Can a ghost cause a road accident?

Australia’s highways are littered with the ghosts of road-accident victims.

Early one morning in the 1980s, 19 cars were involved in a pileup on the Mornington Peninsula Freeway in Victoria, Australia. The motorists claimed that they had swerved to avoid hitting a misty, floating human shape that then disappeared. Could it be that they had seen the ghost of someone who had died on that highway?

It is easy to dismiss the wraith that haunts the Mornington Peninsula Freeway as a trick of the light, fog or morning mist. But it is difficult to explain it away when hundreds of people declare they have seen the phantom, which some say had been around for 10 years prior to the 19-car pileup. One woman recalled, “I was driving with my husband when the grey misty shape of a woman suddenly hurled itself in front of the car. I was so frightened I almost swerved off the road.”

Despite the many witness accounts of encounters with ghosts, there are no experts on the subject, only theories. One common theory is that ghosts are imprints in a dimension close to our own of people who have died but do not know it. In other words, they are earthbound. Apparently, this happens in the case of sudden death, such as a road accident. According to psychic and author, Sylvia Browne, time is meaningless in the immediate, after-death dimension. A traumatised road-accident victim, therefore, can remain in those first few minutes after death and re-enact the trauma over and over again, which in our dimension could last for years, even centuries.

So, could it be that the phantom set of headlights flying down King George Avenue in Tamworth, New South Wales, late at night is a re-enacting of a drag car race gone wrong? King George Avenue used to be a popular drag car racing strip where many people crashed and died.

It is doubtful that highway ghosts set out deliberately to kill people. These hapless ghosts are probably not even aware of us. It is more likely that the sight of them spooks drivers, who then swerve to avoid hitting them. But who knows? Certainly, no one in our dimension ever will. If we accept that ghosts exist, the idea that a person can hang around after death and scare people half out of their wits adds a tantalising element to our ponderings about life and death.

References
John Pinkney, Haunted: The Book of Australia’s Ghosts, The Five Mile Press, Victoria, 2005.
Sylvia Browne, The Other Side and Back, Signet, USA, 2000.