The Crossroads Read online

#2.16 “Roadkill” from the popular television series “Supernatural”.

  According to the legend, a lonely driver sees a woman hitch-hiking at the side of the road in the dead of night. The driver in question is usually a male, but there are variations that even include entire families. The hitchhiker gets in the car, and that’s when the driver gradually begins to notice strange things about her. Her hands are scratched and bloody, her dress is surprisingly old-fashioned, or he notices something else about her that isn’t entirely normal. The driver usually disregards this though, and drives the woman home. Somewhere along the way, the hitchhiker disappears from the car. Then there are some variations to the story. In one variation, the driver goes to the address the woman gave him a day or two later, only to meet up with the mother of the young woman who explains to him her daughter has died in a car accident ten years prior, on the exact same spot where he picked her up two nights before. In another variation, the address the young woman gave him leads to an old, abandoned house. He then searches her name in the city records and discovered she passed away in a car accident. In any case, the motorist finds out that he has just given a lift to a ghost.

  I wanted to take this popular and well-known legend and add my own spin to it, offering a female protagonist suffering more or less the same fate as the ghost. Because all the reported cases of this urban legend had something to do with a woman dying in a car accident, I wanted to get rid of that part of the story as well. Then I got the idea of a vengeful spirit hurting men because she was cheated on by her own husband and thus driven to the edge of insanity. My aim was to mix these two storylines together and offer an original take on “The Phantom Hitchhiker” legend.

  Majanka Verstraete is a twenty-one-year-old female from Belgium. She is currently studying law at university, and hopes to become a successful lawyer one day.

  Her greatest passion in life is writing. She enjoys writing everything from epic fantasy to paranormal romance to gothic horror stories. When she’s not writing, she’s probably reading ridiculously large fantasy books, watching reruns of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer or spending quality-time with her friends.

  You can find out more about her and her writings on her website:

  https://writings.eternalised.net

  Evermore eBook Publishing is a small publishing company specialised in eBooks. As a young, fresh and dynamic company, we want to look at the future. We specialise in publishing eBooks because we are confident that eReading is the way of the future.

  Visit our website:

  https://evermore.eternalised.net