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Drivers Share Their Scariest, Most Bizarre Trucking Moments

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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.

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