On February 25th, 1993, the pilot episode of the TV series The Extraordinary premiered on televisions across Melbourne, Australia. This episode contains one of the creepiest ghost stories I’ve ever heard – a true tale of the supernatural which was previously broadcast in Britain on July 9th, 1970, on Season 3, Episode 200 of the David Frost Show; and which was retold in Tell Me More, the 1990 autobiography of the late TV host Larry King. The story is the first-hand account of Telly Savalas, an American actor perhaps best known for his portrayal of the titular tough-guy protagonist of the crime drama series Kojak, who would die eleven months later from prostate cancer.
Telly’s story takes place on the night of June 26th, 1955, on a lonely backroad in Queens, New York. At that time, Savalas was a 33-year-old WWII veteran who was working as a radio host for the U.S. State Department. He had a 5-year-old daughter and a marriage on the rocks, and was living in his mother’s home in Garden City, Long Island. Although Savalas never explicitly stated this in his many retellings of the story, the details he provides indicate that, at the time this mysterious event took place, he was probably on his way home from an illicit tryst with a 21-year-old model and future Hollywood actress named Joan Hackett, whom he had just dropped off at her parents’ home in Manhattan.
Somewhere at the western end of Long Island, at the eastern edge of Queens, Telly’s car ran out of gas. Hoping to get directions to the nearest gas station, the radio host walked to a nearby White Castle restaurant on Hillside Avenue, where he was advised of 24-hour station located at the junction of the Grand Central Parkway and the Cross Island Parkway. To get there, he would have to take a lonely wooded road to the Grand Central Parkway, from which he could easily hitch a ride to the gas station.
Savalas did as instructed, and headed down that dark forested backroad on foot. Several minutes into his journey, at about 3:00 in the morning, the late-night silence was broken an effeminate, high-pitched voice which erupted right behind him: “I’ll give you a ride.” Startled, Telly whirled around to see a black Cadillac idling on the side of the road. At the wheel was a man dressed in a white suit.
Puzzled that he hadn’t heard the vehicle pull up, and half-suspecting that the mysterious driver had sinister designs, Savalas nevertheless decided to take a chance and got inside the car. The man in the white suit drove Telly to the Grand Central Parkway and further up the road, making pleasant conversation all the while in a strange high-pitched voice.
As they pulled into the gas station at the Cross Island Parkway intersection, where Savalas hoped to fill up a small can of gas, the stranger said, “I’ll lend you a dollar.” The voice actor hadn’t asked him for money, but when he fumbled in his pockets for spare change, he realized that he was indeed broke. Embarrassed, the voice actor accepted the banknote on the condition that the man give him his name and address so that he could pay him back by mail. The man in white produced a piece of paper on which he scrawled a phone number and address based in Boston, Massachusetts. He then signed the paper “James Cullen.”
Once Telly had filled up a can of gas, James volunteered to drive him all the way back to his car so that he could fill it up. The radio host gratefully accepted the offer and got back in the Cadillac.
The pair retraced their journey back down Long Island’s Grand Central Parkway. On the way, out of the blue, James said, in what Telly described as the spookiest voice he had ever heard, “I know Harry Agganis.”
“Who’s he?” Savalas asked.
“A utility infielder for the Boston Red Sox,” the man in white replied, in the same eerie falsetto.
Baffled as to the reason for this strange unsolicited disclosure, Telly nevertheless decided to hold his peace out of respect for this Good Samaritan who had gone so far out of his way to assist him.
The pair reached Telly’s car without further incident and filled it up with gas. In a final act of generosity, James helped the voice actor push-start his car. That accomplished, he got back inside his Cadillac and drove off into the night.
The following morning, Telly went to his State Department job as usual and returned to his mother’s home that afternoon, where the evening paper, the New York Journal-American, was waiting for him. On the front page of the paper was the headline “Harry Agganis of Red Sox Dies Suddenly.” The 26-year-old baseball player – who was in fact a first baseman, not a utility infielder – had died suddenly and unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot in the lung, that very day, that fatal event likely being a complication of a serious lung infection he had been battling for over a month.
Recalling the strange comment that James made the night before in that uncanny voice, Telly produced the paper bearing his contact information and phoned the Boston number James had written on it, intending to express his condolences.
“Jimmy’s Bar,” said a man on the other end.
Telly asked for Mr. Cullen. After a few moments, a woman picked up the phone and asked who was calling. Telly again politely asked to speak with Mr. Cullen, explaining that he had spent the previous night with him, and was sorry to hear that his baseball-playing friend had passed away. To Telly’s astonishment, the woman broke into tears and angrily admonished him for playing such a cruel joke on her, telling him that James Cullen was her husband who had died two years earlier.
