The Kerosene Man of Fox Hollow

It was the winter of 2007, and I was hauling a load of frozen meat from Bangor, Maine, to a distribution center in Scranton, Pennsylvania. My rig was a 18-wheeler, and I’d been on the road for ten hours, the snow piling up on the shoulders of I-84. My CB was crackling with static, and the only other souls out there were the occasional salt truck and a few brave ones like me.

About 1 AM, I decided to exit at the Fox Hollow interchange to check my directions and grab a coffee from a 24-hour place I remembered. But the diner I remembered was gone, replaced by a boarded-up shell, its neon sign dangling by a wire, swinging in the wind. The parking lot was dark, potholes full of ice, and the only light came from a flickering mercury vapor lamp on a pole, casting sickly green shadows. I pulled in, killed the engine, and sat there, steam rising from my exhaust.

I was studying a road atlas by the faint glow of my dash light when a knock came at the passenger door, sharp and impatient. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned off my interior light and peered through the frosted window. A figure stood there, bundled in a heavy parka, but something was off. The parka looked too thin for the cold, and the boots were not winter boots but leather dress shoes. The face was pinched, pale, and the eyes were wide and staring, like a man who’d seen something terrible.

I rolled down my window a crack, and the man leaned in. He smelled of fuel oil, a sharp, acrid odor that burned my nose. He spoke in a low, urgent voice: ‘I need a ride. I’m a pilot, my plane went down back a ways. I’ve been walking for hours.’ I noticed he had no bag, no phone, no gloves. His hands were raw and chapped, and his voice trembled.

‘Where’s your plane?’ I asked, skeptical. He pointed vaguely behind him, into the dark woods that lined the road. ‘Back there, in the trees. I got out before it exploded. I have to get to Scranton, to the airport, they need to know.’ I hesitated, but he looked so desperate, and the cold was so biting, that I unlocked the passenger door.

He climbed in, and the smell of kerosene filled the cab, making my eyes water. He sat rigid, staring ahead, his hands in his lap, fingers twitching. ‘I’m Captain Raynes,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘Air Transportation Command.’ I nodded, trying to place the uniform, but he wasn’t wearing one, just a white shirt and dark pants, no jacket. I offered the heater, but he shook his head.

We drove in silence for a few miles, the only sound the whine of the engine and the crunch of slush under the tires. I asked about the crash, but he gave monosyllabic answers, never looking at me, just fixing his gaze on the road ahead as if expecting something to appear. After a while, he started muttering to himself, words I couldn’t catch, and I realized he was speaking in a loop: ‘They’re still there, they’re still there, they’re waiting.’

I asked what he meant, and he turned to me, his eyes suddenly wet, and said, ‘There were forty passengers. We left Bangor at 2130, bound for Scranton. We were over the mountains, and the wing iced up. We went down, and I was the only one who got out. But they’re not dead. They’re not dead. They’re in the fuselage, and they’re burning, and I can hear them calling me.’

I gripped the wheel, my heart pounding. ‘But if you were the pilot, why wasn’t there a search for you? Why haven’t I heard about a crash?’ He didn’t answer. He just stared at me, and in the green dash light, his pupils seemed to dilate, and I noticed his breath didn’t fog the windshield.

I was getting spooked. I pulled off at the next exit, a small town called Emporium, and stopped at a 24-hour truck stop to fill up and maybe call the cops. I told him I needed to check something and stepped out. When I came back with coffee, the passenger door was open, and he was gone. I looked around, but there was no sign of him, just a smell of kerosene lingering in the air.

The cashier, a heavyset woman with tired eyes, asked about the smell. I told her about the pilot, and she went pale. ‘You picked up a ghost,’ she said. ‘There was a plane crash in these woods in 1999, a small commuter, went down in a blizzard. The pilot survived, but he wandered for hours before he froze to death. They found him near this very truck stop.’ She pointed to the edge of the lot. ‘Right over there, under that oak tree.’

I didn’t need to hear more. I paid, got back in my rig, and drove the rest of the way without stopping. At the Scranton depot, I unloaded in silence, shaking. I never drove that route again. But even now, on cold winter nights, I sometimes smell kerosene, and I hear a faint knocking on my door, and a voice says, ‘They’re still waiting.’