I just finished putting up a Classified about Cuba Road, and I figured maybe some folks might like to know why I'm asking about it. There most certainly are a lot of stories about Cuba Road, if one takes the time to look into them... Historically speaking, Al Capone used it as one of his two main hideouts, along with the one in Saint Charles, so it shouldn't be any major wonder that so many of the stories and rumors seem to center around mafia ghosts.

My wife and I originally started taking an interest in it when we heard of a "ghost house", one that supposedly appeared on the night of a full moon, and disappeared in the morning... Supposedly, if you were in this house when it disappeared, you'd disappear, too. There are pretty specific directions on how and where a body can find this house on the night of a full moon, and my wife and I have followed them multiple times, never to see this ghost house.

We were also looking for spirits of mafia members engaged in a shootout with local police. We never actually saw this, either, though on Rainbow Road (a residential road that shoots off of Cuba Road), I did sense the presence of spirits that didn't seem very happy that we were there.

What we did encounter, though, was what seemed like a car, tailgating our car close enough that we could scarcely see its headlights in our rearview mirrors. My window was rolled down at the time; we couldn't hear engine noises from it, and we couldn't see the outline of the car itself. Even granting that its brights were on (it lit up the interior of our car blindingly when it wasn't two inches from our bumper), we should've been able to make out a driver, or a hood, or something, when the car was close enough that it wasn't blinding us anymore. Then, on a stretch of Cuba Road with no turnoffs or driveways, the headlights vanished. There was no car behind us. More than a little spooked, we decided we'd had enough ghosts for one night, and went home.

There's more, but I'll make a second post for it...

My wife decided to scare the daughters of a very close friend of her family's last weekend, so she sat them to watching scary movies for pretty much all of the evening and well into the night. I ducked out, going to Adama Geist's house, reportedly just to hang out and stuff, but in reality to waste time until I got the signal from my wife.

When I got the signal from her cell phone, I drove out to Cuba Road. There's a small, private cemetary located about half a mile from 59, and there're residential side-streets across the road from it. I chose the darkest of the sidestreets, turned off my car and all my lights (I drive a black car, so it was pretty easy to remain hidden), and waited for Alexis to drive her guests down the road.

I had my window rolled down... It wasn't apparently late enough for some people; there were a few cars that drove by, people going home and whatnot. I watched light from headlights as they turned down different streets... I did see a set of lights grow brighter, as if a car was coming, though I couldn't hear one. Then the lights started flashing and vanished, as if perhaps a car had parked near the cemetary. The gate was open, and I thought maybe my wife had decided to drag her hapless guests into the cemetary itself for added scare factor... When I got out of my car--you guessed it, noone was there. No car, no lights, no sign of anyone having turned off the road...

She did eventually show up, and I played ghost for them all, pulling onto the road, turning on my brights, and tailgating my wife into the same stretch of road we'd lost our ghost in, and suddenly turned my headlights off. My wife then proceeded to drive across 14, and I turned around to speed home... After driving a bit further down the road, she made to turn around, and everyone saw another set of headlights come blazing down the road. Noone in her car could easily make out any kind of form to the car, which narrowly avoided hitting them, and they couldn't hear an engine to it...

So we set out to show them ghosts, and instead of me with a proverbial sheet over my head, they got real ghosts, too.

For those who might be curious, apparently, the girls were very highly freaked just by my vanishing act alone; their minds were already on the scary movies they'd seen, so they had themselves believing that my car had, in fact, completely vanished. Mission successful.

That's cruel, but funny.