Thriller Thursday5

These excerpts are from the book Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger.

Route 666: The Southwest's Devil's Highway (pg 408-409)

"Although US Route 666 is now officially known as US Route 491 or 393, the legend of Camino del Diablo, 'the Devil's Road', will be long remembered. The original naming of the highway had nothing to do with the Number of the Beast, or Antichrist - 666, as given in Revelations, the last book in the Bible. The highway was so designated because it was the sixth branch of an interstate route then known as US 60. The section linking Chicago to Los Angeles became the legendary Route 66. And the Four Corners detour from Route 66 was renumbered 666 in August 1926. But some say labeling the road with those numerals made it Satan's own road to perdition. The 190 miles of the former US Route 666 starts at Gallup, New Mexico, wends it way through 70 miles of Colorado, then ends in Monticello, Utah. According to numerous eyewitness accounts, on nights of the full moon, a black 1930s-vintage Pierce-Arrow roadster has appeared and run scores of cars, trucks, and motorcycles off the road. The ghostly automobile has been linked to at least five deaths. Dr. Avery Teicher of Phoenix spent ten years documenting reports of the phantom Pierce-Arrow and the howling hellhounds that materialize to terrorize anyone foolhardy enough to pull off Route 666 and admire the desert landscape. According to Dr. Teicher, two members of a biker gang had both of their arms chewed off by the fiendish ghost dogs, and a third biker had 90 percent of his face eaten away. The least threatening of all reports from the Devil's Highway are those of a phantom female hitchhiker who vanishes whenever someone stops to give her a ride. On January 21, 2003, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson stated his support to change the name of US 666. The change became official in may 2003."

A Vanishing Restaurant Outside of Amarillo (pgs 440-441)

"In the early summer of 1987, Sam and Clara were traveling to Amarillo, Texas on a business trip. Shortly after midnight, they decided to stop to eat at a quaint, rustic-style restaurant that neither of them had ever noticed on previous trips to the region. They remembered that the food was prepared in an excellent down-home country style, and that the waitress, the cook, and even the other customers were so friendly in a sincere manner that Sam and Clara truly meant their promise that they would stop back again. 'And we tried to do exactly that on our return drive,' Sam said, 'but that great littl down-home restaurant was nowhere to be seen. We even looped back a couple of times, thinking we might somehow have driven on by. We even got into an argument, each of us insisting that we remembered exactly where it was. We just couldn't find it, and since the hour was getting very late, we drove on.' Because their business required a number of return visits to Amarillo, Sam and Clara traveled that route on three consecutive weekends, each time keeping a watch for the restaurant with the wonderful cooking, but it seemed as though it had simply vanished. 'Since then, we have driven that route a dozen or more times,' Sam said, 'but we never again found that friendly little restaurant.' Indeed, Sam and Clara may have been extremely fortunate. What if the 'friendly little restaurant' appeared and disappeared every few years? A kind of Texas-style 'Brigadoon'. They might have been lost in time and space for decades. But at least the food and the company would have been good."