Shite thats seen death

[gordonbennet]

Gordonbennett, you are Stephen King AICMFP

 

In all honesty re-reading it all sounds a bit bloody silly now, but 26 years go it was far from that.

 

I still work with one my old mates from that job, in fact we usually blag each other a job if one of us drops on a good un, we sometimes reminisce as you do, and he often says that there was something about that particular lorry.

[bub2006]

I've had an encounter similar on a country lane near me. I have an open mind regards things like this. Some say i am strange and mock. Frankly i don't care!

[Mr Lobster]

I read on a truckers' forum that at least two trucks which were on the Herald when it capsized were definitely put back on the road afterwards: a B-reg Scania 142 and a D-reg Iveco Turbotech, the latter having fallen through the open bow doors when the ferry went over.

 

As far as trucks recovered from the Herald go -

 

It would be almost impossible for them to have fallen through the bow doors as the ferry would have needed to come to a very sudden, abrupt stop from considerable speed to actually eject them from the vehicle deck and it didn't. That said, there were a couple of trucks that went in the sea which had been on the outside deck, I've got (none digital) pics of one of these being recovered and it was knackered.

 

Bear in mind that its quite possible that some of the trucks on the Herald would have been only lightly damaged and possibly stayed dry - if they had been parked on the side that didn't go into the sea and the securing chains held then its possible. If all the freight vehicles were sold en bloc as salvage regardless of condition then its fairly likely that some of the better condition ones went back on the road. 

 

If they'd been in the sea though I wouldn't think they would be fit for much though, from the date of sinking until the ferry was salvaged was around seven weeks and certainly some of the pictures of the car deck when the ferry was upright and towed back to harbour showed carnage.

 

Just my 2p worth.

[gordonbennet]

I've had an encounter similar on a country lane near me. I have an open mind regards things like this. Some say i am strange and mock. Frankly i don't care!

 

Fancy telling the tale Bub, they'll be able to but both of us in the same yellow van when those nice young men in white coats turn up, cut down on cost that way.

[bub2006]

There is a lane just off the A38 near Sutton what heads down to pinxton. Built a industrial estate near there now mind. I was 16 on my scooter heading towards my nans house. The road comes off the bypass and down the lane there isn't much light bar the light off the A38. Bike fuel light was flickering and it ran out of fuel down at the bottom of the lane near a blind bend. Rang my aunt to bring me some petrol,sat down an had a smoke while waiting. Seen something in the darkness coming round the bend. Figure of a man emerged and i can still see him clear to this day. He was wearing a old check shirt,flat cap and dungarees open on one side. Carrying a old sort of satchel. As i watched him coming towards me i felt uneasy but still said good evening. He looked towards me and said hello and carried on walking. Less than five minutes later my aint came round same bend and gave me fuel can. She then went up the lane to turn around in same direction the chap walked. I got home with me aunt behind me but curiosity got the better of me and i asked my aunt if she seen a chap on the road. She didn't see anything and there was nowhere for him to go. To this day i cant explain it and i never been down there at night since.

[Lankytim]

GordonBennet, that stretch of the A45 is well known for legends of ghosties and gouls, further towards Coventry there's even a pub called the Phantom Coach!

 

I have another paranormal lorry story, well it's probably not but anyway..

 

The first driving job I got after passing my HGV licence in 2001 was for a firm called FGF in Birmingham, I actually replaced a fella who had been killed in a road accident over in Suffolk. He was on a dual carriageway when a lorry pulled out of a layby infront of him, he went into the back of it full pelt resulting in fatal injuries for the poor driver and a totally wrecked DAF 55 17 tonner, it was a total loss and sold for scrap by the insurers.

 

It turned out that the DAF ended up back on the road, even though it was severely damaged, kinked chassis, cab smashed off, I think even the engine had smashed. Maybe was used to ring another vehicle? Who knows. For 2 years after, on the anniversary of the crash the company received parking tickets from up Scotland for the "scrapped" DAF, which unnerved everyone who worked there. It was very strange. I once got out of a severe bollocking for something because the boss had just opened one of these parking tickets and was close to tears.

