We've talked a lot about travel and very little about roads, even though a parallel world exists around them. A world we all inhabit from time to time, and many of us almost every day of our lives. This is especially true for truck drivers, the men (and now some brave women) of the road. We rarely stop to think about how differently these people live their lives, with their homes on the road.
In the last 13 years, I've traveled over a million kilometers all over Spain. Many times, I've finished work—well… I've just finished a long, hard day's work—very late. And I have to drive at all hours and on back roads in who-knows-where.
I, who consider myself a brave guy, ignore ghosts, spirits, virgins, politicians (ghosts too), etc. But when, at one in the morning, you're driving alone… That changes. First, you get a suspicious chill down your spine, and second, you always think of Iker Jiménez's voice, or even his face, saying, "Welcome back to the ship of terror." Of course, you've heard him on the radio or seen him on TV before, even unintentionally. Then, you start remembering the now incredibly famous—even more so than Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Aida Nizar combined—the girl on the curve.
Every self-respecting town has to have its "girl on the curve," with its own twist: she might be a girl celebrating her First Communion, a raped woman, and so on. But the most famous of all, without a doubt, is the newlywed. The First Communion girl is unsettling in herself, but when there's fog... the story surrounding the newlywed, with its dramatic undertones, is especially complicated. And it can get much more complicated if you come across a roadside cross; that can border on terrifying.
Thinking about it, the girl on the curve is a cool chick who just warns you about a dangerous curve, tells you she died there, and then disappears. Basically, it's like a traffic safety ad. I can assure you I've never seen her, although, well, I've seen plenty of girls on curves, and usually, their stories are much sadder than the girl's... I'm sure some of them would have preferred to be dead.
There's another, much less well-known, but equally famous story. It differs from the previous one in that it can only happen if your car is second-hand, and especially if you bought it from a used car dealership and didn't know the previous owner. It's the story of the SPIRIT OF THE PREVIOUS OWNER who, after a traumatic death, like any spirit, decides to stay and live in their car—just to cause trouble, of course. You become an intruder, and even if you've paid the transfer fees, the spirit won't leave. But you'll only see it if someone takes a picture of you in your car, at which point you'll notice a very unsettling figure behind you. The worst part of this story is that it's right behind you, and naturally, that typical chill down your spine is amplified three or four times over.
I've never seen one myself. Lately, I've been lucky enough to enjoy a brand-new car, and before, I always knew the previous owners, and they weren't dead, as far as I knew. Anyway, this story is very easy to verify. Any traffic department has thousands of photos of cars, especially lately. Maybe they only take them, like the girl on the curve, to warn us that we have a spirit in our car. What nice people!
My recommendation this week is that we be very careful on the road, because roadside photographers have recently taken to hiding under motorway bridges. Watch out! And I don't believe in ghosts, but... who knows.
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