velocity

Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown?

“The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting?”

The creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen to you. Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events from Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and Beyond.

Each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with

mind-bending investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with sightings available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. My name is Lewis Rose. I grew up on the edge of Matoon, Kansas, in a little house with my younger sister.

Dawn, short for Donica, had cerebral palsy and went to a special school. From the start, when my mom and dad first tried to explain to be why she was different, I felt fiercely protective of her.

“That's why the arrival of the death car, when I was nine, shook me so much.”

It was a 1982 green four-door Chevy Malibu that terrorized my town and changed my childhood. The Malibu, nothing special, nothing memorable, was the last sedan Chevrolet ever sold. For a while, in the 80s, they were the most likely model you'd find yourself in if you hail the taxi in Baghdad. The last one came off the line in 2024.

A few days after Thanksgiving of 1988, the death car came.

The first incident might be considered good Wikipedia fodder.

After a brief visit to Matoon, Michael Van Gabbins, two-time Emmy nominee for his role as

“the mayor in the CBS sitcom Town Hallors, was returning south on Route 20 with his boyfriend,”

whose elderly father lived just outside town. I learned all the details of this drive only two decades later when a creative journalist running an essay for Granta Magazine talked with Van Gabbins in person about it. It was 11.15 p.m. and the road ahead of them, like so many in the area, unrolled long and dead straight.

Van Gabbins saw a splash of oncoming headlights in the distance. They were moving toward his car so swiftly, covering so much ground in so few seconds. At just from moment, he thought he might be actually seen a low-flying UFO.

He heard an engine sound that the typical American driver never encounters once in their

lifetime, that of a modest V6 engine pressed to its utter capacity, like a fistful of mad hornets getting angrier and angrier. In the passenger seat, Dean Rick's shouted, "Oh my god!" So the uncoming car was staying in its own lane, Van Gabbins was so terrified of its velocity that he instinctively drove them off the right side of the road, where their

rental car suffered a damage to the undercarriage as they bumped to a skidding halt in some farmers' shallow field. At their moment of divergence, the two vehicles were separated by only about five feet. In that split second, the ear-grating shriek of the engine was described by Van Gabbins, as being more like a terrifying physical punch to his heart.

No one was ever able to perfectly prove that it was the death car, but everything that came after this encounter reinforced that belief. Two nights later, the local police got a panicked call for me, school teacher, just past midnight, about a car going so fast on Dunlop Road, that it had been nothing but a blur as its screamed past his house. He was convinced someone was about to die. Dunlop stretches east

car had been headed in the direction of what was lafably referred to by the Chamber of Commerce

“as the Matoon business district. Other people claimed later to have heard the car that night,”

there was just that one eyewitness. Three mornings later, at 6.15 a.m., just before sunrise, Father Kenmore Laplin arrived at 5th Congregational Church on Bridger Street to open up its doors for the day. He noticed someone lying under a tree beside the pretty little garden adjacent to the building. It was an unconscious man in distressed clothing, a plaid shirt wrapped many times around his right hand. There was a ropey trail of blood, leading more than

a hundred yards from the side of Bridger Street, the second longest street in Matoon, to the

spot where he lay. I have to say the unusually frank Father Laplin told the grant a journalist over the phone in 2009. I thought he must be dead. There was that much blood. The victim's name

“was T.K. Evans, age 58. Three of his fingers were located in the grass where he had been struck.”

He'd been walking down the edge of the road quite drunk, when he heard a rising high pitched roar behind him, turned and suddenly felt something slam into his right hand as he lifted it to perhaps thumberide. The impact also immediately broke his arm and dislocated his shoulder. A one-time medic in Korea, he had crudely bandaged his bleeding hand, stumbled to the church where he'd come a few times over the years on hot breakfast days for the poor, and passed out.

Both his physical agony and the memory of the moment, dead into by, in ebryation and day, temperature in the upper 20s. One of those fingers, and the palm of the hand it had been raggedly torn from, were later found by a lab to bear faint traces of dark, jade stone, acrylic, and nimble paint. Someone came quickly out of the woodwork to say they heard a car ripping down Bridger Street that night, and thought in a panic that it was the sound of a small airplane

about to crash. I got up just in time to see the glow of headlights rushed by their front window so fast that the dark and bulk of what those headlights were attached to revealed nothing about itself. Father Laplin shared a sermon about recklessness with his congregation two days later.