 

OK, maybe that story wasn't that ghostly, but it was very odd!

[Cavcraft]

As far as The Herald of Free Enterprise goes, any Iveco that went within 1,724 nautical kilometres of a puddle would have fallen to pieces on the spot, so I suspect the story is complete bollocks.

[Split_Pin]

My spine tangled a fair bit with your A45 lorry story GB! Should start a thread on Autoshite 'Channel 2' for these sorts of things! I have a friend, who happens to be quite religious but is one of the best tellers of 'true' ghost stories ever!

[HH-R]

Not quite the same but on the rare occasions I borrowed my parents' Rover 25, I always had a "bad feeling" I could never put my finger on... some bizarre situations would happen on the road that would never happen in my car even though I drove it loads more. For example the time there was a cow in the middle of the road on a blind corner. It met its end in a 5 car pile up...

 

I had the same feeling about my Rover 75 which I also had at the time. I think that was basically because I was driving an old Rover I got treat like shit on the roads, people pulling out stupidly etc. I knew it was time to chop it in when I had a Citroen C5 inches away from T-boning me, that properly shit me up.  It was replaced with a Fiat Panda, which, bizarrely, gets me a load more respect on the roads.

[Split_Pin]

I'm pretty sure you're not the only one who has had a feeling of "The Inevitable" whilst driving an elderly 90s Rover.

[Sudsprint]

I have a slightly unnerving but true family tale that does not involve death:

 

 

 

Back in the late 1950s my parents would go to Round Table dinner dances in their little Standard 8.

 

One hight in the early hours they set off home. My mother could sense and smell something very wrong in the car as my Dad weaved his tipsy way home through the country lanes.

 

She looked round and there was the silhouette of a man lying on the back seat.

 

'Denis' she hissed...there is someone in the car'.

 

My father ignored her.

 

Time and again she repeated this until she reached the conclusion that my father was in on some terrible plan to kill her.

 

As they turned into their drive my Dad finally looked round and saw this figure in the back.  He leapt out, locked him in the car and went for back up from local neighbours who were unsurprisingly not too keen to get involved.

 

By the time my Dad got back the man had gone.

 

It turned out it was a tramp who had decided to doss down in an unlocked warm car, and let himself out when the coast was clear. 

[Cavcraft]

I sat in a Ford Ka once and felt like a massive twat, does that count? It was such a strange experience I've never repeated it. 

[Claphamrangie]

All rather macabre.

Am aware of a chap who committed suicide in his Jag xjs in my village in surrey many years ago. Was a neighbour of my folks. His widow carried on using the car for years, quoting something like " why waste a perfectly good car on that silly old sod". We all declined getting lifts!

The husband of one of my father's cousins committed suicide in his Metro about 25 years ago. She carried on using it for two years and, when their eldest son went to university, she gave it to him and he used it for another three years before it was eventually sold

[cms206]

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

As alluded  to elsewhere, I've recently acquired a Volvo 240GL which had sat down the side of a petrol station since 2020. It had been acquired by them from Copart, but using some detective* skills I ended up in contact with the previous owner's daughter on facebook. She spoke to her dad, Jim, who was delighted that his car still survived and he was more than happy to fill in some gaps in it's story.

To be honest, I wish I'd never asked.

 

"You know someone died in it, yeah? I hope that wouldn't put you off."

I had already paid for the car. It was not yet physically here. Lets continue.

"No... ?" I replied. 

Jim continued the story. The car was new to Volvo at Warwick as a company car in early 1990. Jim and his mate who owned a Volvo specialist came into possesion of the car in early 1991 after it had been involved in a fatal collision "somewhere in Warwickshire" where the driver collided head on with a horse. The horse ended up in the passenger compartment and both in and the driver died of their injuries. It had allegedly done 60k miles in it's first year and while the chassis rails etc were all straight, the middle of the car - bumper, grille, bonnet, scuttle, windscreen and roof - were very much destroyed. Jim and his mate put it on the back burner, rebuilding it as time allowed, including a full replacement roof. It was never written off by the insurers as it was, allegedly, only insured third party.

