that's a good sign for her potential encounters with tow trucks or deer.