“I was there. I remember it well. All of the tune was then abuzz with fears of a terrorizing driver”

roaming the area, aided by Dean Rick's having already shared his own story with several locals. The more people talked, the more anecdotes came out about the sound of that engine heard recently in the night. My own fourth grade teacher Mrs. Quincy told a neighbor she'd been walking her dog very late one night recently, and seen a blaze of light on the far horizon where Route 20 did its

slow bend toward King's conference road. She thought she'd never seen a car going that fast

in her life. A low hump hurdling forward like it was on a race track, seeming to defy the laws of physics. There had been other drivers on the road at that moment, and the car swirled across the WL line to get past them. Its engine was the only one audible. The granta journalist asked her to describe the sound when she was 80. They were in her sunny kitchen three blocks from where she taught me compound words as a child. Something about that, Mrs. Quincy said, made me think about people being

cut up in some awful horror movie. I saw two minutes of one time by accident, buzzing, cutting. While the police went looking for someone guilty of vehicular assault causing grievous injury to T.K. Evans, kids got scared. Parents got scared for them, including mine. There were less than 2,000 people in Matoon back then, and it didn't take long for everyone to feel the fear. The fear I felt at age nine was not for myself, although I was already half convinced

that the car was, in fact, driven by a ghost, or a demon, or maybe nothing at all. My fear was redone. Each day my folks got her into her wheelchair in the morning and waited with her for the bus that took her to school. Once it was a while, both of them would have to get home late from their jobs in the same day, and it was understood that if I walked into our kitchen

wait for Don's Bus to arrive at quarter after four. On those days, when I would normally be out

“climbing perilous fences, or jumping my bike over dangerous ramps, I helped her into the house”

and onto the living room floor, where she liked to stretch out and watch TV, whatever cartoons I felt like putting on for her. I was to make her a little snack, and of course, watch out for spills.

Never once, in all my childhood, did I fail her in this routine. I would sooner die.

My love for Don was fierce and possibly dangerous to those who might do her harm or injustice. It had always been that way. Drifting off to sleep at night, I tortured myself with mine to movies of that phantom car, always long, and a black, of course, tearing around the corner from metal road onto sunflower, and plowing into my sister's bus from behind, just as the

“gears of its stair lift began to lower her to the pavement. In this movie, she was giving me the smile,”

as she sometimes did upon coming home, and suddenly the image splintered, and there was a deafening crash. I would open my eyes, and stare at my bedroom ceiling and think, "I know you're there, God. You'd better protect Don. You'd better protect Don." I'd say that a dozen times in my head, and then keep going, vowing to say it exactly 50 times, which was the magical number I decided would make her safety from the deaf car permanent. The only times I ever talked to God

as a kid, I recall, maybe incorrectly, were to make accusatory condemnations about what he had done to Don, and demands that he either fix it, or fix the world around her, so it understood,

“and cared about her, like I did. To me, God was just another bully, and I hated bullies,”

and had already mixed it up a little with a one at school. On the night of December 9, 1988, a pair of brothers, both seniors at Matuna High, where the football team was outscored 335 that year, headed out in their parents' car in a bit of an adventure, they intended to enter the county's short film festival, and had been allowed to borrow the media department's big Panasonic video camera for the whole weekend. On night one, they intended to shoot

Beerol for a horror movie they'd written about a giant insect creature, to be depicted by a friend of theirs who was building it out of paper mache in his basement. Sometime after seven, they found themselves on long route 20, roughly in the same area where Michael Van Gabbins and Dean Ricks had encountered the death car. The two brothers, Jess and John, had been warned by their father to keep their eyes open for both black ice and the crazy driver everyone was talking about,

and had insisted they take his truck, which was safer than the family's Chevy citation. Their experience was scaringly similar to that of Van Gabbins. Jess was driving and John was doing his best to get a passable image of the road ahead in a low light, on certain of the

camera's controls. The second he heard a loud engine in the distance, sounding through the closed

windows like it was echoing through a primitive speaker system. He pulled his head away from the eyepiece to see a glint of headlights behind them in the rear room mirror. The lights grew in size alarmingly, and he shouted at Jess to pull over fast. They told the grant a reporter, the story, sitting beside each other on a sofa in Lawrence, where long after high school they split a house and ran a restaurant together. Instinctively sensing the right shoulder was perilously close to a

runoff ditch. Jess had jerked them to the other side of the road, with a downside to going off entirely would only be a soft landing in a big parking lot beside a furniture factory. The death car was plowing up behind them so fast they barely made it over. It had likely been expecting them to jog right, and when they went left instead, Jess heard the car's engine waver, and the wheels

squeal as a frantic adjustment to both speed and trajectory were made at the last second.

