The Children Buried Under The Road

And that was when you realized the children were not looking for playmates. They were looking for someone to join them, to become a permanent part of their ghostly game. Get ready for a campfire story. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at night. So throw someonood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story tonight, late, Michelle, So where are we? What's going on? Well, we've decided to move the show out of the studio and we're going live on location, live in quotation marks. But we've decided to really keep with the scary ambiance and the surprise really to a campfire, and that is why we will now be known as Campfire Story. Camp Fire Story. Also, what a better place to tell a scary story than buy the campfire at night? Agreed? Agreed, And for the longest time, this is how stories were shared. So it fits. I like it, me too. We'll both share a story and then also we love it if our audience also contributed to our themes, Like our theme this week is hunted Highways, Let's do it, energy down, Let's go, energy down, energy down. Here we are in the woods, playing around by a campfire, singing our songs. I'm sure everyone appreciates that, Michelle. Anyway, back to just roads in general and how spooky they are. I think we've all experienced, you know, driving down a road at night alone. And my campfire story goes like this. There was a freeway in a town not too far from here, where the locals never spoke of it. It was said that at night the road came alive with the echoes of children's laughter. It was the laughter that sent shivers down your spine. A young man named Edwin, who is new to town, scoffed at these stories. He was a rational person and didn't believe in ghosts. You can relate to that, right, Edwin. Yeah. So one night Edwin decided to take that freeway home, dismissing the warnings of his neighbors. As Edwin drove, the night grew darker and a thick fog began to roll in, blanketing the road. The street lights flickered, as if struggling to maintain their glow against an unseen force. Edwin's car headlights cut through the mist, but he could barely see a few feet ahead of him. Suddenly he heard it, the faint sound of children giggling. He shook his head, thinking it was just his imagination, but then he saw them, apparitions of children running across the road, their faces pale and their eyes hollow. They were playing a game of tag, darting in and out of the fog, coming dangerously close to this moving car. Your heart race as you tried to focus on the road. You told yourself they weren't real, just figments of your tired mind. You know you're tired. But then a little girl appeared right in front of your car, staring right at you with sad eyes that seemed to plead for help. You swerve to avoid her, nearly losing control of the vehicle, but you regain your composure, and as you look in the rear view mirror, the children had vanished. The laughter, however, grew louder and more menacing. And that was when you realized the children were not looking for playmates. They were looking for someone to join them, to become a permanent part of their ghostly game. So you hit that accelerator, desperate to escape the haunting chorus of giggles and as you left that fog behind, the laughter faded, the freeway returned to normal, and you never took that road at night again. And whenever you hear children's laughter, you're reminded of that eerie night on that road. Geez Okay, it's something about kids giggling. It's it's some of the kids. But here's the thing. You wouldn't think that's real, right, Like, that's total fabrication. Why would kids be in a freeway. But now I'm going to tell you the story of a killer who's long dead, but his crimes echo every time you drive on the Ventura Highway or Route twenty three. Yeah. So the serial killer mac Ray Edwards was a child molester and serial killer who molested and murdered at least six children in Los Angeles County, California, between nineteen fifty three and nineteen seventy. He was sentenced to death and he hanged himself in prison. So he's long dead. One of the scary things about him is that he worked for Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. Oh wow, And he worked on the freeway construction sites during the fifties and sixties, and one of the bodies of the wards known victims was actually found underneath the Santa Anna Freeway, and he claimed to have disposed of others under the Ventur Freeway. Here's the thing. Edwards may have committed other murders, but his own accounts were inconsistent. He had claimed to like an inmate or a prison guard, that he'd killed between eighteen and twenty two children. But he's only officially he said six, like there's a quote. Six is all. There is just six. But he has at least five other suspected victims of kids that went missing at that time, and even now the police are still looking. And as recently as two thousand and eight and twenty eleven, the police conducted two separate searches following up a potential victims buried under freeways. What and the cadaver dogs got hits on places in the freeway, but there wasn't enough evidence to excavate for those bodies. Just remember next time you get stuck in a fog and you hear a giggle. That wasn't your imagination? Ready for another road story? I mean, I love a good haunted road, all right? Should we keep trucking down the road? So here's a story that I bumped into recently that made me think about the whole ghostly hitchhiker urban legend, except this one has actual stories behind it. Imagine this, Michelle. You're driving along the road with your husband heading up to San