At their core, ghost stories are mysteries. Apparitions do not sit down with you and tell you their story. They slip into the living world, insubstantial and mute, leaving witnesses to scrape together an identity based on almost nothing. Sometimes their secrets are discovered, sometimes not. Some lost souls will always be lost.
The River City is no stranger to hauntings, but this story does not takes place in a house or some abandoned old building. The place that is haunted is a road.
Specifically, Fifth Street Road. This road starts out in a local neighborhood before crossing a bridge and going up a hill. It is at the top of the hill that this apparition is generally found.
A cab driver was driving along the road at 4 a.m., and when he crested the hill, he saw a young woman on the side of the road, waving him down. He pulled over and let her in. Even though it was cold, she was only wearing a thin blouse and a skirt. When he remarked that it must be cold without a coat, she said that she hadn't worn a coat for "nine or ten years." She asked the driver to take her to the bottom of the hill. So he drove down the hill, and when he got to the bottom, the girl in the backseat was gone. He checked the floor, thinking that maybe she had fainted and fallen off the seat, but she was not there. He checked the road and it was deserted. When he returned to the station, he told the dispatcher what occurred and found out that the same thing happened to a driver of another Huntington cab company a year earlier.
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In the years that followed, many other people reported the same experience on that hill, in its most common form.
As reported in a 1958 newspaper article, the young woman is wearing a bridal gown and is only seen on rainy nights. She rarely speaks, but she will always accept a ride and disappear when a driver reaches the stoplight at the bottom of the hill. At some point, the girl's origin was revealed. The story goes that she was coming back from her wedding in Wayne when it started to rain, making the roads slick. Somewhere on or near the hill, the car flipped and the bride was killed. Ever since, she can be seen on that hill in the early spring and only after dark when its raining, hitching rides from passing motorists. A later story has a cab driver knocking on a door at a house at the bottom of the hill, after the girl disappears from his cab, in the hope that the occupants might make sense of what happened. The old woman who answers tells the man that the girl was her daughter and that she had died. However, this origin story has never been proven and the girl appears in different time periods with different clothes. Sometimes a wedding dress, sometimes just a blouse. She has been witnessed hundreds of times over the years.
Another story involves a cab driver who tried to ignore the girl as she flagged him down, but apparently, she would not be ignored.
When the driver tried to pass her by, the engine stopped, the lights went out and the radio fell silent. When the girl got in the car, everything came back on again. Sometimes she has even accepted a ride on a bus, but regardless of the vehicle, she always vanishes at the bottom of the hill. So, who is this disappearing girl that has been walking the roads of Huntington for 60 years? How has she been around for so long, yet is always appropriately dressed for the current era? The people who have seen her swear that she is real, and no report mentions her clothes being of a different time period. Whoever she is, her appearances are as baffling as her apparent ability to change with the times. Is it the same girl in every report, or different girls who have mysteriously been killed on a cursed road that always needs a spirit walking its shoulder, perpetually lost? It is highly doubtful that we will ever know the truth about the apparition who cab drivers call The Ghost Girl of Fifth Street Road.
To this day, the origin of the bride in the rain is still a mystery, and many years have passed since the last sighting. Maybe that means that her spirit is finally free. Perhaps she has finally found her way home, and her long dark road has finally found its dawn.
Have you heard this story, or even witnessed the spirit yourself? Either way, please comment below and join the discussion. We would love to hear from you. Maybe one of you can solve this mystery once and for all.
