Ghostly garage: The most haunted cars in history

We don’t often talk about the automotive world being a place of superstition and folklore, but dig only an inch past the surface, and there is plenty enough of it to go around. As Halloween approaches, we’ve got our antenna up for the spooky and fantastic. Many of these stories about haunted cars, spooky rides, and automotive folklore, from beyond the gloom, orbit around famous cars and even more famous people. 

These stories continue to circulate around the firesides of car and history lovers alike. So sit back, clutch your blankets close, and imagine these words underlit by an old maglight. Enjoy a venture down the darker roads of car culture dotted by ghosts, curses, devils, and all other manner of eldritch aberrations. (Make some space in your mind for Poe-esque belles-lettres. Sorry, not sorry.) 

The Cursed Graf & Stift Double Phaeton of Franz Ferdinand

In the mid-to-late 19-teens, the Great War was apocalyptic, rending our planet in ways that had previously gone unimagined. Blood replaced water; barbed wire and shattered cities were now the foundations young men stood upon to make war and noxious gases filled the air. 17 million lives were paid to fuel the hatred of only a few. Entire histories and landscapes were covered over with gore. It all started with a car. 

Most people know that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife was the match that lit the fire of the world’s great doom. But the story here concerns the car that Ferdinand and his wife died in, a 1910 Graf & Stift Double Phaeton (pictured above).

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, military governor General Oskar Potiorek had planned nearly every detail, from the temperature of the Archduke’s wine to the construction of a private chapel. Security, however, was another matter. Despite warnings from his police chief about threats against the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Potiorek provided just 120 gendarmes to line the streets and refused to bring in additional troops. One conspirator, Nedeljko Čabrinović, threw a bomb at the Archduke’s car as it traveled to an official reception. The bomb missed, and Potiorek assured Franz Ferdinand that the danger had passed.

Despite surviving the first attempt, the Gräf & Stift double phaeton still ultimately carried Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife to their grisly deaths in Sarajevo, making it the centerpiece of one of history’s most infamous cursed-car legends. According to a Venetian museum curator by the name of Karl Brunner, it is these legends that carried the car’s gruesome mantle after the Archduke and his wife:

Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand

“After the Armistice, the newly appointed Governor of Yugoslavia had the car restored to first-class condition. But after four accidents and the loss of his right arm, he felt the vehicle should be destroyed. His friend Dr. Srikis disagreed. Scoffing at the notion that a car could be cursed, he drove it happily for six months – until the overturned vehicle was found on the highway with the doctor’s crushed body beneath it.

Another doctor became the next owner, but when his superstitious patients began to desert him, he hastily sold it to a Swiss race driver. In a road race in the Dolomites, the car threw him over a stone wall and he died of a broken neck.

A well-to-do farmer acquired the car, which stalled one day on the road to market. While another farmer was towing it for repairs, the vehicle suddenly growled into full power and knocked the tow-car aside in a careening rush down the highway. Both farmers were killed.

Tiber Hirschfield, the last private owner, decided that all the old car needed was a less-sinister paint job. He had it repainted in a cheerful blue shade and invited five friends to accompany him to a wedding. Hirschfield and four of his guests died in a gruesome head-on collision.

By this time the government had had enough. They shipped the rebuilt car to the museum. But one afternoon, Allied bombers reduced the museum to smoking rubble. Nothing was found of Karl Brunner and the haunted vehicle. Nothing, that is, but a pair of dismembered hands clutching a fragment of steering wheel.”

The story is almost certainly a coalescence of fictions, assembled decades after the assassination. The real car still stands in Vienna’s military history museum, but let us not let the truth stand in the way of a good story. Even still, the truth has its own unsettling detail. 

The car’s license plate read “A III 118,” which some interpret as a prediction of the Armistice that ended World War I on November 11, 1918. A contemporary photograph appears to show the same plate on the car shortly before the assassination, making it more than a later addition to the legend. The interpretation depends on reading the plate in English, and the lettering is ambiguous. What can’t be overlooked: through all the murky history and ghost stories, there is no denying this Gräf & Stift double phaeton is the inflection point that led to one of the darkest and bloodiest periods in human history. Something like that might just be enough to carry over and connect the otherwise parallel spiritual realm to our own earthly realm.

The Black Volga of Russia

The Volga, produced by GAZ from 1956 to 1970 in the Soviet Union, was a limo for the Soviet elite. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a particularly infamous black Volga with white rims and curtains that was feared above all others. Some claimed it was owned by priests; others, by nuns. In time, some people began to swear that Satan worshippers drove it, and still others claimed Old Scratch himself was behind the wheel. Whoever or whatever drove it, the rumors concerning the demon limousine said that it abducted children and that those who approached it would meet one of a variety of mournful endings; sometimes instant death; sometimes the victim would mysteriously drop dead exactly 24 hours later. The story of the black Volga wasn’t limited to Russia, but spread to Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and even Mongolia.

The explanations for who or what drove the infamous Black Volga are as wide and varied as any good story. Beyond the supernatural, some believed the Volga was tied to more Earthly acts of evil, like a state surveillance mobile that would snatch dissenters; some said it was tied to human trafficking and the elites who ritualistically harvested blood… where have we heard that? Others told stories about the Black Volga would spy on and abduct people for clandestine medical experimentation.

