This truck stop horror story happened during a wind closure on I-80 in Wyoming, when the speaker in the drivers’ lounge called my first name for a shower I never booked. I thought it was a mix-up until the third call came from somewhere it shouldn’t have.
I’ve been called just about everything over a CB in twenty-two years of trucking. The worst thing I ever heard over a speaker was my own first name.
My name is Dana. I’m fifty-six, I’m from outside Valdosta, Georgia, and I’ve been an owner-operator since 2011. One truck, one trailer, reefer loads mostly. Produce west, frozen stuff back east. When you own your truck, you put your name on the door. Mine said DANA R. PRUITT TRUCKING, VALDOSTA GA, in white letters with a little peach painted underneath. My granddaughter picked the peach.
In February of 2025 I was westbound on I-80 in southern Wyoming with a load of frozen potatoes for Salt Lake. If you’ve driven 80 in winter, you know what happened next. Wind. The state shut the interstate from Rawlins to Rock Springs for blow-over risk, and every truck on that road piled into the nearest truck stop.
Mine was a big travel center off an exit I won’t name. Fuel island, restaurant, a store, a drivers’ lounge with a TV, and eight shower rooms down a back hallway. I’ve used a hundred places just like it.
I fueled first, before the lot packed up. While I was at the pump, a man came over with a squeegee from the bucket and started cleaning my driver’s side mirror without asking. That happens. Some guys get bored.
He was maybe forty. Clean tan work coat, clean boots, clean-shaven. That’s what I noticed, honestly. Everybody in that lot looked like they’d been driving fourteen hours, and he looked like he’d just woken up from a nap.
He stepped back and read my door.
“Dana R. Pruitt,” he said. “That you?”
“That’s me.”
“Owner-operator. Good for you.” He tapped the peach with the squeegee handle. “That’s nice.”
Then he dropped the squeegee in the bucket and walked off across the lot. I didn’t see what he drove. I didn’t care. I wanted a hot meal and a bathroom that didn’t move.
I parked in the back row. By eight o’clock the lot was full and trucks were lined up on the ramps. The road wasn’t opening till morning at the earliest. I ate a chicken-fried steak in the restaurant, bought a coffee, and sat in the drivers’ lounge to watch the weather.
A Page for Shower 6
At 9:40 the speaker crackled.
“Dana, shower 6 is ready. Dana, shower 6.”
I looked up. Everybody looks up when the speaker goes. It’s a reflex. But I hadn’t booked a shower. I’d meant to, later. I hadn’t been to the desk yet.
I figured it was another Dana. It’s not that rare a name, and plenty of men have it too. There had to be a few hundred drivers in that building. I went back to the weather.
At 10:05 it came again.
“Dana, shower 6 is still ready. Shower 6, Dana.”
Same clerk. Bored voice. Nobody in the lounge got up.
I don’t know what made me go to the desk. Curiosity, I guess. Maybe I thought if nobody was using it, I’d take it. The girl at the counter was about twenty. Her name tag said Kaylee. I asked who booked shower 6.
She checked her screen. “It’s under Dana.”
“Last name?”
“Just Dana. Paid cash.” She looked up at me. “Is it yours?”
I said no. I asked who paid. She said a guy, and shrugged, and said he told her it was for his wife, who’d be in from the truck in a little while. She said he’d been very polite about it.
I’m not married. I haven’t been since 1998.
I told her I wasn’t anybody’s wife and it wasn’t mine. She said okay, she’d let it time out. I asked her not to call that name again. She looked at me like I was a little off, but she said okay.
I went back to my truck around 10:30. I want to be honest about where my head was. I wasn’t scared. I was annoyed. I figured some guy had a wife named Dana and a mixed-up night, and I was a fifty-six-year-old woman getting worked up over a shower.
I locked the doors, climbed into the sleeper, and called my daughter. We talked about my granddaughter’s science fair. I didn’t mention the shower. It didn’t seem worth it.
A Different Voice on the Lot Speakers
The lot has outdoor speakers too. Most big stops do, up on the light poles, so they can page drivers in their trucks. Mostly it’s fuel desk calls and lost dogs.