"If you peel back the door rubbers you'll see the joins; they were staggered, we did them right but the whole roof was done". 

I could not corroborate this until the car was home. He did not lie. It has had a roof.

By 1995 the car was nearing completion and a customer of the garage was looking to replace his rotten 240; mine was offered and the deal was done on the basis that the customer's 240 was taken as a trade in. The 240 was readied for an MOT.

The customer never collected it; he too passed away. His 240, from my understanding, was a GLT and is where the interior of mine hails from.

All this done, Jim himself then needed a car; he had rebuilt it, and claimed it was a solid car, so he took it on as his own car in 1996. It was hit by a beavertail outside his house in 2020, and as he was himself now in his 70s he wasn't fit to fix it again.

Two dead people and a dead horse later, it is now sitting on my drive... I can't obviously confirm nor deny the story but I'd love to find out for sure.

[artdjones]

3 minutes ago, cms206 said:

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

As alluded  to elsewhere, I've recently acquired a Volvo 240GL which had sat down the side of a petrol station since 2020. It had been acquired by them from Copart, but using some detective* skills I ended up in contact with the previous owner's daughter on facebook. She spoke to her dad, Jim, who was delighted that his car still survived and he was more than happy to fill in some gaps in it's story.

To be honest, I wish I'd never asked.

 

"You know someone died in it, yeah? I hope that wouldn't put you off."

I had already paid for the car. It was not yet physically here. Lets continue.

"No... ?" I replied. 

Jim continued the story. The car was new to Volvo at Warwick as a company car in early 1990. Jim and his mate who owned a Volvo specialist came into possesion of the car in early 1991 after it had been involved in a fatal collision "somewhere in Warwickshire" where the driver collided head on with a horse. The horse ended up in the passenger compartment and both in and the driver died of their injuries. It had allegedly done 60k miles in it's first year and while the chassis rails etc were all straight, the middle of the car - bumper, grille, bonnet, scuttle, windscreen and roof - were very much destroyed. Jim and his mate put it on the back burner, rebuilding it as time allowed, including a full replacement roof. It was never written off by the insurers as it was, allegedly, only insured third party.

"If you peel back the door rubbers you'll see the joins; they were staggered, we did them right but the whole roof was done". 

I could not corroborate this until the car was home. He did not lie. It has had a roof.

By 1995 the car was nearing completion and a customer of the garage was looking to replace his rotten 240; mine was offered and the deal was done on the basis that the customer's 240 was taken as a trade in. The 240 was readied for an MOT.

The customer never collected it; he too passed away. His 240, from my understanding, was a GLT and is where the interior of mine hails from.

All this done, Jim himself then needed a car; he had rebuilt it, and claimed it was a solid car, so he took it on as his own car in 1996. It was hislt by a beavertail outside his house in 2020, and as he was himself now in his 70s he wasn't fit to fix it again.

Two dead people and a dead horse later, it is now sitting on my drive... I can't obviously confirm nor deny the story but I'd love to find out for sure.

Just count yourself lucky it was a Volvo. Most other cars wouldn't survive a horse coming through the windscreen.

[sierraman]

Horseshit! 😂

[SunnySouth]

Finding this thread morbidly fascinating I have to admit. In reference to the killer Stagecoach bus mentioned (11 years ago!) earlier on, I remember it and I recall it might have resided in Worthing for a time. I seem to recall the two operating divisions did an exchange, as the union at its original garage up north had refused to touch it.

There are one or two examples from the railway which come to mind; there were serious accidents at Selby and Hatfield within a few months in 2000/2001, both were on the East Coast Main Line and both trains were being powered by the same locomotive, class 91 number 91023. That particular type of train only has one loco, and in both incidents this one was fortunate enough to have been on the back end, pushing the train rather than pulling it. It lived on, and when it was overhauled as part of a fleet-wide project involving the whole fleet at that time it was renumbered differently to all the rest, becoming 91132 (logically, if it had been any of the rest of those locos, it would have become 91123) to disguise its ‘legacy’, and ended up being one of the first of its type to find its way to a scrapyard, in 2021.

