Alabama State Route 5 is one of my favorite highways to travel in Alabama. It runs just under 200 miles in the western parts of the state and is my backroad of choice for getting from central Alabama down to the gulf coast.

The section of Highway 5 that is the topic of this post runs between the City of Jasper and the Town of Natural Bridge. For many years truck drivers would report a girl appearing on the side of their trucks when driving HWY 5 at night. Some drivers reported seeing the girl run along the side of trucks, traveling in the opposite direction, and jump up on the side of the cab. Keep in mind that these trucks were usually traveling between 60 and 65 MPH so we are not talking about an ordinary girl. The general location of these hauntings was in the vicinity of the old race track.

I have heard the stories of drivers who encountered the girl, if they were willing to talk about it, they would tell how the girl seemed to appear in a side window of their truck and then disappear. They also didn’t want to drive that stretch of road at night any longer. I knew a few characters, the type of which you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, that were terrified of seeing the ghost girl ever again.

In the nineties I got tired of listening to the all night trucking radio shows about the time Art Bell’s Coast to Coast show went national. Coast to Coast had everything that sleepy headed truck drivers needed to stay awake at night like government conspiracies, alien abductions, UFO’s and ghost stories.

I remember hearing a couple of ghost stories, from Alabama, and the HWY 5 ghost was one. A driver called in telling how he was driving north on HWY 5, at night, and the little dog sleeping in the passenger seat jumped up and began barking at the passenger side window. The driver looked over and saw a red haired girl looking in, he said she looked down at the little dog, smiled and then faded away. That was about a typical story.

The best story about the the red haired girl ,that I ever heard, came from a long time friend. I will refer to him by his C.B. handle which was Pusher, from the time he worked in the oil fields. I always change the names to protect the innocent and the criminally insane, of course. Not only is Pusher’s story the most detailed but it also sheds some light on the identity of the girl and the origin of these hauntings.

One night Pusher was headed north, on HWY 5, and as he neared the old race track he heard a sound like wind rushing past his ears. He looked to his left, out of the driver’s side window, and a red haired girl was hanging off of the rear view mirror. This is the only time I ever heard a driver say that the girl talked and she said, “Have you seen my shoes?” Then she faded away.

In those days Pusher was about a three hundred pound gorilla, and no one had ever known him to back down from anything, but the sight of the girl, holding onto the side of the truck really rattled him. On up the road, at the junction of U.S. 278, was a Shell fuel stop and a motel with truck parking where Pusher pulled in for a cold drink and to shake off the fright.

Inside the Shell station Pusher sat a soft drink and some snacks on the counter. The young lady at the register rang up the snacks, stared at him and said,”You saw her didn’t you?” He snapped at her, quite curtly, and replied, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” He snatched the bag up from the counter top, hurried back to his truck and headed it west on U.S. 278.

The next day he had to go back to Birmingham by way of the same route so when he got to Natural Bridge he stopped again at the Shell fuel stop. Pusher had calmed down from the encounter with the ghost and felt badly about the way he had treated the cashier the night before. He entered the store and the same young lady was standing at the register so he walked up to her and humbly apologized for the way he had spoken to her. He told her that she was right, he had seen the girl and how the girl had asked him about her shoes.

The truck stop cashier then told how a newly married couple had crashed on that road, near the race track and were killed. When they were removed from the wreckage the girl was barefoot and her shoes could not be found and it was thought that they had been ran off the road by a big rig.

When Pusher left the Natural Bridge fuel stop, and like many before him, resolved to never drive that road at night and alone again.

When traveling north, from Jasper, on HWY 5, and on a peculiarly dark night some weary truck driver is bound to meet a red haired girl, looking for her shoes and the trucker that killed her.