Context:

The informant and I had recently gone on a retreat together to a wooded area. At the retreat, we participated in a nighttime ghost story telling session with some friends, and my informant was talented at performing ghost stories. I later asked her to share some ghost stories with me again, and I recorded the interview for collection purposes.

Interview Transcript:

Informant: Once upon a time… I think I told this one too, but anyway, there was a woman, driving in her car. She was just driving home on her way from work, it was like a thirty minute drive, and as she was driving, home, she started to notice something weird. She noticed that at every turn she took, the truck behind her would like, would keep taking the same turns, and go on like onto the same freeway as her. And she started to get suspicious because she started thinking that this truck driver was probably following her. So, she even started to like, she like took some random turns and even went in a loop, and she realized that it kept following her. And then, it started flashing its headlights at her. It would, like, flash its headlights a few times and then stop. And then she started getting freaked out, so she started speeding a little bit, and it started speeding after her. And she took like a sharp turn, and it took a sharp turn after her. And it kept flashing its, um, headlights at her. And so she started getting freaked out. So she decided she would call the police before, like, she drove home, and tell them to come to her house so that they would be there when she came so they could, like, arrest the truck driver right there are then. So, dangerously, she dialed… No, you know what, not dangerously. She used wireless… Like, um, speakerphone. Wait… yeah, okay. It doesn’t change the story. Anyways. She called the police and told them, “There’s a truck driver following me, following my car. Like, come to my address, it’s something something something street. And the police replied, like ‘Okay. We’re on our way.'” And so she got home. She got out of the car, and the police were there. And the truck driver… And the truck driver drove up behind her, and she pointed at the truck driver. And she was like, “There! That’s the man who’s been following me. Like see! I told you he was following me. He followed me all the way home.” And the police were like, “Sir, what’s going on?” And he was like, “There was someone in the car, in the backseat, and he was trying to kill you. And every time I saw him coming up with his knife, I would flash my headlights at him so that it would like, blind his eyes so he’d get back down.” And then they opened the back door, and there was a man with a knife. And they arrested him, and everyone was safe. The end.

Me: I like that.

Informant: Real fear.

Me: Yeah…

Informant: That’s why you should always check the back seats of the car…

Context:

This story derives its horror from a scary situation that a listener could realistically encounter in real life. It also has a plot twist, in that the figure originally made out to be scary ended up saving the woman by following her, and the woman’s car, which she had thought to be safe, turned out to be dangerous due to its housing an attempted murderer.