“I didn’t let it go,” Telly said in his interview for The Extraordinary. “I did get in touch with the woman again. I did meet her in New York. She came down from Boston because, you know, this is a little too much.
“The clothes I described were the clothes he was buried in. The piece of paper that he gave me, signed ‘James Cullen’ – she brought a letter that he wrote her when he was in the Army. It had ‘Jimmy’ on that. Outside of that, the signature’s identical. There’s only one thing that was different. I said, ‘He had a high voice?’
“She said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no,’ she said. ‘He had a deep voice, like yours.’” Mrs. Cullen, doubtless aware of the horrific implications of such a disclosure, then revealed that her husband had committed suicide by shooting himself through the throat, obliterating his voice box.
Telly Savalas’ disturbing tale, which has a chilling sequel we will not cover here, is a dramatic example of one of the most incomprehensible types of ghost stories, namely that of the phantom vehicle. Skeptical arguments notwithstanding, there are several schools of thought regarding the nature of visual, auditory, and olfactory phantoms. Some believe they are manifestations of the souls of the dead, trapped between this world and the next. Others believe they are the remnants of emotional energy which remain on earth long after the people who emoted them have left our earthly plane. Others still propose that they are glimpses of the living past, perceptible through some attenuation in the fabric of time. All of these theories hold that paranormal activity is contingent on some mysterious quality unique to humans and, perhaps, the higher animals, be it the possession of a soul, the ability to produce strong emotional energy, or some other characteristic which has not yet found its way into the repository of human knowledge. None of them provide a satisfactory explanation for reports of phantom vehicles – the shades of lifeless machines which most Western philosophies contend have neither souls, nor emotions, nor some indefinable attribute which might place it in the same qualitative camp as human beings.
Canada has its fair share of phantom vehicle stories, some of which we have explored in previous pieces. Recall, for example, the phantom train of Medicine Hat, Alberta – a sort of locomotive doppelganger which appeared to have portended a deadly train collision on July 9th, 1908. Then there was the ghostly passenger train which dashed through the village of Wellington, Prince Edward Island, on a December evening in 1885, just after the tragic drowning of a boy. And in the winter of 1897, an anonymous writer described seeing an ethereal locomotive glide across the snow before vanishing into thin air, all while shivering at a lonely train station in the hamlet of Shanawan, or Domain, Manitoba.
Perhaps better known are tales of phantom ships, like the ghost ship of the Northumberland Strait – a three-masted schooner seen from time to time burning in the strip of Atlantic Ocean that separates Nova Scotia from Prince Edward Island. Nearby, in Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay, not far from the fabled Oak Island, locals have reported seeing the shade of the Young Teazer. This vessel was an American privateer which blew to smithereens in a naval skirmish fought during the War of 1812, when a suicidal crewmember set fire to the gunpowder supply. Every once in a while, locals report seeing a ship ablaze at the spot where the Young Teazer met her tragic end. And the waters off Lark Harbour, a small fishing community on the western shore of Newfoundland, is rumoured to be haunted the spirits of a shipwrecked crew whose ghostly cries carry on the wind during storms.
In this piece, we will examine more vehicular mysteries from Canada, from the relatively prosaic, as mysteries go, to the downright astounding.
Our first story treats with a strange little event which took place in the Quadra district of Victoria, British Columbia, on the night of Tuesday, August 26th, 1953. This story appeared in both the next day’s issue of the Victoria Daily Times, and in an article by Curtis Fuller in the February 1954 issue of the magazine Fate.
That night, Mr. Cyril Black and his wife, who lived in a little house on Victoria’s Graham Street, decided to go the theatre on View Street, not far from downtown. In the back seat of their locked car, they left a newly-purchased woman’s suit still in its box, wrapped in paper and neatly covered by car blanket.
When they returned to their car, they found that the box in the back seat had been unpacked. The suit was draped over the seat, and the car blanket had been rolled up and stowed on the floor. The Blacks would have assumed their vehicle had been broken into were it not for the fact that nothing had been taken – not even an expensive camera which lay in the glove compartment. To make matters truly bizarre, however, the car was still locked.
Mrs. Black was too frightened to get into the car, and Mr. Black admitted to a reporter that he himself was hesitant to get behind the wheel, chilled by the prospect of playing chauffeur to some invisible backseat driver.