Whether the devil’s limo was driven by state operatives, occultists, or the red guy himself, the Black Volga is one spooky car. 

James Dean’s haunted Porsche 550 Spyder

Most people who know of James Dean know that he died in his beautiful but troublesome Porsche 550 Spyder. This is why he affectionately called the roadster “Little Bastard.” It is said that following Dean’s traumatic death, the doomed Porsche 550 carried with it the black mark of death.

Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder was already wrapped in ominous folklore before the actor died behind its wheel on September 30, 1955. A week before the crash, Dean showed the car to fellow actor Alec Guinness, who reportedly had an immediate, inexplicable sense of dread. Guinness later recalled warning Dean that if he drove the Porsche, he would be found dead in it within a week. Dean was killed days later when his Spyder collided with a Ford – driven by a man eerily named Donald Turnupspeed – on the way to a race meeting, turning the little Porsche into one of automotive history’s spookiest machines.

The stories only grew darker and harder to explain after the wreck. The Porsche 550 was stripped for parts, and its engine and other components were linked to two racing crashes, one of them fatal. The mangled car itself toured safety exhibitions before reportedly catching fire in storage in 1959, while other tales claimed it fell on a bystander and later killed the driver transporting it. Then, in 1960, Little Bastard supposedly vanished from a sealed railway boxcar and was never seen again. Some of these stories are unverified, and the car’s disappearance may have been a publicity stunt, but its combination of celebrity tragedy, eerie premonition, and a trail of alleged misfortune has kept the legend of James Dean’s cursed Porsche alive for decades. Eerie, isn’t it?

The Surrey ghost crash

Moving things into the modern age, in December of 2002, the Surrey Police began to receive a massive influx of calls regarding an accident on the A3, an expansive highway running from London all the way down to Portsmouth. The calls described a vehicle that had swerved off the road and down an embankment, ultimately crashing into the underbrush. The police arrived at the stretch of highway at Burpham near Guildford, but were met with a perplexing and inexplicable scene. There was no sign of a car accident at all. No car, no debris, no tire marks, nothing.

They continued to sweep the area, looking for any indication of the reported crash. Finally, they found a maroon car buried deep in the brush. What confounded the police was that the car was not just deep in the brambles and saplings lining the A3; it was like it had been dropped there, or at least had been there, for a very long time. There was no carnage or indication a car had recently smashed through the trees. It was as if trees and shrubs had grown in around it. The car was covered in spider webs and debris, and there they found the heavily decomposed remains of the driver.

The driver was later identified as a 21-year-old man who had been reported missing five months earlier. Police had been looking for the missing man since July, after he didn’t return home from an outing with friends in Hounslow. 

So what did the motorist who called the crash in to the police actually see if the young man crashed over five months earlier? Some people insist that the caller actually saw a sort of spiritual, ghostly replay of the accident that had taken place five months earlier – like an echo.

RACER’s own ghost car story

While preparing which ghost car stories I wanted to tell here, I asked our intrepid Editor-in-Chief, Mark Glendenning, if he had known of any spooky tales from the racing world. He didn’t. However, he did share with me a personal story of his own that I am delighted (and spooked) to share here. 

Here it is as told to me by Mark:

“I lived in Arizona until recently, on the northern edge of Tucson. If you wanted to go to Phoenix, the most straightforward route was to jump onto I-10, which is a massive interstate that runs across the country from Florida to LA. It’s usually painless, but you are dealing with trucks, people merging at 50mph when the traffic is doing 80, dudes in lifted trucks with Texas plates riding over two lanes, etc.

So often, we'd take the 'other way' – a single-lane, unlit road through the desert for about 80 miles that eventually spat you out near Phoenix's outer eastern suburbs. Overall it took about 15 minutes longer, but it was more chill. You did have to concentrate because there were ditches and stuff by the road  – silent western film star Tom Mix died along that road when he went into a ditch and a heavy metal suitcase he'd stashed on his parcel shelf flew forward and smacked him in the head.

We'd been on a family trip somewhere, had flown back into Mesa (a smaller airport outside Phoenix, used mostly by budget airlines), and decided to use the back road for the 90-minute drive back to Tucson. It was about 1am, and at night that road is dark.

We're about halfway along it, and I see some headlights approaching from the other direction. We're probably doing 70-ish, so as the car came closer, I gripped the wheel a little tighter in anticipation of a bit of buffeting when it went past, since it was probably doing a similar speed and would be passing pretty close due to the road being so narrow.

So the approaching car gets closer and closer, and right as it's about to draw level, it just vanishes. Gone. Nothing went past us – you can both feel and hear it when a car is passing you on a narrow road, especially at speed. I looked in the mirror, and there were no taillights. There was nowhere for it to turn off. It was just not there anymore. And my wife and daughter were dozing, so they didn't see it. I'm not into woo-woo stuff at all, but it was super weird.”

Hopefully these stories put you in the Halloween spirit! Please feel free to share other creepy car legends, tales of automotive atrocities, and personal poltergeist stories if you have them. Happy Halloween!