Drivers Share Their Scariest, Most Bizarre Trucking Moments

Reddit is a popular social media site that has taken the world by storm.  Reddit allows users to contribute text, videos, pictures or URLs and/or respond to other’s posts.  Virtually any topic can be found on Reddit.  If you’re familiar with Pinterest, Reddit is like its younger, cooler– yet slightly less attractive–cousin.

Recently, mfreezy posted this question in the AskReddit section: “Truckers of Reddit, what’s the craziest, scariest, or most bizarre thing you have experienced on the road or at a truck stop?”  The question got more than 500 responses that range from truly scary to almost unbelievable.

Here are some of our favorite responses:

– dilligasatall

A few years back I was driving up an icy hill in the middle of winter after a snowstorm when another semi coming down the hill started to jackknife. His trailer swung out sideways blocking the entire road at around 80 kph (50 mph), and heading straight towards me giving me nowhere to go, except to stop and try to back up as quickly as possible to give him a little more space to (hopefully) get his trailer to tuck back in behind him. Thankfully it did about 15 meters (50 feet) in front of me.

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– CalvinDehaze

My mom is a trucker, this is her story.

She was driving through Arizona when she saw what she thought was leaves blowing across the road in the distance. This puzzled her since there’s mostly pine trees in northern Arizona. When she finally got to the “leaves” she realized that they were migrating tarantulas, 1000’s of them. There were so many of them that her truck was sliding on their guts so she had to slow down. She stopped at the first truck stop and told her co-driver to fuel up (he was sleeping at the time) because she wasn’t going to step foot outside after what she just saw. Her co-driver was pissed since it was technically his time off, and he thought she was crazy, until he saw the tarantula guts and legs caked in the inside wheel well of the truck.

She has many many stories like this. Trucking is 90% boredom, 10% insane shit like this.

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– Digyo

Many years ago I was on what is called a “meet and turn” This is where a driver that is domiciled out of one city will drive a load halfway to its destination, while a driver domiciled out of that destination will drive halfway with a load that is destined for my city. We meet in a parking lot, switch trailers and drive back home. I had been on this run for a few months and found that I always got to the meet point about an hour before the other driver. It was a dark and empty dirt lot at about 3 am, so I would stretch out across the seat and take a short nap.

One night, about 10 minutes into my nap I was awoken by a barking dog. I tried to ignore it, but it carried on for several minutes and got louder as the dog got closer. Soon, it became apparent that the dog was right outside of my truck barking at me. OK, either this dog is Lassie and is trying to alert me to something, or else he is just a pain in the ass and I will need to throw something at him to scare him off. It is important to note that the barking had been going on for a good 10 minutes at this point.

So, I sat up and looked out my window. Standing there, mere inches on the other side of the glass was a man of about 35. He was a large fellow. And was barking at me. his eyes were crazy and he was frothing at the mouth a little — the scene really held my full attention for a moment. The sheer creepiness of this struck me. Gently, and making an absolute minimum of sudden movements, I reach down and started my truck and slowly pulled away. He chased me, much like you might expect an angry dog to do, barking all the while.

Needless to say, it played hell with my power naps from then on.

-mannequin-sex

My dad drives in Texas a lot as well, but there is a particular road he always avoids. I’m not sure what road it is, but he says its in the middle of old Native American land.

One night as he was driving through, he kept seeing shadows running along side his trailer. Every once in a while he would hear a loud BANG as if someone was slapping the side of the trailer. He decided to stop and see if a tire has blow, because that’s the only thing that could be making that noise.

He did his usual walk around, checking the tires, but as he turned the corner, he heard a laugh, and a shadow took off running down the road.

Needless to say, he shit his pants, jumped in the truck, and didn’t stop until daylight.

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-gaqua

I used to drive I-80 between San Francisco and Cheyenne, Wyoming a lot. It’s about 16-20 hours of driving depending on weather and traffic and whatever.

Anyway, one time I got out at a rest stop to stretch my legs and take a piss, maybe buy a coke. I go into the bathroom and there are three beefy, bearded guys all naked from the waist down just lying on the ground blowing each other in a daisy chain. I looked at them, and two of them looked up at me, cocks in respective mouths, and one of them kept going and the other one’s eyes went wide as hell. I just said “Er, sorry.” and walked right back outside. Oddly, all I could think of was “Wow, that floor is probably filthy.”

 

-psychopathenator

My trucking days were shit, but I got some good stories from them. Going south on I-75 in Georgia at around three a.m., I see this bright light maybe about two miles behind me. Not only is it super-bright, but it is on the interstate and it is HAULING ASS. It’s big too, and it’s moving faster than anything I think I’d ever seen. Now, earlier that day I had called the guy who taught me how to drive, and he is really, really superstitious about life on the road. He would tell me stories about how a green apparition chased him in Florida when he was pulling too many miles, all kinds of stuff. I was already spooked from that conversation earlier, so looking into my mirror and seeing this giant light FLYING towards me made my asshole clench onto the seat. This thing closes the distance between us and FLIES past me, probably doing around 120. I had the window down and as it went past me, I felt this massive amount of HEAT. When it passed me, I could finally tell what it was!

Get this.

It was a hay hauler, a truck that hauls a trailer designed for hay, and the ENTIRE LOAD OF HAY IN THE BACK WAS ABLAZE.

I jumped in the CB and screamed “DRIVER, YOUR TRAILER IS ON FIRE!!!” The driver comes back in a surprisingly calm voice with, “I know, I’m just letting it burn off. I figure if I go fast enough, I can keep my cab from getting burned.”

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-catherder9000

My uncle was a long haul trucker back in the 90s (mainly did international runs from Canada down into the US and back to Canada) with a pretty nice new Kenworth that had one of those maximum size sleepers on it. It had a built in toilet and the works. He decided that the small tank that came with the toilet was a pain in the ass to have to empty so frequently so he converted half of his passenger side diesel tank into a septic tank.

A few weeks after converting his tank he happened to pull in at a truck stop somewhere in the States and parked for the night after driving longer then he should have. When he woke up at 5AM with the dawn just starting to get bright he climbed out to see beside his truck something that makes him laugh every time he tells the story.

On the ground on the right side of his truck was a 5 gallon jerry can, a siphon hose with one end in his tank and the other laying on the ground; puddle of puke and some puke foot prints; another few feet away, puddle of puke; another few feet away another puddle of puke.

Some dumb SOB tried to siphon his septic tank in the middle of the night.

 

To read more trucker’s stories, follow this link to Reddit.

Do  you have a scary, bizarre or funny trucking story to share?  We’d love to hear it.