The moment, when the Malibu street by John's window, was the only time its image was ever

and in only two frames was the car visibility. Because of the darkness, which was touched somewhat

“by the ambient glow of the factory's security lights. Only special processing was able to really”

make it clear that the car which blew by was green in color, and nothing at all was visible through its driver's side window. The car was still wobbling left and right as its tail lights grew smaller and smaller, as if the driver couldn't regain full control. Control was no easy feet at those speeds. In a mid-sized family sedan, not designed for operation above 85 miles per hour, the steering would become far less precise past that, and radial tires in the early 80s

were not as good as they are today. Over 90, it would feel like you were lifting right off the pavement. If the car were absolutely floored to reach a five-liter V6 engine speed capacity of 105 to 110 miles per hour, even a shallow dip would create a ramp effect, sending the car

slightly airborne, breaking and steering ability would vanish in a split second.

The Malibu's high body roll factor created dramatic lean and sway, so a good-sized pothole would also create a dangerous loss of control, with a blowout being likely fatal.

“I remember being at the table at dawn's 12th birthday party, and thinking about the”

death car as she opened her presence. Probably another gem in the holograms doll, to maybe a new color form set, she liked making big figureates using all the shapes. Later that night, I snuck down stairs to our basement and stared in Mute fascinationity, wooden rack on the wall above the washing machine. It held a collection of four small bore rifles owned by my father,

he intended to train me up on him at some point, so I could go hunting with him some day. Staring at those guns, I remember thinking that I could stop all this if given the chance. I could stand firm on the side of Sunflower Road and aim true and get off the exact right

“shot that would save the town and save Dawn. At that age, my unrealistic imaginings of heroism”

bathed in a golden glow that could rescue all people and all things with a single saving act. I saw a newspaper headlines trumpeting my glory. Worshipful gazes on my parents' faces, TV interviews, Dawn being transferred to the finest private school in America. Four nights after she opened the toy hide, probably picked out for her from the Sears Catholic.

The death car finally terrified residents of Main Street by tearing through the red light at

Matoon's central intersection at one in the morning, waking many people up. Seen from the second tallest building in Matoon, a three-story house converted into low-income apartments. It's velocity delivered a profound shock to a shut-in named Paul Beranic. He had heard that savage engines sound coming and gone to his window to look down at the street just in time to see the car appear suddenly from behind one building and then vanish just as quickly

behind another, providing a glimpse as quick as a single batting of a hummingbird's wing. It was gone just as soon as it had come. Still likely bearing ghostly traces of T.K. Evans' blood. The authorities began to consider roadblocks as an option to catch the death car. The police got just one chance to be the heroes in this story. And on December 27th, I wasted my own.

What happened was that I had to spend a few nights after Christmas at my great-and-tips, part of my annual obligation during vacation week from school, and T.K. She was actually cool with the music I liked and was kind of a great cook from the eight years she scandalously lived in France with an older professor back in the day, but she was over 70 now and not really able to keep up with what dawn might need day to day.

So, dawn and I were separated for a little while, which gave me a terrible feeling. And T.K. lived by herself out on Bundle Road near Creepy Olda Grovinger's funeral home.

It was a four-mile straight shot east to west with just a few houses, really spread out,

“death car territory, to me, despite there having been no reports of it appearing there.”

Yet it was dawn back home I was worried for. As if my presence or some magic talisman protecting her from harm,

never before had I suffered that youthful delusion, never what I again after that night.

And T.K. let me stay up watching TV after she went to bed real early, like eight, her spine stuff always bothering her. I checked out unsolved mysteries, and I looked out the front window, where it was too dark to see more than the closest shoulder of the road, not even the endless rows of dead corn stalks across it. I fell asleep in Anttip's big quarter-row-lined, easy-chair, during that old show, midnight collar, and dreamed. I dreamed of the ocean. I'd never seen it in person.

My brain at age nine was filled with dramatic images from movies where it existed in a state of

“almost constant royal and crashing white caps, and that's how I recall that dream today,”

but it's been so long. The sound of a car engine woke me up.

