Ghost Vehicles

In advance of our monthly meetings we choose a topic to look into and discuss. This month our topic is ghost vehicles. That’s going to cover a really wide range of phenomena and we will be looking at some specific cases. It has got me thinking though about the way a ghost – for want of a better word – vehicle could possibly fit in to any coherent theory.

That people do see our of place of otherwise mysterious forms of transport seems beyond doubt. WWII planes have been seen in Derbyshire, Dr Peter McCue tells of a case involving a vanishing car on the Isle of Skye in the 1970s “They pulled into a passing place to make way for an oncoming car. The passing place was just before a small hump in the road, which then obscured the approaching vehicle. But the car didn’t reappear, although there seemed to be nowhere that it could have gone without being seen” https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/road-frights-of-the-paranormal-kind/

and in FT 377 (March 2019), Deborah Contessa Hargreaves describes an experience as a child in Blackpool in 1976 seeing a steam locomotive despite the fact that these had long been replaced be diesel and notwithstanding that, in a location where the train tracks had been removed.

So what could these events represent? The traditional idea of a ghost, the one everyone knows and which is perpetuated by ghost hunters is that of the ghost as the spirit or soul of a deceased being, which is able to return to familiar haunts ( literally!) and in some cases interact with living people. As vehicles have never been alive this model can’t apply to them. So what about a time slip? That would work in that the witness is seeing into a past time and we can also extend this argument to explain UFO sightings – in this case the inexplicable vehicles are in the future.

Another suggestion is that the human mind is somehow necessary for a ghost to appear. We see ghosts of people and of animals but generally these are ghosts of much loved pets, cats, dogs, horses, etc. Ghost dinosaurs, sheep, cows and the like are rare and interestingly if something of that nature was seen I wonder if it would be labelled as a ghost? Now people do have an emotional connection with transport, steam trains are held in great affection and cars are given names. Could this explain their appearance?

One more idea, maybe the ghost vehicles all have a human ghost as a driver or passenger and the vehicle simply belongs with them in the same way a ghostly monk has his habit and a white or gray lady has an appropriately coloured dress?