The tale is, on the face of it, a simple one. One evening in late 1964, two sisters, Maragret Prior and Marcia Colling-Hill, were driving at night on the A417 near West Hendred when a figure suddenly darted out in front of their car. Slamming on the brakes and bracing themselves for the beastly bump, the pair were astonished when no bump came.

When they pull over and looked around there was no figure to be seen, leading the pair to conclude that their alarming experience was supernatural in nature.

Both sisters described the figure the same, a man wearing an overcoat and cap, and both swore that he was so close to the car that, if he was material, there was no way they could have possibly avoided hitting him.

The fact that sisters corroborate each others stories lends credence to the tale, but other than that, their experience is not too hard to explain away. The event took place on a December evening at around 7.15pm, and visibility would likely have been poor. Perhaps the man was simply not as close to their car as they imagined, and had time to leap out of the way. Shaken by his near miss, he could have made himself scarce before the sisters had time to collect themselves and look around.

However, the plot is thickens with the knowledge that an elderly man was reportedly killed on the road close to the spot three years prior. Could the sisters have been unwittingly taking part in a supernatural replay of the accident that caused the man's death?

The most detailed account of the events that I've found is in Mike White's excellent book The Veiled Vale (2016), which makes it clear that the primary source was a contemporary newspaper article. White also points out the close proximity between the location where the events took place and the nearby Hare public house. It's certainly not hard to imagine a connection between the sale of alcohol and the likelihood of people staggering out into roads!

Frustratingly, I've not been able to track down the original newspaper article, but I assume it was also the source for a number of other books and websites that mention the story, including Peter Underwood's A Gazetteer of British Ghosts (1971) and Anthony D. Hippisley-Coxe's Haunted Britain (1973).

Perhaps more crucially, I've not been able to track down any reports of a man killed near West Hendred in 1961. I assume such an event would have warranted a mention in one of the local papers, but my searches of www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk have drawn a blank.

The website ParanormalDatabase.com briefly mentions that the ghost 'may have been seen again in 2010 by a woman who swerved to miss a figure which ran out in front of her car', but provides no source for this.