Although Mr. and Mrs. Black’s strange experience could potentially be ascribed an especially skilled lockpicker, the same cannot be said for another strange event which was detailed in Nova Scotian folklorist Helen Creighton’s 1957 book Bluenose Ghosts. In her chapter on ‘forerunners’ – supernatural warnings of disaster which feature prominently in Canadian Maritime folklore – Creighton described an unusual series of events which took place at Cape Mabou, a settlement on the western shores of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island.
Sometime in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, residents of Cape Mabou often reported seeing an old man standing on the side of a certain road, at the end of a certain bridge. Whenever the man was hailed, he disappeared into thin air. Sometimes, in place of the old man, passersby would see a fine-looking horse and carriage rumbling over the road, always in the same direction, without leaving any track in its wake, which vanished in the same manner as the old man.
One day, an old school inspector took his carriage over that very same stretch of road. On the bridge, the carriage hit a bump, launching the old man out of his seat and into the stream below, where he drowned. The eerie apparitions of the old man and the carriage were never seen again after that tragic event, leading locals to suspect that those phantoms been forerunners foretelling the death of the old school inspector.
Our next story takes us back to Victoria, British Columbia, to an event recounted by Frank Sudlow in the March 1962 issue of Fate. Sudlow’s experience took place in Beacon Hill Park, an enchanting natural area which sits at the southern tip of that Vancouver Island city, on a winding dirt road called Lovers’ Lane, which the city would later close in the 1970s.
While Sudlow was walking alone down Lovers’ Lane, keeping on the right side of the road, a car approached from the opposite direction. Sudlow idly glanced at the vehicle as it sped past him, and looked over his shoulder to watch it disappear around a bend in the wooded road. As he did so, he saw another much older vehicle come around that same bend, heading in his direction. “It was a very old car,” he wrote, “a 1929 model.”
Sudlow turned around and continued up the road, fully expecting the old vehicle to pass him. When it did not, he looked back to see where it had gone. It was nowhere in sight. Fearing that the antique automobile had run into a tree, he turned around and walked back down the road, but could find no trace of the car anywhere. With a shudder, it suddenly struck Sudlow that the vehicle had made no sound.
Our next story came to my attention by way of both my friend Bexx Korol, and a YouTube viewer who commented on my video on Canadian urban legends.
Just north of the city of Oshawa, Ontario, between Lakes Simcoe and Ontario, at the northern edge of the crowded crescent popularly referred to as the Golden Horseshoe, lies a body of water called Lake Scugog. This lake is bisected by a large peninsula known as Scugog Island, a rural expanse of field and forest connected to the quaint village of Port Perry, which sits at the lake’s southwestern end, by the Ontario Highway 7A. Scugog Island, in turn, is split diagonally by a dirt road called the Mississaugas Trail. At the southern terminus of this trail, at its intersection with Pine Point Road, sits a boulder spray painted with the words ‘Ghost Road’ – in informal guidepost commemorating one of Ontario’s eeriest ghost stories.
According to an old urban legend, which has several different versions, one evening in 1957, a young farm boy decided to see how fast his motorbike would take him. His throttle wide open, he raced down lonely Mississaugas Trail at breakneck speed, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake. As he approached the end of the road, he lost control of his bike and hurtled into the ditch, directly into a rusty barbed wire fence. The force of the collision rent the cyclist’s head from his shoulders. One iteration of this gruesome tale has the biker’s severed head coming to rest by the rock which now bears the graffiti.
Ever since, the legend goes, the cyclist’s restless spirit has lingered on Mississaugas Trail, driving up and down that dirt road on a phantom bike. Every once in a while, locals brave enough to take that haunted byway at night report seeing a ghostly light travelling over the hard-packed earth. Some say that the sighting is accompanied by the faint sound of an old engine revving at maximum capacity. Reminiscent of another phantom light sometimes spotted over old railway tracks in St. Louis, Saskatchewan, this mysterious luminescence is said to be large and white as it approaches the viewer, like the headlight of an oncoming motorbike, and small and red as it continues its journey behind the viewer, evoking a motorcycle’s taillights.
Other strange phenomena said to occur from time to time on Scugog Island’s ‘Ghost Road’ include vehicles being acted upon by some unaccountable force, mysterious compass and electrical malfunctions, and the emanation of strange noises with no identifiable source.
Our next story takes us to the American city of Baudette, which lies on the southern shores of the Rainy River, the watery border separating Minnesota from Ontario. This story was told by one Mabel W. Stevens and published in the May 1949 issue of Fate.
One evening back in 1914, Mabel’s brother returned from the Baudette post office with news that there had been a bad wreck on the Canadian Northern Railway northwest of town. As a result, the train which regularly ran from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Baudette would be delayed until the following morning.
