My name is Shakeel; I am a 37 year-old Uber driver, living in Lucknow, India. I’ve been driving a cab since I was 29 and I know my way around the entire city. I usually drove during the day shifts, but very recently, and for reasons unknown, I was appointed to the night shift, for the first time in my time in the company.
I didn’t mind it, I’d just have more time to do stuff during the day.
Everything went normally during the first 3 weeks of the night shift.
The week after than, changed my perception of the supernatural forever, you see, I was never of the imaginative or superstitious kind; but this incident made me question everything.
A few days ago, I was driving through a semi rural area to pick up a customer, it was 2:37 a.m. and not a single person was in sight.
Standing by the side of the forest path, was a woman, waving her arms in panic. She was wearing an Indian traditional suit. I slammed the brakes and came to a sudden halt. I rolled down my windows and asked her what she was doing out here this late in the night. In a panicked voice, she said, “They’re coming after me, please, please drop me at *address omitted*.”
Coincidentally, to get to the customer I had to pick up, I had to pass through the location she wanted to be dropped off at.
So I gave her a lift, and as soon as she got in my car, she calmed down completely. Not one spec of panic or fear was on her face. I was beginning to suspect that she was going to rob me.
But she did not pull any tricks or do anything remotely suspicious. When I finally reached her destination, she thanked me, got out of the car, and insisted that she pay me ₹1000 ($12.81) which was far more than any cab ride paid, (₹200 - 300) ($2.56 - 3.84). She said that she was going to go inside her house and get the money. Now, I really did want to help her out for no financial benefit, but I needed all the help I could get to make ends meet.
I canceled the ride of the customer I was previously on my way to pick up, and waited patiently. 2 minutes passed, then 5, then 10, then 15, then 30, and when it had almost been 37 minutes, I got out of the car, walked to her house and rang the doorbell. In less than a minute, out came an old man. He looked to be in his seventies; he was short and stout and had an annoyed look on his face. He asked me what I wanted and I politely told him that I wanted to talk to the woman who had just walked inside that house, and I told him the whole ordeal. The old sleepy old man’s eyes widened suddenly and he visibly started shaking.
After a good minute of silence, the old man spoke -
“I have had more than 15 cab drivers walk up to my door and tell me the exact same story, but the problem is that no woman lives in my house, I live here alone with a grandchild. But now it is too much to take in, it is too much to be a coincid—”
All the while he was speaking to me, he was not looking me in the eyes, so my eyes subconsciously wandered off to check out the inside of his house, and I saw what seemed to be a family portrait hanging on the wall. I interrupted him mid-sentence. —
“Excuse me, sir, I believe I see her in that portrait hanging on the wall, please can I have a closer look?”
The old man looked at me, a bit pissed off that I had cut him off, but still turned around and got that family portrait for me.
“This is her.”
I pointed at a woman standing beside him, and he was visibly confused. A tear rolled down his cheek as he began -
“That is my daughter, she died 8 years ago in a car crash, she was returning home one night at around 2:30 a.m.
And was on a phone call with me and her mother; she used to say we made her feel safe during unsettling times. She was dragged off, robbed and assaulted, all the while; we could do nothing but listen. I even called the cops who arrived there just 7-8 minutes too late. The accused managed to flee the scene. Many people have since reported sightings of a woman on that road, she comes at night and targets mostly cab drivers, if they refuse to help her she starts running after their cars at inhuman speeds, screeching, causing them to crash. I always thought that the story of this woman was an urban legend, but now I realize it is her; it is my dear child.”
With this, he broke down in tears, and I stood there, too shocked to interpret what had just happened to me. I bid him goodbye and went and sat inside my car. Still contemplating what I had just heard, maybe this was all made up to scare me, or as an excuse to not pay me. But the whole scenario with someone being out there at 2:30 a.m. was also weird.
I drove to a more populated part of the city and just let everything sink when, when I noticed a woman’s head quickly peeked and disappeared through one of the bushes in my peripheral vision. I didn’t know if it was real or was it just my paranoid mind playing tricks on me.
The next morning I set out once again to investigate what was going on. I knocked on the old man’s door, no response, i then rang the doorbell, no response again. As I was walking back to my car, the door flung open but no one was in sight, it was 9 a.m. so I decided to walk inside. I noticed that this building that seemed like a house just yesterday was now in complete ruins with spiders and lizards crawling around. I saw the photo of the girl lying on the floor.
And unlike the impulsive horror movie protagonists, I noped the hell out of there, and most probably I am never working a night shift ever again.