Francisco. It's February twenty sixth, nineteen forty, and you're both on a cool looking forward Its engine is roaring as you drive along the road through beautiful black and white scenery because it's the nineteen forties. But then you spot a woman on the side of the road. Oh, Michael, Jack, you say to your husband, please pull over to help this poor young lady. Certainly, he says, as he slows the car down, and the woman greets you both with a solemn look, opens up the door, and gets in the car. You keep driving, trying not to make it awkward because you keep trying to make conversation with this woman, who just frowns, looking very sad. She keeps looking out the window. Eventually you get to a Dumbarton Bridge toll or. Back then, they charged you based on the number of people that were in the car, and not by car. You'd give three cents for three people. The attendant looks at you and says, oh my, it appears to me that you have overpaid. There were only two of you in the car. There was no one in the backseat. What this specific story is. I mean, it's very specific, right, like you pick someone up to a toll. But this type of urban legend has been told over and over and over like for generations, and it's usually well accepted that they're just rumors, stories, you know, that are just told forever. But this specific ghost called the White Witch just won't die. I've never heard of the White Witch. Oh this is good. It's a creepy one because it's up in northern California and it's a very specific area. It's the seven mile stretch of Niles Canyon Road. There's this article that sf Gate did, but they did a very good report on the story, which I'll link to. But it followed the story of this man who was driving down the road and had an encounter with his ghost. And in my research I found this Facebook post that, you know, around Halloween twenty twenty three. Just recently, Ray Palomino posted this Facebook group called Fremont and Niles, California Memories. He posted this picture of a ghost in the middle of the road. He asks, so, what's the actual story behind the phantom hitchhiker aka the White Witch in Niles kN and the post got flooded with responses. A girl having an accident on her way to prom night was one of them. A woman heading to her wedding and dying. There was the tragic story mentioned by this guy, Brian Wing about an article in the Daily Review that said that there was this man who was driving to Fremont when he saw a woman along the road near Paolo Mar's Road. He didn't stop, He just kept driving, but when he looked in the rear view mirror, the woman was sitting in the car seat behind him. No, that's a nightmare. No, he freaked out, stepped on it. He got to a place called Big Daddy's, appropriate name for a drive in up there, and then he called the police. It was said that the girl's mother eventually heard the news and rushed to meet with the guy. When she got to see the car, she said that it smelled just like the same brand of perfume that her daughter used to wear. She had been killed in the canyon walking home from a broken down car incident the whole post is about old people sharing memories, right. I loved it. I went through like everything. There was one that mentioned the white Witch finally, but it turns out that it was not the white Witch that I'm talking about along the road, but there was this phone number that you could call on the phone and this witch would answer your questions that you had. Young kids would call this number and get freaked out like, oh, I'm gonna call it, and then this actually one of the comments on here said that this woman called and she freaked out because oh, an old woman answered. So they hung up, and that was that I've fallen and I can't get up. Where's the beef? Oh, where's some beef lady? Like? Oh man. Anyway, so a couple of posts actually mentioned that the white Witch in Skyline, Oakland Hills actually and supposedly it was a daughter who was supposed to get married when she was killed by her husband. To be so like classic, that's what they say that this white Witch is. I mean, that's like a traditional lady in white right. But anyway, among all these posts there's this one by Daniel Mesiki who says, quote, yep, she was in the back seat of my car in Niles Canyon. Back in nineteen seventy nine, I got off work at Reynolds's can plant at three o'clock in the morning, driving back to Livermore. I was twenty years old, driving back to Livermore and Niles Canyon, driving as fast as a twenty year old would, and hit a curve too fast. She touched my shoulder. I looked in the back seat and saw her. He was interviewed like he was. They made an article the whole story of what happens experience. Turns out, he was driving along the road in his seventy seven Toyota Selica when he felt the hand on his shoulder. He stopped completely in the middle of the road at night, pitch black, in complete silence, and he looked back, but there was nobody in his car, and he looked around. There's no one there now again. Sf Gate is a publication in San Francisco, looked into this story and he talked to Daniel Misiki. The guy and his story held up in the same detail, same everything. Although it is a typical hitchhiker vanishing hitchhiker story, this one is said to appear only on February twenty sixth and has been in the newspaper articles consistently known as the Ghost Scroll of Nile's Canyon or the White Witch. Now one of the reporters for this article, actually it has been known as the Deadliest Road is very dark and quiet, has sharp turns, a lot of areas where you can fall off and crash, and one of the reporters literally bumped into a car driving on the wrong