The Gray Man

Anyone who drove along Oxford Drive about fifteen minutes past the city limits would come to a sharp bend in the road. The place was technically called Brewster’s Corners, but the more widely known name was Hangman’s Bend. 

The county placed warning signs, reduced the speed limit by ten miles per hour, and put reflective panels along the entire bend, and still, there were accidents every year. The curve was just too great, and because it was outside of town, few people adhered to that slower speed limit. On a cold night, if there was black ice, you could almost guarantee that someone would go off the road.

If everyone was lucky, a car would only end up in the ditch. Some of the unluckier drivers might go right through one of those reflective panels on a post, cause serious damage to their car, and probably end up in a hospital. 

Every so often, a car would hit a spot just right and go through the trees and down the embankment. Those drivers rarely made it out alive. Hangman's Bend was responsible for at least twenty deaths over the years.

Driving around Hangman's Bend during the day, a driver would see several roadside memorials set up by loved ones over the years. A wreath of flowers, some candles, and stuffed animals, usually a framed photograph, too. They were small, off to the side of the way of traffic, and there were far too many of them.

One of the biggest problems with Hangman's Bend was that it had become an urban legend. The first recorded death was back in the fifties. There was a string of them throughout the sixties and seventies, and things seemed to calm down a bit in the eighties and nineties. However, for reasons no one could explain, fatalities began to pick up again after that.

Many of the drivers who died were young, and the forensics indicated speed and drinking were definitely contributing factors. They were mostly teens who partied and dared one another to see how fast they could take the Bend.

Frank traced the urban legends back as early as the late eighties. That's when the story of the Gray Man began to appear. To hear the kids tell it, the Gray Man was a ghost that haunted Hangman's Bend. He appeared on cloudy nights as an old man in gray pants and a gray shirt. According to the story, if you saw him, you were going to die.

As with many such tales, the fine details were never that fine. It was unclear how the Gray Man's presence would kill you, just that it was an omen of your impending doom. It wouldn't necessarily be the night that you saw him, but all the stories agreed that your death would happen on Hangman’s Bend soon after, and it was going to be in your car.

“He doesn’t do it himself,” one source had told Frank. 

“It’s just a sign. Jamie Barker said he saw him, and he died a week later,” said another.

Frank would normally not have given much credence to an urban legend that was, by all accounts, fairly cliched and repeated across the country. However, some aspects of the Gray Man legend stood out. Not the least of which was that Frank had been called to look into it by a man named Davis Barker, whose son Jamie had died in an accident on Hangman's Bend.

Barker was convinced that the Gray Man legend was no legend. He didn't go so far as to say he believed it was a ghost, but he was convinced that something was out on that road causing drivers to crash. Whether it was a prank by some other kids or a dangerous psychotic, he feared his son had been murdered. If it was a ghost, then he felt Frank would be able to figure it out better than the police, who dismissed the father’s concerns out of hand.

“They don’t listen. It’s a dangerous stretch of road. Kids speed and act stupid. People die there. That’s what they told me,” Barker said to Frank. “My son was not some stupid kid. And he told me… in the hospital, before he died… that he saw this Gray Man there.”

“But you don’t believe it was a spirit?” Frank asked.

He had met Barker at the man’s home shortly after the death of his son, when the police refused to investigate the possibility that it was anything more than an accident. 

“I don’t care what the hell it is. I want to know what happened to my boy,” Barker insisted. 

Frank told him he was willing to look into it and had set about asking some of Jamie Barker's friends what they had seen and what their friend had told them.

There was an unsettling consistency among the stories once he started to branch out his investigation and talk to others. Everyone who claimed to have seen the Gray Man, although few talked about it, was dead. 

Frank only had the word of friends and loved ones to go by when it came to proof that these people had spoken about seeing something, but he couldn't think of a reason why any family would lie about a loved one's death.

No one alive had seen the Gray Man firsthand, but the descriptions from the friends of three victims over the previous five years were strikingly similar. Gray shirt, gray pants, white hair, elderly, in brown shoes. He stood on the side of the road and just stared at the car as it passed. No one could see his eyes.