Blue Bell Hill — the A229 phantom hitchhiker

OVERVIEW

A chalk hill between Maidstone and Rochester carrying the A229 dual carriageway over the North Downs, with the Kit's Coty House megalith on its slope. It is Britain's best-known road ghost: since the 1970s drivers have reported a girl stepping into the road near the Aylesford turn-off, being struck, and vanishing. The case is written up by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena and in Sean Tudor's The Ghosts of Blue Bell Hill (2017).

HISTORY

On the night of 19 November 1965 a Ford Cortina carrying a bride-to-be and her friends collided with a Jaguar on the hill; three of the young women died, the bride the day before her wedding. In 1974 Maurice Goodenough went to Rochester police saying he had hit a girl, wrapped her in a blanket on the verge and gone for help; nothing was found. In November 1992 the coach driver Ian Sharpe and, a fortnight later, Chris Dawkins each reported hitting a woman who looked them in the eye and went under the car; police searched and found no one.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The accounts are on the police record and in the Kent press; the link to the 1965 crash is the tradition's, not the witnesses'. Folklorists read it as a local form of the vanishing-hitchhiker story that has attached itself to a real tragedy.

VISITING

A fast dual carriageway with no safe stopping; the picnic area and the North Downs Way are on the hilltop, Kit's Coty House is signposted. Do not stop on the A229.