side of the road and totaled. The reporter's car when it is totaled, and some of the articles talk about how in nineteen forty eight they actually sent a photographer to Nels Kanyon and search for the Ghost Girl during her annual February twenty sixth return. The photographer didn't see a ghost, but he did take a few pictures of the canyon, and when he developed the photographs, he was stunned to find an ethereal young woman in one of them. She was draped in white and gazing ahead into nothingness. The first paper that ran the image was in nineteen forty eight, then again on February twenty fourth, nineteen fifty, but this time it was captioned for those who believe in ghosts, we present the above picture. For those who do not believe in ghosts, we present the above picture. Two days later, on February twenty sixth, nineteen fifty, a ghostly figure did appear on a railroad trestle alongside nels Kanyon Road, spooking drivers as they passed by. Now, when you look at the image, it looks fake. It looks like this double you know, what do you call it? Double exposure? Yeah? Double exposure, Yeah, which is what they do with a lot of spirit photography. Is so double negative. Yeah. However, digging more into it, I found out about the prank basically because you know, February twenty sixth was the ghost Girls day to come out. There was this white figure that actually appeared there, but it turned out to be nineteen year old Clarence Chivers wearing a white sheet. Alameda County sheriff deputies responded, and they actually went there and fired warning shots and then arrested Clarence. Yeah, they arrested him. What if you actually became a ghost while you were pretending to play a ghost? What happened? See? And that's the thing inside. But are you still dressed as a ghost now that you're a ghost? Good question? I mean this feels like inception. Yeah, I'm curious. I'm used to know what would happen. What if you're in a Halloween party and you're dressed up, yeah, and you die is like the wolf man or a clown? Yeah, and then you're just stuck in your clown costume for the rest of well, you're like, what happened? Oh? Man? There was this guy who posted some details on the whole white Witch phenomenon that keeps going on along that road, and ten years after he published his research, I guess in a short blog post, he got in contact through email from this guy named Mike Shivers, who was a nephew of the late Clarence the guy who did the prank okay, and he said, yeah, his uncle did indeed stage the prank and they actually talk about in you know, family parties and such. He was actually arrested, Like the guy that did the prank was arrested. I'm not surprised he was arrested. It seems like that would really stress people out, so you'd need to arrest whoever was doing it. Yeah, you think this is funny, but we don't think it's funny. Yeah, so just creeving people out. But yeah, the story stays alive. And even despite the prank and it's confirmed that it was a bank, people still believe it. And you can tell by all these posts of the people that lived around the area talking about their memories being scared by this ghost entity that lurks at Niles Canyon Road. So even though some of these stories of vanishing hitchhikers might be made up and just rumors, they're always surrounded by some truth. And in this case, maybe there were warnings because this road happened to be one of the deadliest, so you might be the next one. Just the heads up, keep your eyes on the road, everybody well edwin. Do you believe in haunted roads? I do, and that's because of my experience that the Pacheco Pass, there's an ear vibe that you get there. But I like that thing. I go after that, like I chase that, Like yeah, that thrill. I feel like I'm safe in the car. But now after finding out that you know they can go into the ghosts can go in wherever. They're just popping in. They don't need locks. Yeah that creeps me out. What about you, I'd say, once again, I'm more scared of people outside on the road that I am of ghosts. I used to live out in Apple Valley and so that lots of desert stretches of road without any sort of like lighting. So fairly I loved speeding on those roads at night. But like out in that same area, that family got murdered and buried out there, you know those fat family that went missing. That sounds familiar. That sounds familiar. You remember that it was like a San Diego family. They were like buried up one of those roads that I used to just go up and down like speeding a ground on. Isn't that weird? Wow? So once again I think I'm more scared of like a random person. I get it, logical, it makes sense to be afraid of things that could kill you. I don't think ghosts can kill you unless they scare you to death. And then I mean, I guess a ghost could scare you into an accident, and that could be their intent if they wanted to send in your comments. You guys reviews the ms, We're gonna start reading them live on the air, do it, Harmony says. First off, if they had to prick a ghost president to appear in their home, it would be George Washington, and they're asking if we can do the story of Teresa Fidalgo. Is it true that Teresa Fidalgo was sleep by your side? Oh, like a ghost, unmasking the enigma of Teresa Fidalgo's tragic legend. Okay, we have to do this at least. Oh that sounds great. All right, well, I think I'm calling it. This says creep me out thoroughly. I guess it's time to put out the fire and head home. Will you be able to make it to the next Campfire Story? Good Night? Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Kovarubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, a VW Sound It All.