THE PHANTOM LORRY

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17236, 16 April 1930, Page 18

THE PHANTOM LORRY

ROAD MYSTERY SOLVED JUTTING WALL AND A HEDGE LONDON, Feb. 17. A lonely road between Godley and Mottrain, Cheshire, ' reputed to be haunted by a phantom motor lorry, was treated with more than ordinary care l>y motorists to-day. Its unenviable reputation, owing to a succession of accidents, with three dead and 25 injured during the last two years, was intensified by an eerie atmosphere given to the locality by the suggestion of the coroner, Mr. Stuart Rodger. At an inquest at Ashton yesterday on a pillion rider killed on the road on December 30, Mr. Albert Collinson, of Cook street, Audenshaw, the driver of the motor cycle, said that he swerved to avoid a heavy motor-lorry backing out of an opening between an inn and cross-roads. There is no opening between the inn and the cross-roads, and this fact led the coroner to remark. “It must have been a phantom lorry.” He added to the ghostliness of the suggestion by saying that at one house in the noighobrhood where he had made inquiries, he had been told of a dog which ran home “howling and terrified” after hearing! footsteps m the road. ’solving the mystery. “To track do\vn this spectral lorry, I motored to the scene of the accident to-night,” says a press correspondent.. “From the ghost's point of view conditions were excellent—a still, quiet night, darkness, and little traffic. "1 stood in the road with the powerful head lamps of the car flooding the spot,where the motor cyclist’s fatal swerve began, and in the ray of light I found what 1 believe to he the solution of the accident and the explanation of the phantom. “There appeared, not ;rn earthbound lorry driver, ceaselessly backing his vehicle out of a. ghostly side road, but an equally startling impression of a ghost—the singular coincidence of a sloping hedge and a slightly jutting wall.” A break in the wall, concealing a water trough, suggested the possibility of an opening, and, towering al>ove.' two yards to the left, a hedge inclined to the roadway, throwing its jagged end into the beam of light in such a way that even the most experienced motorist travelling at night might mistake it foi' the top of a. heavy motor lorry reversing into the main road. The illusion was further heightened by the sudden change of light on the footpath where the cemented part joins a stone-paved section, which, at first sight, appears to be a part of the road