Strange experience at West Virginia rest stop (Hurricane rest stop 64 West)
I drive long distances for work and in my travels I have visited many rest areas and this experience was by far my strangest and most unnerving.
It was a little after 8pm (dark) on Tuesday, 9th of January, 2024. I parked my 26 foot company box truck on the gravel easement off the service road that exits the rest stop, as the truck parking area appeared to be congested and quite full. Upon entering the restroom itself, which was particularly sketchy and run down even for rest stop bathroom standards, I noticed there was a guy standing at the first urinal on the left, and no one else in the restroom. Nothing odd about him at first, just an innate observation. For some reason I (instinctively?) walk into the 3rd stall (the handicap stall) and begin to do my business. A few seconds into relieving myself, in what I would describe as my 8 o’clock peripheral, I distinctly notice something pop up over the divider in the middle stall to my left.
I was instantly alarmed, with a natural “what the f*ck?” Kind of reaction. However, whatever I noticed in the corner of my eye seemed to happened so fast that it almost seemed like a visual anomaly, almost a hallucination of sorts, if you will. Mind you, by this time I had been driving nearly 8 hours, so I was never ruling out the fact that my eyes were playing tricks on me. However, I have great vision, and even in moments when I may have had a visual “floater” or a similarly minor anomaly, I have never felt the kind of immediate discomfort and alarm that I felt when this happened.
Of course I instinctively wondered immediately “did someone just peek over at me?!” But again, it happened so quickly that it almost seemed, I don’t know, supernatural in nature? I would never assume this before a logical explanation, but the fact that my mind jumped to this weird theory is kind of surprising in and of itself, since I’m very practical and always aware of my surroundings in terms of potential danger or nefarious activity.
The glimpse I seemed to catch; I would describe as flesh colored, or even the color of light, although I wouldn’t say I noticed it being “luminous” in nature. It also appeared narrow, almost too narrow to be a human head, but again it happened so freakishly quickly that it’s hard to say for sure. I believe these factors may be why I felt so weird about it, almost like it wasn’t a human interaction.
I checked briefly under the stall from the handicap stall side, no feet. When I exited the stall, I peeked though the crack between the door and the divider, and didn’t seem to see anyone in the middle stall.
First kicker: the stall had a handwritten “out of order” sign on loose leaf paper taped to the door.
I went to the sink to wash my hands where I began to loosely observe the guy standing at the urinal. Mind you, he was already there when I walked in and was still standing there. After washing my hands I noticed that this guy never looked to the right or left, never stretched, shrugged, fumbled with his belt, nothing. He simply stood looking straight ahead. He remained this way until I had fully exited the bathroom.
Second kicker: I couldn’t help but notice in the quiet setting that there were no typical “urination sounds”. It seemed like he wasn’t even peeing. Just standing there. This was the moment when I became fully weirded out. Were it not for this, I may have simply written off the “eyes playing tricks on me” theory.
Note that there’s no way this guy could have made it from the urinal to the stall next to me unnoticed in a short time without me at least hearing his footsteps or the stall door opening. He was at the urinal the whole time.
Weird side note: there was graffiti in the handicap stall that read “PEKR” (sounds an awful lot like PEEKER, doesn’t it?)
I left without further incident. My theories include; two guys scouting for a potential robbery target (or a target for something much more nefarious), some kind of weird voyeur thing (imo the most plausible theory given the speed of the incident. Could it have been a phone camera with low flash popping up over the divider? This may explain the “narrow” profile of what I saw and the “light” color)
What do you guys think? Was I in real danger? Was it some kind of creeper voyeur thing? Has anyone ever experienced something similar?
I can’t help but question what really happened that night. It inspired a very particular weirded out feeling in me that I can’t say I’ve ever had before.
Sorry for the long winded story, I wanted to give as much detail as possible in hopes to get some productive feedback.
Thanks for reading.