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There is this girl that I’ve been talking to that attends Pepperdine University.  I figured, what the hell, what better way to flirt with her than to ask her if she has any ghost stories she’d be willing to share (a.k.a. help me with my homework).  I was not expecting much, but upon my asking, she jumped all over it like I had just asked her to be my girlfriend (see: no way).  Her tale is as follows…

“Ummm…my speech teacher tells a story of ghosts that haunt the canyon (Malibu).   So he said that there was this guy who would like hide in the bushes on the side of the road.   He would run out to the side of the road at night when a car drove past, covered in blood.  He would try to like convince and trick people into helping him.  When people would pull over to help the guy, they would realize that he was covered in red paint instead of blood.  After he lured them out of their cars, he would bring them to like a secret hiding spot behind the bushes that he popped out from and rape the people that pulled over to help.  It didn’t matter to him if it was a woman, a guy, or even little kids-he would rape them all.  After he raped them, he would slit their throats and toss them over the side of the canyon and take their cars and drive away.  My speech teacher says that when you drive by the same turn at exactly midnight, you can feel the ghosts of all the people he killed trying to push and pull your car off the canyon to join them.”

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Lauren told me that they were having a roundtable discussion in her speech class regarding ghost stories and how to properly verbalize them.   Her professor gave this example and at the conclusion, proclaimed to believe the story is true as it was told to him by his adult son, who claimed to have seen and felt the ghosts’ presence himself.  Lauren was a little bit more wary of the ghost story as she does not necessarily believe whole-heartedly in the existence of ghosts.  Instead, she hypothesizes that the force supposedly exerted by the ghosts on the vehicles can easily be explained by wind which is constantly swirling and changing throughout the canyon.

Personally, I am not inclined to believe the ghost aspect of this story as Lauren and I share a similar theory of what was actually happening to these cars.  However, an interesting aspect of the story is the fact that the time which these events are said to occur are during a very liminal time, midnight.  This leads me to believe the tales could possibly be true, as I do believe the scheme the deranged man was pulling could have happened.  However, my initial inclination is that there are no ghosts that haunt the Canyon as I’m sure there would have been many news stories covering the disappearances of that amount of people, which there was not.