There was a rather gruesome tale some years back of a train involved in a fatality - not an uncommon event on the railway, sadly. As is usual, the service it was operating was cancelled and all the punters duly unloaded, and with replacement driver on board and having received whatever ‘attention’ it might have needed from the fitters (these situations can cause a surprising degree of damage to the delicate bits underneath a train, quite often air pipes or hoses) off it went empty to wherever it needed to go for a steam clean. Sadly, it didn’t get very far before it managed to chalk up its second victim of the day, and was involved in another fatality before it had even had the first one properly cleaned off…

 

 

 

[comfortablynumb]

Talking of trains and fatalities, ex brother in law was a tube driver, on the jubilee line.

One night one of his colleagues hit and killed a drunk Australian, who fell off the platform as the train was pulling in.

He told me that if you're actually hit, rather than being run over, bodies come apart, pretty gruesome I know.

The recovery team spent all night looking for his left arm.

He'd had it amputated in Oz 15 years earlier!

My god I've got a warped sense of humour 😁

[stuboy]

1 hour ago, SunnySouth said:

Sadly, it didn’t get very far before it managed to chalk up its second victim of the day, and was involved in another fatality before it had even had the first one properly cleaned off…

 

 

[lesapandre]

3 hours ago, cms206 said:

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!

As alluded  to elsewhere, I've recently acquired a Volvo 240GL which had sat down the side of a petrol station since 2020. It had been acquired by them from Copart, but using some detective* skills I ended up in contact with the previous owner's daughter on facebook. She spoke to her dad, Jim, who was delighted that his car still survived and he was more than happy to fill in some gaps in it's story.

To be honest, I wish I'd never asked.

 

"You know someone died in it, yeah? I hope that wouldn't put you off."

I had already paid for the car. It was not yet physically here. Lets continue.

"No... ?" I replied. 

Jim continued the story. The car was new to Volvo at Warwick as a company car in early 1990. Jim and his mate who owned a Volvo specialist came into possesion of the car in early 1991 after it had been involved in a fatal collision "somewhere in Warwickshire" where the driver collided head on with a horse. The horse ended up in the passenger compartment and both in and the driver died of their injuries. It had allegedly done 60k miles in it's first year and while the chassis rails etc were all straight, the middle of the car - bumper, grille, bonnet, scuttle, windscreen and roof - were very much destroyed. Jim and his mate put it on the back burner, rebuilding it as time allowed, including a full replacement roof. It was never written off by the insurers as it was, allegedly, only insured third party.

"If you peel back the door rubbers you'll see the joins; they were staggered, we did them right but the whole roof was done". 

I could not corroborate this until the car was home. He did not lie. It has had a roof.

By 1995 the car was nearing completion and a customer of the garage was looking to replace his rotten 240; mine was offered and the deal was done on the basis that the customer's 240 was taken as a trade in. The 240 was readied for an MOT.

The customer never collected it; he too passed away. His 240, from my understanding, was a GLT and is where the interior of mine hails from.

All this done, Jim himself then needed a car; he had rebuilt it, and claimed it was a solid car, so he took it on as his own car in 1996. It was hit by a beavertail outside his house in 2020, and as he was himself now in his 70s he wasn't fit to fix it again.

Two dead people and a dead horse later, it is now sitting on my drive... I can't obviously confirm nor deny the story but I'd love to find out for sure.

Every house built say before 1945 and a lot after will have had someone die in them. It's just how things were - people did not die in hospitals - death was not a medicated condition or as organised as it is now.

So  with cars with a past.

You will be able to find out - the collision will have needed an inquest because of the nature of the death. 

If you track down the coroners offices for Warwickshire you will probably find the death was reported in the newspapers local to them as the kind of thing that made local news.

Equally nobody may have died in the car - their injuries may have caused the death later.

But do you really want to find out? 

