Anybody who drives Interstate 80 across Wyoming in winter has scary highway stories. Jackknifed semis. Ground blizzards so white you can’t see your own hood. Mine is about a road closure, a man in a parka, and a gate that he said had been opened just for the two of us.
In January of 2020 I was driving from Salt Lake City to Omaha for my brother’s wedding. I’m a pharmacist. I had exactly two days off, and I’d left a day late because of work. I hit Rock Springs at about 4 p.m. and the signs were already flashing. Wind gusts, blowing snow, closure possible. I kept going. I wanted to make Laramie before they shut it.
I didn’t. At 6:40 p.m., about twenty miles past Rawlins, the eastbound gate was down. A long metal arm across both lanes, red lights blinking. A digital sign said ROAD CLOSED. RETURN TO RAWLINS.
The Gate
There’s an exit right before the gate, where you’re supposed to turn around. There were maybe fifteen trucks and cars lined up on the shoulder and the off-ramp, idling, waiting. Everybody figured it would open in an hour or two. I pulled in at the back of the line, behind a pickup with Nebraska plates, and turned on my podcast.
The wind was rocking the car. Snow was coming sideways through my headlights. Every few minutes a gust would white out everything, even the pickup’s taillights twenty feet ahead.
By 8 p.m., the line had thinned out. People were giving up and heading back to Rawlins for a motel. The pickup ahead of me left. Then the semi ahead of that. By 8:30 I was the only car left at the gate. I should have gone too. I kept thinking about my brother’s face if I missed the rehearsal dinner.
Scary Highway Stories Don’t Need Monsters
At 8:52, somebody knocked on my passenger window.
I hadn’t seen anyone walk up. I hadn’t seen headlights. There was just a man standing in the snow at my passenger door, tall, in a heavy orange parka with the hood cinched so tight around his face that I could only see his nose and mouth. Snow was packed on his shoulders like he’d been standing in it a long time.
I cracked the window an inch. The cold came in like a hand.
He leaned down and said, calm and friendly, “They opened it for us.”
I looked at the gate. It was still down. The red lights were still blinking. The sign still said ROAD CLOSED.
I said, “It looks closed.”
He said, “Not for us. Follow me.” And he pointed east, past the gate, into the white.
I told myself he must work for the highway department. That parka was the color they wear. Maybe they were letting a few people through behind a plow. That happens sometimes. I asked him, “Are you with WYDOT?”
He didn’t answer. He just said, again, in the same tone, “They opened it for us. Come on.” And he started walking. Not toward a truck. Toward the gate. On foot.
Footprints
He walked right up to the gate arm, ducked under it, and kept walking down the eastbound lane, into the blizzard, until the snow swallowed him. No truck. No plow. No headlights out there. Just a man walking down a closed interstate in a ground blizzard at nine at night.
I sat there with my hands on the wheel. Every part of me said this was wrong. A smaller part of me, the part that wanted to be at the wedding, said maybe he knew something. Maybe there was a convoy.
Then the wind dropped for a few seconds, the way it does between gusts, and my headlights reached farther than they had all night. I could see the road past the gate. Maybe two hundred feet of it, before it went white again.
There were no footprints. The snow was blowing hard, sure. But he’d walked through it not a minute earlier. There should have been something.
And then I saw what was across the road, about a hundred yards past the gate. The headlights just reached it. A white shape, too big to be snow. A semi trailer lying on its side across both lanes.
I backed up, turned around, and drove to Rawlins at twenty miles an hour with my hazards on.
The News in the Morning
In the motel the next morning, the news said the interstate between Rawlins and Laramie had reopened at 6 a.m. Overnight, a semi had blown over in the closure zone and blocked both lanes. There had been a second wreck behind it, earlier in the evening, before the gate came down. A pickup had driven into the trailer in a whiteout. The driver had died at the scene.
They showed a picture of the pickup, crushed, on a flatbed. And there, on the seat in the back of the shot, was a heavy orange parka. Not a WYDOT jacket. Just a hunting parka, the kind you buy at a farm store.
I made the wedding. I got there four hours late, gave my brother a hug, and didn’t say a word about any of it. I’ve told it since as one of my short horror tales at dinner parties, and people always laugh nervously, the way you laugh at scary small stories that don’t have a big ending.
But I think about it every time I see a closed gate. He was so calm. He didn’t want to hurt me. He just didn’t want to go out there alone.
Have you waited out a road closure?
Tell us your scary highway stories in the comments, especially if you drive mountain passes or open plains in winter. These are the scary stories for stormy nights that every long-haul driver seems to have.
Read trucker scary stories and fake detour horror story next, and don’t follow anyone past a closed gate.
How scary was it?
More Highway Horror Stories
I Passed the Same Hitchhiker at Three Exits, Forty Miles Apart
There Was a Scarecrow at Every Mile Marker on My Drive Home
Dana, Shower 6 Is Ready
A Voice on My CB Counted Down the Miles to Where He Was Waiting
The Payphone at the Rest Stop Rang, and It Was for Me
I Sat at a Railroad Crossing for Forty-One Minutes in Kansas