This funeral home horror story is about a van that drove itself. Every night for four nights, the removal van at the funeral home where I worked in Savannah, Georgia, came back with fourteen more miles on it, and every morning the passenger seat was wet. Tour guides make a living off ghost stories of Savannah. This one never made the tour.
In 2018 I was twenty-five and working as the night attendant at a family-owned funeral home in midtown Savannah. It’s a real job, and more common than people think. Somebody has to answer the phone at 3 a.m. when a hospital or a family calls, and somebody has to go with the removal team to pick up the deceased. On quiet nights, I did paperwork, watched movies on my laptop, and slept on a cot in the office.
The funeral home had a white removal van. That’s the vehicle we used to bring people in from hospitals and homes. Not a hearse. Just a plain white van with tinted windows and a stretcher in the back. It was parked every night in a garage behind the building. The garage door was on a keypad. I had the only key to the van at night. It hung on a hook in the office, right over my cot.
The owner, Mr. Pettigrew, was in his seventies. His grandfather had founded the place in 1921. He kept very careful records. One of his rules was that whoever drove the van wrote the mileage in a logbook on the clipboard in the garage. Start and finish. Every trip.
Fourteen Miles
In late September, we had an unclaimed man in our care. That happens sometimes. A man named Lonnie Mabry, sixty-one, who’d died alone in a rooming house downtown. The county had sent him to us while they tried to find next of kin. If nobody turned up in a couple of weeks, the county would pay for a simple burial.
The morning after he came in, Mr. Pettigrew called me into the office at the end of my shift. He had the van’s logbook.
He said, “Did you take the van out last night?”
I said no. We’d had no calls. I’d been on my cot watching a movie.
He said the last entry in the log was from 6 p.m., when the day crew parked it. The odometer that morning read 14.6 miles more than that.
I said maybe the day guys forgot to write down a trip. He said maybe. He didn’t believe it either.
The next morning it was 14.6 miles again. Exactly.
The Wet Seat
The third night, I didn’t sleep. I sat at the office desk with the van key on its hook right over my head and the door to the garage in view. I stayed awake till dawn on energy drinks. I never heard the garage door. I never heard an engine. Nothing.
In the morning, the odometer was up 14.6 miles.
And when Mr. Pettigrew and I opened the van doors to look, the passenger seat was wet. Not soaked. Damp, like someone had sat there in wet clothes. It had been dry all week. No rain in Savannah for nine days.
The cab smelled like the river. Marsh mud and salt and something sweet, like pipe tobacco.
Mr. Pettigrew stood there looking at the seat for a long time. Then he said, very quietly, “Mr. Mabry smoked a pipe. The landlady said so.”
I asked him what that had to do with anything.
He didn’t answer. He went inside and called a man he knew who installed dashboard cameras.
What the Dash Camera Saw
The camera guy came that afternoon. He put a small camera on the windshield that recorded the road ahead and the inside of the cab, and it had GPS built in.
That night I stayed up again. Same thing. No sound. No engine. Nothing. In the morning, 14.6 miles.
We watched the footage in Mr. Pettigrew’s office with the door closed.
At 2:10 a.m., the camera turned on by itself when the engine started. The garage door was going up in front of the van. The van backed out onto the street and drove away.
The driver’s seat was empty. I want to be very clear about that. You could see the whole cab in the camera. The steering wheel was turning. Nobody was holding it.
The passenger seat was not empty.
It was hard to see. The footage was dark and grainy, lit only by streetlights going by. But there was a shape in the passenger seat. A man, sitting very still, with his head turned to look out the side window. You could see his outline against the lights. You could see a little red glow, like the bowl of a pipe.
The GPS showed the route. East out of midtown, over the bridge toward Thunderbolt, a small town on the river. The van stopped on a quiet street in front of a little white house. It sat there with the engine running for twenty minutes. Then it drove back. 7.3 miles each way.
Mr. Pettigrew turned off the laptop. He wrote down the address.
Where My Funeral Home Horror Story Led
That afternoon, he drove out there himself. He told me about it the next night.
An old woman answered the door. Her name was Bernice. She was seventy, and she was Lonnie Mabry’s sister. They hadn’t spoken in thirty years. Some family fight about their mother’s house, she said. She didn’t even know he was in Savannah. She didn’t know he was dead.
When Mr. Pettigrew told her, she sat down on her porch steps and cried. Then she said something that he said he’d never forget.
She said, “I knew something was wrong. For four nights there’s been a white van parked outside my house at two in the morning. I thought it was somebody casing the house. I almost called the police. But it never did anything. It just sat there. And the whole street smelled like Daddy’s pipe.”
She claimed his body that week. She paid for a real funeral, a nice one, and she buried him next to their parents at a church cemetery on the marsh.
The van never moved on its own again. The mileage was exactly right in the logbook every morning after that.
I left the funeral home business a couple of years later. I’m an electrician now. But I still think about Lonnie Mabry, riding through Savannah at two in the morning with nobody at the wheel, just to sit outside his sister’s house and wait for her to notice.
And I still think about the fact that the funeral home had other unclaimed people over the years. Mr. Pettigrew told me once that the old logbooks, going back to the 1950s, have a lot of mornings where the mileage doesn’t add up.
He kept those logbooks in a locked cabinet. He never let me read them.
If you’re looking for the best scary stories from people who work nights, read the late night radio horror story about a caller in a blue Corolla, our retail horror stories post about props that went off after closing, or the hitchhiker horror stories from three exits in Nevada.
Do you know a funeral home horror story?
People who work around the dead tend to have a story or two they don’t tell at parties. If you have a funeral home horror story, or any haunted Savannah stories from the old streets by the river, share them in the comments below.
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More Night Shift Horror Stories
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A 911 Call Came From Inside Our Dispatch Center at 3:02 Every Night
Corporate Kept Calling the Gas Station at 2 A.M. to Send Me Outside
The Whiteboard in an Empty Hospital Room Kept Writing My Name