“About ten o’clock that night,” Mabel wrote, “I was looking out my front window facing the tracks. In the distance I saw the headlight of the engine, growing brighter each second. I saw the engine and the long line of coaches come slowly into sight and come to a stop less than half a mile away, the coaches brilliantly lighted. It was a pretty sight in that cold, wintry night.
“I called my mother-in-law’s attention to it and we watched for a while. We could see no passengers – the coaches seemed to be utterly empty. Then suddenly the lights vanished.”
The next morning, Mabel and her family learned that the train they had seen the previous night had not been the train from Winnipeg, which finally arrived in Baudette at 9:00. “There had been no train,” Mabel concluded. “What we saw was a phantom, but certainly a very plain one.”
Three more phantom train stories appear in Mary L. Fraser’s 1932 book Folklore of Nova Scotia. In one of these stories, an invisible train could be heard rumbling over the fields at Mabou River – not far from Cape Mabou, where the phantom carriage was seen – years before a railroad was built through that very area. In another story, residents of the village of Barrachois, Cape Breton Island, used to watch a phantom train gliding around the headlands of Bras d’Or Lake. “Every coach was lighted, but no people could be seen,” Fraser wrote, paraphrasing the words of a witness who claimed to have watched the phantom every night at 7:00 for a whole month. At the end of that month, a man was killed by a train at the very spot where the phantom would vanish every night. The ghost train, apparently, had been a forerunner of his death.
Fraser’s third and most remarkable phantom train story is set at Port Hawkesbury, at the southernmost tip of Cape Breton Island, across the Strait of Canso from the Nova Scotian peninsula. Many years ago, while walking along what is now the Nova Scotia Highway 104, or the Miner’s Memorial Highway, at the edge of town, two old women were confronted by a frightening and unfamiliar sound. “All of a sudden,” Fraser wrote, “they heard a terrible noise, a rushing and a clatter; then, more terrifying still, an awful, huge, black thing, with one big eye in it, came rattling past them and went right through a fishhouse that stood nearby. They ran to the nearest house, and entered pale, breathless, and scared to death.”
Years later, when steam engines were introduced to Eastern Canada, one of the old women watched a train go by on the Nova Scotian mainland, and recognized the sound it made as the one she had heard that strange day at Port Hawkesbury. Although she never lived to see it, a railroad was eventually built at the very place at which she and her friend had seen the apparition on Cape Breton Island, running through the very spot at which the old fishhouse once stood.
A similar incident, just as extraordinary as the previous, took place in Mull River, in the southwestern quadrant of Cape Breton Island, sometime in the early 1880s. According to Mary Fraser, who included the story in her book, a man was walking to a neighbour’s house one evening when a terrifying object loomed before him on the road. “It was large and black,” Fraser wrote, “and had a red light in the middle of its back. A stream of light came from the front of it, so bright that he could see the shingles on the house to which he was going. It went up to the house, passed around it, and then came down the road so swiftly that he jumped aside to let it pass.”
Terrified, the Cape Bretoner made the sign of the cross and stared at the hulking hobgoblin as it trundled down the road, mercifully indifferent to his presence. On its back side were two glowing red lights that glared at him like the eyes of some giant predator. The man recalled that the object made no sound as it rolled its way around a corner and out of sight.
It wasn’t until twenty-five years later that the man realized that the monster he had seen was the phantom or forerunner of an automobile, which first began to appear on Cape Breton in the early 1900s.
Season 1, Episode 1 of The Extraordinary (February 25th, 1993)
“Green Guide,” in the February 25th, 1993 issue of The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia)
“Weird Story on TV Concerning Agganis,” in the July 10th, 1970 issue of the Daily Item (Lynn, Massachusetts)
“Red Hot,” by Red Hoffman, in the July 4th, 1970 issue of the Daily Item (Lynn, Massachussets)
Tell Me More (1990), by Larry King and Peter Occhiogrosso
Season 14, Episode 29 of Biography, “Telly Savalas: Who Loves Ya, Baby?”, February 29th, 2000
“Poltergeist at Play? Invisible Fingers Ransack Locked Car,” in the August 26th, 1953 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
“I See by the Papers,” by Curtis Fuller in the February 1954 issue of Fate
“Death was Pleasant,” by Frank Sudlow in the March 1962 issue of Fate
https://canadamotoguide.com/2018/10/29/the-headless-motorcyclist-on-the-ghost-road/
https://scugogheritage.com/misc/ghostroad.htm
“The Phantom Train,” by Mabel W. Stevens in the May 1949 issue of Fate
Folklore of Nova Scotia (1932), by Mary L. Fraser