PHANTOMS ON ROADS AND HIGHWAYS - Part Three

     The Phantom Warrior Who Raced Trains
     From the works of Brad Steiger, Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, And Haunted Places




     A travelling salesman was making the night trip from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Butte, Montana by train.  He had been dozing lightly in a lower berth when he was awkened by what he later described as a "damned uneasy feeling."

     He couldn't put a finger on what was troubling him, he told a reporter for a Chicago newspaper in the summer of 1943.  There were no strange or unusual noises in the train.  He could detect nothing that sounded wrong in the steady clicking of the wheels.  For some reason he decided to lift his window shade.

     That was when he saw the apparition.  Outside of his window, so close that it seemed as if he might be able to touch them if he lowered the glass, was a brightly painted Indian brave on his spirited mount.  The warrior bent low over the flying black mane of his horse and looked neither to the right nor to the left.  He seemed to be mouthing words of encouragement to the phantom mustang as they rapidly gained on the train.

     "I've seen them five or six times after that, in different parts of the Dakotas," the salesman said.  "They seem to be solid flesh, but there's a kind of shimmering around them.  It's like watching a strip of really old movie film being projected onto the prairie."

     Railroad brakemen, engineers, and construction crews in the Dakotas and Wyoming have often spoken of the phantom Sioux and his determined race with their swift, modern iron horses.  They couldn't beat the trains when they were alive, on old timer who knew the legend behind the spectral racers commented, but they seem to have picked up some speed in the afterlife.

     According to tradition, Frederic Remington, the famous artist of the Old West, sketched the Sioux brave and his mustang from life as the inexhaustible pair raced the train on which he was riding in about 1888.  Remington had heard from several travelers the same tale, of a determined warrior motive represented a tangible symbol of the encroaching white man, and the Sioux believed that if he could conquer the iron horses, his people could vanquish the paleface invaders.

     With a marrow-chilling war whoop, the warrior would come astride the train engines as they entered a wide-open stretch of the prairie.  The mustang would pound the plains until sweat formed on its lean, hard body.  Only the greater speed of the locomotives would at last enable them to pull away from the chanting Sioux and his animal as he painted their images.  Remington named his piece:  "America On The Move."




     Route 666:  The Southwest's Devil's Highway




     Although U.S. Route 666 is now officially known as U.S. Route 491 or 393, the legend of Camino del Diablo, "the Devil's Road," will be long remembered.  The original naming of the highway had nothing to do with the Number of the Beast, or Antichrist - 666, as given in Revelation, the last book in the Bible.  The highway was so designated because it was the sixth branch of an interstate route then known as U.S. 60.  The section linking Chicago to Los Angeles became the legendary Route 66.  And the Four Corners detour from Route 66 was renumbered 666 in August 1926.  But some say the labeling the road with those numerals made it Satan's own road to perdition.  The 190 miles of the former U.S. 666 starts at Gallup, New Mexico, winds it way through 70 miles of Colorado, then ends in Monticello, Utah.

     According to numerous eyewitness accounts, on nights of the full moon, a black, 1930's vintage Pierce-Arrow roadster has appeared and run scores of cars, trucks, and motorcycles off the road.  The ghostly automobile has been linked to at least five deaths.

     Dr. Avery Teicher of Phoenix spent ten years documenting reports of the phantom Pierce-Arrow and the howling hellhounds that materialize to terrorize anyone foolhardy enough to pull of Route 666 and admire the desert landscape.  According to Dr. Teicher, two members of a biker gang had both of their arms chewed off by the fiendish ghost dogs, and a third biker had 90 percent of his face eaten away.  The least threatening of all reports from the Devil's Highway are those of a phantom female hitchhiker who vanishes whenever someone stops to give her a ride.

     On January 21, 2003, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson stated his support to change the name of U.S. 666.  The change became official in May 2003.