I worked in the truckstop industry for about 15 years.
All of the following stories took place at the same location. I worked there less than 18 months. If people are interested, I have other stories at other locations, but this one had the most frequent occurrence of weird stuff that happened.
I was given the opportunity to help open this brand new location, and since it came with a fat raise and a promotion, I definitely accepted. It now has been about five years since the location opened. I don’t believe there is a single employee left that was there when we opened of the over 60 employees we hired prior to opening day.
On opening day, not long after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, a woman delivering flowers dropped the flowers on her sandaled foot and sliced her foot open bleeding all over the entrance.
Within a week of being open, we had water and sewage, coming up through all the drains, including sewage ones outside all over the property. It had not been raining, it wasn’t like a flood situation weatherwise we have no idea what caused it to suddenly happen. And just as quickly as it happened, it went away. Plumbers were baffled.
A couple of months after we opened, we faced a severe storm that destroyed the high-rise interstate sign and caused a seven hour power outage. I had sent several people home. But I had kept a couple of employees in case the power came back. As we sat in the restaurant dining room, chatting under electric lantern light. An employee who was a local resident and had lived in the town all of her life mentioned that people were a little worried when this place was announced to be built because this property had been rumored to been a Native American burial ground for years. I have zero way to prove or disprove if that is accurate, but given the events getting more serious, as time went on, it makes you wonder. When the power did come back, despite several steps, I took like unplugging all the equipment to make sure the surge wouldn’t fry stuff, we lost several pieces of expensive equipment. Some of this equipment was critical and cause major operational problems for weeks until it could be replaced.
The first winter after we opened, was the coldest in years. So cold that we had to buy space heaters for the servers in the electrical room so the servers wouldn’t freeze. We had issues with frozen pipes, especially in the truck care center and the restaurant.
6 months after opening was the first death. A truck driver came in to take a shower in one of the shower rooms, and we had sensors on the doors that let us know how long someone had been in there. If the timer had been going for a couple hours we would knock on the door to see if maybe they had actually left so we could clean it for the next driver. The employee knocked on the door of a shower that had been in use for a couple hours, and there wasn’t an answer. She used the key to open the door, and the driver was on the floor. He had died of a stroke. He had been driving a semi truck 30 minutes before he entered that room. The employee who had opened the door was significantly traumatized. The company did a great job of offering support for her, but she didn’t last much longer after that.
A few weeks later was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. I was working on the restaurant side of the truckstop as the restaurant manager had quit after a series of bad things that happened to her, and they asked me to move me into the role temporarily. The assistant manager on the store side came over because the freakiest thing had just happened.
She pulls me into the store side office and pulls up the cameras to show me what happened.
A small four-door sedan pulls into the lot but doesn’t pull into the gas station side, pulls into the truckstop side where the semi trucks pull in. He parks next to the maintenance shed which is located adjacent to the main building and very close to a large trash compactor.
He gets out of the vehicle, opens one of the doors and pull out a trash bag. He throws the trash bag on top of the compactor. He then gets in his car and leaves the property.
I don’t remember exactly how long, as she had fast forwarded the footage, but I think it was an hour or two later he returned. He pulls back next to the compactor. Climbs on top of the compactor, and chucks the bag onto the roof of the maintenance shed. He then climbs down off of the compactor, gets in his car, and leaves never to return.
This is when he was noticed by an employee who had been outside gathering trash to take to the compactor. The maintenance shed is more of a small building/garage. It’s about 20’ x 20’. If the employee had not seen him throw it up there, it probably wouldn’t have been noticed maybe ever as the building was as high as a one-story building.
Once the employee saw the individual leave, he goes into the shed gets a ladder and goes to get the bag on top of the roof of the shed. he brought the bag inside the store to show the assistant manager.
Inside the bag is a ton of paper. These documents list hundreds/thousands of addresses across the United States. Under each address is a specific hidden location on each property where a body could be found. No information on who the individuals were. Just sex and location of the individual/individuals on these properties. The locations spanned from coast to coast but I didn’t get a chance to look too deeply into them. I was really freaked out, and I thought that touching them would maybe contaminate something, so we just put what we had pulled out back in the bag. The obvious answer here was to call the police, so that is what happened next.
Now the thing about truckstops, is that they are more often than not in remote locations along interstates for obvious reasons. The town this truckstop is located in has three police officers total. It is a town with less than 1000 people. So, when I say the chief of police showed up, it’s because he was the highest ranking officer of three in the town. He hated us as truckstops bring crime, and suddenly he had a lot more work to do. He comes in, watches the footage and looks in the bag. And the most frustrating thing here is that he was not concerned in the slightest. He asked what we wanted him to do about it, it was probably a prank, etc… he took the items with him, filled out a form for request for the footage and left. My hope here is that he at least forwarded this to the FBI.
A couple of weeks after this, there was a body found of a bound, nude, and recently deceased man across the street at a dump. Because it was a dump, they had no idea where the individual had originated from.
Sometime in following weeks was the second death on the property. It was a driver that had died in his truck.
Somewhere in the middle of this, we had another severe storm, and the interstate high-rise was destroyed again.
We had another weird incident involving abandoned things. But this one had a resolution. A driver came in to show us that someone had left. Ratchet straps and small children clothing folded up neatly next to a diesel pump. The combination of the items was alarming for me, so I got on the camera system and called the police. I was able to find the truck that left the items and luckily I got the one amazing police officer in the town this time she actually did her job and followed up with me to let me know that she had found the driver and called him. He had his kid in the truck for a while for summer break, but it had ended so had brought her home with her mom and wasn’t gonna see his kid for a while so he when cleaning out his truck, he had this clothing and some straps he didn’t need and thought someone else could use the items. He didn’t think about the combination of the two raising eyebrows and he honestly was really grateful that somebody would be worried and follow up in case
A couple months after the 1st year mark, the state DOT had to shut down the off/on ramp to the interstate exit started to collapse, and they were worried that the overpass would collapse as well. We had nearly 0 business for weeks as construction crews rebuilt the ramps, and repaired the overpass. It was during this time that I earned a promotion to a general manager role and was moved to a different location. I kept in touch for a while, especially with my former boss and the assistant manager. The incidences continued.
Couple months after I left there were two major incidents, but I cannot remember which came first. One was involving an individual that entered the building with a machete. He was aggressive. The employees were terrified. I wish I hadn’t deleted it, but there is footage of state troopers coming in with AKs and dropkicking the guy. Unsure where this person came from as he walked, and this location was 10 to 15 miles from the nearest town.
The second was a customer, attacked a teenage cashier because he didn’t get the customers lotto ticket correct and got into a brawl with the maintenance guy who came to the kids defense.
Slowly overtime I lost touch with them and they both left the location so I stopped getting the stories. I don’t know if they are continuing.
Haunted? Portal to Hell? I don’t know, but what I do know is now I avoid truckstops like the plague.