True Horror Stories

Purgatory Road

         Storyteller is unknown: During August 2018, my friends and I took a road trip from New York City to Rhode Island. None of us had been to Rhode Island before, so we were excited about the drive, especially because we had rented a Mustang convertible for it. We left a little later than expected—it was about 10:30 p.m., and since it was a busy Friday night, we decided to punch our destination into the Waze traffic app to beat the traffic.

          Eventually, we started losing steam, so my friend in the back seat fell asleep and I just kept driving along quietly, when my friend in the passenger seat told me to exit the freeway to take a side road. At first, driving on the unlit, winding back roads was relaxing, but then the wind picked up and it got increasingly foggy and misty. I wasn't scared, per se, just a little on edge. I thought about pulling over to put the top up but decided against it since there were no cars in sight. Heavy rain was projected for the entire weekend, so I wanted to get the most out the convertible.

          So I kept going along as normal, if not a little too fast to get back to the main roads as quickly as possible when something just shifted. I don't know how to explain it other than an unsettling, exposed feeling. I remember pulling my sweater over my legs to cover up. Then my friend up front told me to look at the street sign in the distance. It read, "Purgatory." We woke up our friend in the back seat, who sort of scoffed.

          Seconds later, we went around a bend where a large red cross was installed on the side of the road with nothing else in sight. We just shrugged it off as a creepy coincidence. By then, we were kind of joking about and indulging in the spookiness, but around the next bend, a big truck came hurtling down the one-lane road— aimed straight at us. Luckily my impulse was to swerve a little to the side, otherwise, it probably would have resulted in a head-on collision. My friend tried to get his license plate number but he sped off, while my other friend found the quickest route away from this particular road.

          We didn't really discuss what happened afterward because we were too creeped out, and we haven't talked about it since. While writing this story, I decided to look it up. I spent an hour trying to retrace our route and found the little road—it was indeed named Purgatory, and though we didn't notice it at the time, Google Maps revealed that Purgatory Road was situated next to an old graveyard. Curious about this road, I researched it further and discovered that had died there in August of 2011 in an accident on their way to visit the grave of Rhode Island's infamous "vampire," Mercy Brown, who died in 1892. Apparently, they decided to go for a drive down this "dark, windy road" because they thought it looked "haunted."