As a culture, we don't consider our highways haunted.

[randomness]

It's not for lack of people dying there. Sometimes you can see crosses by the side of the road, decorated with flowers. But the memorials don't last long, and people put those deaths out of their minds.

I'd thought of this before, and I remembered it as I drove down I-5 from Bakersfield. There was an accident last October that closed the Newhall Pass interchange. So I deliberately took the southbound truck bypass through the tunnel where it happened, and tried to imagine the collision that happened there. It wasn't hard; I was in the only passenger car, boxed in by tractor-trailers, all of us rolling along at highway speed. It's downhill, and the approach has a slight left turn. Somebody makes a mistake, and there's a very big problem. That night, someone did, and three people died.

I spent some time afterwards on the drive into Los Angeles thinking about the dead. In America, forty to fifty thousand people have died every year on the roads for as long as I've been alive. The cumulative number as of 2003 is over three million, according to this saferoads.org pdf. The DoT says there's only a little over four million miles of road in the US, so there's a death for every mile and a third, obviously not particularly evenly distributed.

Maybe if we really thought about it, it'd be harder to keep driving. But if you believe in haunted places: the roads are full of sudden, violent death, so why shouldn't they be full of ghosts?

Comments

[eclectician.livejournal.com]

I wonder what they think about their highways in China and Vietnam, and those places where they take haunting a little more seriously.

[denyse.livejournal.com]

I think the highways are so new in China at least, they haven't had time to build up a good haunting - even with the insane way people drive there sometimes.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i think you have to stick around a little longer to see ghosts. that's why there's all those crosses stuck in the median or the side strip where there have been accidents -- so that you will mentally spend more than the thirtieth of a second it takes to tell *you're* not currently crashing. but it's still not long enough, and i guess any ghosts just watch you cruise on by.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I think maybe roads are inherently places we don't feel ties to specific parts of, and since a ghost is a spirit with a tie to a place, we don't project them on to roads the way we do onto places we're supposed to have ties to. The inherent transportativeness of roads is conceptually at war with the inherent anchoredness of a ghost, if you know what I mean. (Cemetaries, on the other hand, are haunted by nature - the whole essence of a cemetery consists of providing a physical anchor point for the dead.)

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I really hadn't noticed shrines here until after we moved back from the UK. We first really saw them in Greece, where they are alarmingly frequent and well-maintained.

And, speaking of ghosts, I think you might be at least momentarily amused by this ad for lightbulbs in Thailand that recently won a Clio award.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

That was awesome.

[denyse.livejournal.com]

This is hilarious!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

That's good! Thanks!

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

Not driving doesn't always help, anyway. I just read in the alumni notes of the latest Yale mag that one of the D.S.ers from my year was killed by a car in Central Square, Cambridge while he was standing on the curb. He was an absolutely brilliant guy, too, just a great guy-- a real loss.

I bet Boston has more than its share of those ghosts.

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

OH YEAH!

I have a road ghost for you! Large Marge, "PeeWee's Big Adventure".

[esmerel.livejournal.com]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[apintrix.livejournal.com]

freaked me the hell out when I was 9

[http://users.livejournal.com/cgull_/]

You've been extra-philosophical about travel by car lately. You've had way too much think-while-driving time lately, I'm guessing :)

[noire.livejournal.com]

Teen highway death/ghost songs? Definitely haunted.

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

You're right, and my head's never been sure where to go with it.

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

I think the Devil's Slide on Hwy 1 qualifies.

[esmerel.livejournal.com]

No doubt. It will be a big relief when the rebuild is complete.

[babasyzygy.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness - it's bad enough with people slowing down to rubberneck at things that are there!

[mangosteen]

Now, this is just a guess, but there's probably a ghost for every single traffic light on Memorial Drive.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

several for the one by the Mass Ave. bridge.

Although one thing that definitely strikes me is that highways for me are haunted by cars, not by people. Walking on Storrow Drive during July 4th is one of the creepiest experiences ever -- I have done it probably 6-8 years in the 12 I've lived in Boston, and it never got less creepy. Similarly for memorial drive on weekends in the summer, when they close part of it.

[dpolicar]

But would we notice if there were?
Maybe during traffic jams.

Or maybe highways aren't really "places" from a ghost's perspective... paths, rather than nodes. Places in Between, instead.

[darth-libris.livejournal.com]

Actually, parts of our culture do consider highways haunted. If you hang out with motorcyclists/canyon racers for any length of time you will be almost certain to hear some variant of the "white lady" ghost story that causes people to have accidents on some local piece of highway. The "white lady" ghost story is actually remarkably wide-spread; I'm guessing its roots must go back some time. Just google on "white lady" + ghost + highway and you'll find several versions.