At 11:48, over the wind, I heard it.
“Dana. Shower 6 is ready.”
It was a different voice.
Not Kaylee. A man. Slow and calm, very close to the microphone. He said my name like he was saying it across a kitchen table.
I sat up in the bunk. I told myself the night shift had come on and this was a new clerk who never got the message. That was the reasonable thing. I even said it out loud. “New clerk.”
I didn’t sleep. I lay there with the curtain shut and listened to the wind push the trailer around.
1:47 a.m.
The cab dipped.
If you’ve never slept in a truck, you might not know this. You feel it when someone steps up on your step. The whole cab sinks a little on that side, like a boat when somebody climbs in. The wind had been rocking me for hours, but this was different. This was weight. Somebody standing on my driver’s side step.
Then a sound on the door. Not a knock. A tap. Two of them. Light, like a ring on a fingertip.
“Dana,” he said, through the glass. Calm. “Your shower’s ready.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. My heart was going so hard I was sure he could feel it through the door.
I could smell him. That’s the part I still can’t get past. That truck stop stocked one kind of hand soap in the restrooms, a sharp fake coconut, and it came right through the old seal on my driver’s window and into the sleeper. He’d just washed his hands.
I hit the horn. I laid on it with my whole palm. In a lot full of sleeping drivers, that’s like pulling a fire alarm. Lights came on in the trucks around me. Somebody yelled. Somebody else laid on his horn right back at me.
The cab came back up. He’d stepped off.
The Night Manager at the Truck Stop
I called the store from my cell. I’d saved the number off a receipt. The night manager answered, an older man named Russ. I told him a man had been on my truck, and I told him about the shower. He sent the lot security guy, then came out himself in a reflective vest with a flashlight.
There was nobody at my truck. Just my door, with two little smudges on the window where he’d tapped.
Russ walked me inside. On the way, I asked him who’d been on the outdoor speaker at 11:48.
He stopped walking.
He said the outdoor page runs through the fuel desk. The microphone sits on a counter by the window, and the fuel clerk takes a fifteen-minute break at a quarter till midnight. He said nobody should have been at it.
We went down the back hallway. Shower 6 still showed unclaimed on the door panel. Russ opened it with his master key.
The room was dry. Nobody had showered in it. There was a folded towel on the bench, the way they leave them.
There was a strip of duct tape over the strike plate in the door frame. Gray tape, cut neat, pressed flat over the hole where the bolt goes. If I’d gone in there and locked that door behind me, it would have felt locked. The handle would have turned. It just wouldn’t have held anything.
Russ didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “Okay. Okay,” and called the sheriff.
The deputy and Russ and I watched the footage at four in the morning in a back office that smelled like burnt coffee.
The man in the clean tan coat walked in at 9:12 p.m. He went to the desk, paid cash, and asked for shower 6 by number. He went straight down the hallway and into it. He was in there four minutes with the door shut. Then he came out with nothing in his hands.
He walked to the end of the shower hallway, where it opens up to the lounge, and leaned against the wall. You could see me in the corner of the frame, in my chair, watching the weather. He watched me watch the weather for almost an hour. When the speaker called my name, he didn’t look at the speaker. He looked at me.
When I got up and went to the desk to talk to Kaylee, he left by the side door.
The fuel desk camera showed him at 11:47, stepping behind the counter while the clerk was on break, picking up the microphone, and setting it back down. He didn’t look around. He didn’t hurry.
The lot cameras lost him in the dark between rows of trucks. They never got a plate. The deputy said they’d check with other stops along 80. As far as I know, nothing ever came back.
The interstate opened at 6:10 that morning. I was the third truck up the ramp.
That spring I had the lettering taken off my door. It just says my DOT number now. My granddaughter asked what happened to her peach, and I told her it was old paint.
I still use truck stop showers. I don’t have a choice. But I press my finger into the strike plate every time, before I take my boots off.
And when a speaker calls for Dana, I don’t look up.
Have a truck stop horror story of your own?
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