Ghost. United States

On a Friday afternoon Shirlee Teabo was driving to her home in the suburbs of Seattle when she barely noticed a tall, angular man hunched at the shoulder of a curving stretch of highway, she had never before picked up a hitchhiker yet for some reason she felt an inner compulsion to offer this man a lift. Almost without volition she backed her car along the shoulder of the freeway, but began to tremble with fright when he slid into the seat beside her. “Don’t be afraid, Shirlee,” she reports that he said. She wondered how he knew her name. She noted other odd things about her new companion. Although it was a steaming summer day, he wore a heavy pinstriped suit with wide out of date lapels, and a wide brimmed black hat pulled low over his eyes. Suddenly he was telling her things about herself that she had never told anyone, and she had the weird sensation that she had known him all her life. Increasingly suspicious, she pulled into a roadside restaurant area, hoping that the hitchhiker would look for another ride. But he followed her inside, and sat quietly while she ordered coffee and an ice-cream cone, declining anything for himself. She offered the stranger ice cream and he appeared to study the cone for a long time before tasting it. They returned to the car, and were cruising through Tacoma before Shirlee realized that she had no idea of her passenger’s destination. “Oh, this will be fine,” he said vaguely. She stopped the car, and he smiled and called good-bye. As she pulled back onto the roadway she glanced in the rearview mirror for a last glimpse of the stranger. But he was gone. She pulled off the road, looking frantically up and down the highway. There was nowhere for him to hide, yet he was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished. Another man, a neighbor known as Everett reported a very similar encounter with an equally described and garbed man who also mysteriously disappeared after a short car ride.