Lots of things happen - we can find out - but maybe they are better left.

Buying anything from Copart does carry this issue. Cars are not necessarily destroyed in the event of fatality.

[DSdriver]

Off topic but our house is three hundred years old. Nobody has died here in the last fifty years because that is how long we have lived here. Before us was an old lady who moved to Wales and before that it was a childrens home. We only found out it had been a childrens home a while after moving in. We had wondered how so many of the old people we talked to in the village told us they used to live in our house, just thought it had changed hands a lot. 😆

[Dobloseven]

About four years ago,on the local radio was a traffic warning about a road being closed owing to a man being knocked down and killed by his own car at a petrol station.Never thought much about it until I got home in the evening and MrsD got a call to say it was a good friend of ours who had recently returned to the area on retiring.Apparently the car had rolled away while he was refuelling, he'd tried to stop it and died before he hit the ground due to a heart failure., He'd only just bought the car and was showing it to us a couple of weeks previously when we'd met up.His widow decided to keep it as it was undamaged and better than her own car.

[lesapandre]

I'm not quite sure there is an emoji to cover that.

[Markeh]

Sort of off topic but when I moved into a newly-refurbished student house as a third year student, I was chatting with the mechanic based a few doors up (always handy to know as a Megane II owner at the time) and apparently they'd found the previous elderly occupant dead in the house - he was the one who made entry. Used to keep getting breakdown renewal letters for her Corsa B and the odd Christmas card.

Way earlier in this thread and also somewhat off topic the Lockerbie remains being at Tattershall was mentioned - I'm presuming given the proximity that it was linked to Windleys, given they're now going I wonder if they're still there/about to be finally disposed of.

[comfortablynumb]

That's how my uncle died @Dobloseven, flat battery, decided to bumpstart it on his own, got it moving, ran round to the driver door to jump in and the car ran into a wall, crushed him with the door.😕

[comfortablynumb]

My house is also around 300 years old @DSdriver, we're aware of two people who have died in it, one accidentally shot himself climbing over a fence with a loaded shotgun, the other was a landed gentry girl, who wasn't allowed to marry her dream man, because he was a lowly farm labourer, so she committed suicide.

I've no doubt there's others, but they're not as easy to find 

[sierraman]

8 hours ago, Markeh said:

Sort of off topic but when I moved into a newly-refurbished student house as a third year student, I was chatting with the mechanic based a few doors up (always handy to know as a Megane II owner at the time) and apparently they'd found the previous elderly occupant dead in the house - he was the one who made entry. Used to keep getting breakdown renewal letters for her Corsa B and the odd Christmas card.

Way earlier in this thread and also somewhat off topic the Lockerbie remains being at Tattershall was mentioned - I'm presuming given the proximity that it was linked to Windleys, given they're now going I wonder if they're still there/about to be finally disposed of.

I’d doubt they’ll dispose of it whilst ever it may be used as evidence. It wasn’t stored very well though, literally just a pile of metal behind some fences. 

[Volksy]

2 hours ago, sierraman said:

I’d doubt they’ll dispose of it whilst ever it may be used as evidence. It wasn’t stored very well though, literally just a pile of metal behind some fences. 

It's marked, but not really visible anymore on Google Maps/Earth.

He's a clipping from 2009 Google Earth. Where  you can clearly see the pile.

I'm guessing whoever is still charging storage for it. 

[SunnySouth]

6 hours ago, Volksy said:

It's marked, but not really visible anymore on Google Maps/Earth.

He's a clipping from 2009 Google Earth. Where  you can clearly see the pile.

I'm guessing whoever is still charging storage for it. 

Was it not rebuilt on a massive frame like they do in Aircrash Investigation etc? I would have assumed it would be in a hangar somewhere like a massive half-finished puzzle!

[Dyslexic Viking]

Since my Mercedes was a taxi for 9 years and at that time ambulances were few in rural areas so the taxis were used as such, it is likely that someone has died in that car and someone has probably also been born in it too.

The house I live in is 120 years old, so someone has probably died there also.