Written by Claire St. Germain
I’ve always loved graveyard shifts. Back when I worked at a small 24-hour restaurant in my run-down hometown, those times working there in the dead of night – maybe one or two customers coming in, the buzz of fluorescent lights and whatever music playing on the radio mixing together – felt like a reprieve from the stress that comes with the daylight. Now that I have a job as a taxi driver, I still have plenty of night-time work – this time without having to worry about cooking or cleaning any fryers once my shift is done.
Things happen at night, though. Strange things that would never show themselves in the daylight. I know many feel uncertain about the authenticity of the supernatural, but I can say with certainty that it’s all real. Curses, blessings, and most importantly – ghosts.
While it’s hard, you can tell a ghost from the living. Dead, glazed over eyes; wounds from their death that stay on them; their voice coming from inside your head rather than their mouth. No matter how you identify them, you can only tell after a short while of being around them and seeing their person.
It was one of those late night shifts, I had just finished my break. The late autumn air chilled me to the bones through my jacket and the cigarette I’d just finished did little to warm me. It was late, my phone shining a pale ‘1:18 AM’ at me as I checked my messages. I felt my shoulders sag as I closed the door to my cab and got back to work, the heater giving me refuge from the cool air outside.
I was driving along the road when a man on the sidewalk waved me down. I stopped my cab next to the old, cracked sidewalk – the city never does much maintenance for the roads – waiting until he was situated in the seat to ask: “alright, where to?”
“The bus stop on West Barrow Road.” he says slowly. Easy enough, the stop isn’t too far from the street we were on that night. I pushed on the gas, letting the streetlights and neon signs fly past in a blur as I drove.
Looking through my rearview mirror, I took a look at the man in the backseat. It was hard to get a good look at the guy, seeing as I only had the light from the street to illuminate my cab. His head was angled to look out the window, but his eyes stared at nothing. The dark hair on his head was messy and frayed as if he had gotten into a fight. The green hoodie he wore had a dark decal on the chest, though his folded arms made it hard to see what the shape was supposed to be of – if of anything. “Must’ve had a rough night,” I remember thinking.
It was a minute of quiet before the man spoke up. “I met a guy on my way back home…” his voice trails and comes out as more of a thought said aloud rather than something he wanted to tell me. “He was… kind of psycho – he hid his face. The guy attacked me with a hatchet so I ran – then I lost sight of him and hailed your cab.”
I would personally say that that guy sounded more than ‘kind of’ psycho, but I wasn’t going to mention it. Instead, I asked something a little more useful; “Did you call the cops? Maybe the jail’s missing a prisoner.”
“No, I can’t find my phone…” he responds casually, “don’t remember where I put it. Can’t remember my name either now that I think about it…”
The man adjusts himself so that he’s staring blankly at the ceiling of the cab. He looks at me through the rearview mirror, and my eyes meet his dull, glazed over ones. “Could you tell me your name? Maybe it’ll help me remember”.
“… Carter…” I was starting to get a little weirded out – but I didn’t wanna judge a guy who’d just had a near death experience too much. He hums something disappointed, “Hmmm…… didn’t help. Thanks for trying though.”
I see the bus stop in the distance, so I start to slow down to stop in front of it. “We’re here, that’ll be twenty dollars.” I say once the cab had fully stopped. Turning to face the man, I extended my hand, saying, “hope you get home safe.”
He wasn’t rifling through his pockets to pay, however – he wasn’t even looking at me. His gaze was fixed out the window, more focused than it had been the entire drive and filled with a silent terror.
“Huh,” he shuddered out, pointing outside the window. “Is that me…?”
I turned to see what he’s referring to – only to be met with the sight of a corpse just a few feet away in an alley next to the bus stop. My head whipped back to look at the man in the back, but he was gone – vanished into nothing. No sound of a car door opening. No shifting to get out. Just gone.
My brain reminded me there was a dead body just outside my cab – I turned my head back. Slumped over on the left wall, the body of a dark haired man wearing a green hoodie sits with a stab wound through the chest – blood staining the chest of the clothes dark.
I stepped on the gas and drove fast a block away to a gas station. It was then I took out my phone and called the police to report the witnessed murder – or rather, the aftermath. The investigation into the murder is still ongoing, but I’ve given my testimony already.
I still think about that night, sometimes, and about the man that disappeared without paying. He was a ghost – he had to have been. This wasn’t the last ghost to ride my taxi – sometimes people hop in my taxi, and either at the stop or halfway, vanish without a trace; they almost always leave when either I or they figure out that they’re dead. While each ghost I’ve met in my career has been different from the others, they all never pay their damn fare.