Every city has a scary urban legend about its public transit. New York has the ghost train. Chicago has the phantom L stop. In Pittsburgh, among the people who ride the late buses, it’s Route Zero. The story goes like this. If you miss the last bus home and you’re standing alone at the stop after 1 a.m., a bus will come. Clean, lit, almost empty. The sign above the windshield will say 0. Don’t get on. I hadn’t heard the rule when it stopped for me.
In 2019 I was twenty-three and working as a line cook at a restaurant in the Strip District. I didn’t have a car. I took the bus home to my apartment in Carrick, across the river, every night after close. The last bus on my route left the stop on Smallman Street at 12:52 a.m. If you missed it, you walked, or paid for a cab, or slept on the bench.
The Legend
A dishwasher at the restaurant named Teddy told me about Route Zero. He’d worked nights in the Strip for twenty years. One night, when I was stressing about missing the bus, he said, “Just don’t get on the zero.” He said it like it was obvious.
I asked what he meant. He told me the story the way people tell scary stories to tell around a fire. The zero comes for people who miss their last bus. It looks like a normal Port Authority bus, but cleaner. The driver never looks at you. It doesn’t ask for a fare. It takes you home, the story says. Or it takes you somewhere close. And some of the people who get on it don’t get off.
He said his cousin’s friend got on in 1996. They found her a week later in a bus shelter in Homestead, alive, in the clothes she’d been wearing, unable to say where she’d been. She’d lost eight days. She said the ride felt like twenty minutes.
I laughed. Teddy didn’t.
A Scary Urban Legend at 1:20 A.M.
In February, on a Saturday, close ran late. A pipe burst under the dish station. By the time I got out, it was 1:05. The 12:52 was gone. My phone was at four percent. It was raining, the cold, sideways Pittsburgh rain.
I stood at the stop on Smallman Street under the little plastic shelter and tried to decide whether to walk two miles across the bridge or burn my last twenty dollars on a cab.
At 1:20, a bus came around the corner.
It was beautiful. That’s the first thing I thought. Clean and white and lit up warm and yellow inside. The rain was running off it but it looked dry. It pulled up to the stop and the doors folded open with a soft hiss.
The sign over the windshield said 0.
I stood there. The heat from inside came out the door like a breath. It smelled like a bakery. Like bread and sugar and warm coffee. The driver was a man in a gray uniform. He was facing straight ahead, both hands on the wheel. He didn’t look at me.
There were maybe six people on the bus. All sitting very still. All facing forward. A woman in a nurse’s uniform. An old man in a hat. A teenager in a Penguins jersey. Nobody had a phone out. Nobody was looking out the windows.
The driver said, without turning his head, “Going your way.”
I didn’t tell him where I was going.
The Rule
I’d love to tell you I was smart. I wasn’t. I was cold and tired and broke, and it was warm in there and it smelled like breakfast. I put one foot on the step.
Then I looked at the teenager in the Penguins jersey. He’d turned his head slowly toward me. He was the only one who moved. He looked about sixteen. His face was gray. And his jersey was old. Not vintage. Old. A logo the team hadn’t used since I was a little kid.
He shook his head at me. Very slightly. Just once.
I took my foot off the step.
The driver said, “Last chance.”
I said, “I’ll walk.”
The doors folded shut. The bus pulled away from the curb into the rain without a sound. No engine. No tires on the wet street. I watched it go down Smallman, the yellow windows getting smaller. At the corner, it didn’t turn. It just went dark. Like someone turned off a lamp.
What Teddy Said
I walked home. It took fifty minutes. I’ve never been so happy to be cold in my life.
On Monday I told Teddy. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he asked me what the kid looked like. I told him. The jersey, the gray face, about sixteen.
Teddy went into the walk-in cooler and didn’t come out for ten minutes. When he did, his eyes were red. He told me his little brother, Danny, missed the last bus home from a hockey game in 1991. He was sixteen. He called home from a payphone at 1:15 and said he’d found a ride. Nobody ever saw him again.
Teddy said he’d stood at that stop on Smallman a hundred nights since, after close, waiting for the zero. It never came for him. He said, “I guess you have to really need it.”
I’ve collected scary urban stories from other night workers in the city since then. Every one of them has a version of the zero. I’ve read scary urban legends around the world about ghost buses and phantom trains. None of them have a kid in an old hockey jersey shaking his head.
I don’t miss the last bus anymore. Ever. And if you’re in Pittsburgh, late, and a clean white bus with a zero on the sign stops for you, don’t take this scary urban legend as a joke. Just walk.
What’s the legend in your city?
Every town has a scary urban legend about the late bus, the last train or the empty road. Tell us yours in the comments.
Read train horror story and hitchhiker horror stories for more travelers who almost got a ride they shouldn’t have.
