The Hollow Crossing

It was a humid August night, and I was returning from a photography assignment in the Louisiana bayou back to my apartment in Nashville. My headlights cut through the thick darkness as I merged onto old Route 17, a lonely stretch of asphalt that snakes through the pine forests of northern Mississippi. The clock on my dash read 2:47 AM, and the road was empty, save for the occasional deer that darted across my periphery.

I’d been driving for hours, my eyes heavy but alert, the taste of stale coffee lingering on my tongue. As I crested a gentle rise, I saw something that made me press the brakes instinctively. About half a mile ahead, on the shoulder of the road, there was a strange shimmering, like heat rising from the tar, but it was too cool for that. It looked like a solid mass of fog, but it had a shape—a human form, too tall and too thin, with long arms that hung almost to the ground.

As I approached, the details sharpened. It was a woman, or what looked like a woman, but her skin was the color of old slate, and her hair was a tangle of pale, writhing strands that seemed to move on their own, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. She was wearing a long, tattered dress that faded into a wispy vapor at her knees—there were no legs, just a trailing mist that dissipated into the gravel. She stood perfectly still, facing away from the road, as if staring at something deep in the trees.

My heart pounded in my chest, but I couldn’t look away. I slowed to 30 miles per hour, then 20, and as I passed her, she turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were two hollow sockets, black and bottomless, and her mouth opened in a silent, agonizing scream that seemed to freeze the air. I floored the accelerator, my tires squealing as I sped away, but when I checked my rearview mirror, she was still there, now facing me, her form flickering like a bad signal.

I drove for what felt like an eternity, my hands gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles went white. When I finally reached a small gas station, I pulled over, shaking, and tried to convince myself it was a trick of the light or a hallucination from exhaustion. But the next morning, when I developed the photos from my camera, I found it. In every single frame, there she was, standing in the background, her hollow eyes staring directly at the lens, and I knew with chilling certainty that she had not only followed me home, but she had never left that stretch of road—she was waiting for the next traveler, and now, she was waiting for me to come back.