Ghosts | Ghosts

Bedfordshire

Ghosts Home >> Haunted >> Bedfordshire >> Silent Passenger

---

Silent Passenger

On the night of 12 October 1979 Roy Fulton, a down to earth young carpet-fitter, was driving home from a darts match in Leighton Buzzard. He had had a couple of pints of lager but was far from drunk; indeed he would not risk drink-driving since he needed to be able to drive to earn his living. Later in the evening he was to report his encounter to the local police which would certainly have been unwise unless he was sure that he could not be prosecuted for drink-driving. It was late in the evening and Mr Fulton was driving through Stanbridge. He was in Pedder's Lane and turned onto Station Road where the street lights end some hundred yards or so away.

From the T-junction. At that point Fulton saw a figure thumbing a lift and pulled up in front of him, looking at him in the headlights of his mini van. The figure had a dark jumper and trousers and an white open-collared shirt. He opened the door himself and sat in the car silently. Even when Fulton asked him where he was going he did not reply but merely pointed up the road; Fulton assumed he was going either to Dunstable or Totternhoe. After a few minutes, during which time the van had been travelling at no less than 40 miles an hour, Fulton turned round to offer the hitchhiker a cigarette and discovered he was not in the car. The interior light had not come on, indicating that the door had not been opened, and in any case it is highly unlikely that anybody could have jumped out of the moving car safely, particularly without alerting the driver.

Fulton put the brakes on and looked behind to see if he could see the hitchhiker but he couldn't. He also checked the rear of the mini van to ensure that the passenger had not somehow got into the back but this possibility was eliminated. As fearful reality dawned, he 'gripped the wheel and drove like hell' as he describes it in his interview with researcher Michael Goss. One analysis of the event holds that the area is very open and flat and would provide no opportunity for someone to hide but we believe that in an unlit area at the dead of night somebody could probably hide very effectively just by lying down in the grass at the side of the road providing car lights or torch lights did not actually pick him out. In any case our own examination of the area indicates that there are a number of possibilities for hiding. But what is most important is how the hitchhiker got out of the car in the first place.

Fulton reported his meeting to the Dunstable police who sent a car to the scene of the incident but did not require Fulton to accompany them. As is typical in such cases, there was very little the police could do, and since there was no apparent crime or breach of law and order requiring their attention, there was no reasonable action that they could have been expected to take. As to the identity of the phantom hitchhiker, one suggestion made in a newspaper was that he was the ghost of a young Scots hitchhiker killed returning from a party, but no concrete evidence of such an event having taken place could be located by the newspaper's researchers.France | Somerset | Somerset | South Africa |