My eyes opened and from far beyond the old console TV and the knick-knacks and the Thomas King Kade calendars, here it came, like a thousand hornets, the size of rats, furious and determined, buzzing, cutting. This was it. I ran to the front window and jumped up so my knees were resting on the sofa and paged the curtain away as the engine reached its highest pitch and volume. I saw the briefest splash of headlights and then an indistinct rectangular hump shot past the house from

off to right. It was both terrifying and thrilling to see an object move that fast. A mechanical

marvel driven no doubt by a demon in a black coat with glittering eyes peering forward over the road,

claws the color of coal gripping the steering wheel. It left a foggy imprint in my vision and then was gone. Only a couple of seconds later I heard, but did not see tires of wine against the pavement as the car suddenly swirved. There was no actual crash, instead I heard something like the sound of deck of playing cards made under my father's amateurish attempts to riftle them from my amusement, the top of each card slapping against the

one in line before it in that furious blur. And I knew it meant the card gone off the road into the cornstokes. The sound got lower, more baritone, as it drove deeper in, and it only another few seconds it faded out altogether. I turned and ran up the stairs, but I did not cry out. I went to ant tips door and hesitated there. I waited just for a moment to see if she would come out, or at least I could hear her move from within, but she slept on. I told you I was a bold kid.

“Didn't I? I think I did. A bold kid with a mission and absurdly inflated ambitions for”

vigilante justice. Just ask, mean Kirk Callum, who'd gotten a nicely bruised arm from a punch of wine on a playground. So it should not be too surprising that I found myself going back down the stairs and putting my shoes on. Though not my coat, I remember vividly, not my coat, is that possible. Even for a child with little interest in common sense, did I really step out of the house without it into a December night in Kansas? Yes, I surely did.

There were no street lights that far out, and beyond and tips front stoop was only a starless black sky into the murky suggestions of road and cornstokes. Leaving the door open the tiniest cracks where we wouldn't get locked out, I stepped beyond the reach of the little enclosed bulb of my head onto the dirt patch beside the old Volvo that had brought me to that house, and from there I moved into the dark. I meant to go exactly 100 seconds down the shoulder of the road,

God protect my sister. I always found comfort in numbers. At 100, I'd turn around. Maybe.

“With just 15 seconds or so to go in my foolish journey, which would have earned me a hefty”

tongue-washing word to be found out, I spotted a break in the corn with inside of the Bateson's house, where antitip's poetry club met. Much later in daylight, tire tracks would be clearly visible on the pavement. The side of that break made it all totally real, even made of the cold, a far more biting. Something had gone into the field at a soft angle and kept going, crushing dead stalks all the way. I'd have to cross the road to follow that path.

I looked left and right, knowing from experience there was a little chance of any other cars coming. The nine-year-old me crossed and part of the corn. My fists jammed into my pockets to keep them warm. My true psychology at that moment is from so many decades of distance a mystery to me.

“I think I wanted to see the car resting upside down on its hood.”

See the driver's dead body. Be the first to tell my friends I touched the car and in doing so,

somehow complete my pact of protection with dawn. As long as I didn't sense a ghost up ahead, I'd be fine. If that did happen, few kids were as fast as I was on my feet. That vaguely car-shaped lane unrolled for longer than I thought was possible. The corn stalks crunched under my feet and the footing was uncertain, and yes, I was getting scared. A very faint red glow became visible up ahead within that ocean of dead foliage taller than I was.

Tail lights were more accurately a single tail light on the left rear side of a car that had

stopped and was idling still safely upright. As if having simply taken a wrong turn, the driver finding this to be an acceptable place to park for a map of check. The death car's headlights were still on, projecting forward into a curtain of stocks where its progress had ended. It had no color in the dark. Beside the car, on the driver's side, sat a man, cross-legged, like me wearing no coat. He had stepped out of the car, sat down on the

crushed stalks and dirt, and was just waiting. With the driver's side door wide open, he turned his head slowly towards me and spotted me in the shadows. He had long hair, you were a thick switchered. I need your help. He called out to me. I can't move my arms. Those arms were dangling convincingly loose, palms upturned at his sides, knuckles resting on the cold earth. I can't get my mother out of the car. He said,

he sounded almost as scared as I felt. He nodded towards the door. I suppose he had me then. Had me gripped by the neck of my good upbringing. The teachings of my parents to be kind. This was not a monster or a demon, but a man had been in a car accident. A criminal, yes,

“a bad man, but a human being, at his weakest. I remember walking slowly forward and”

seeing more of his face, and that it was a soft face, like my father's, and he was around the same age. Plumes of the breath emerging from my mouth kept catching on the tip of my nose, making it so very cold. See if she was okay? He said, "I'm hurt." And yes, I did see the silhouette of a head in there, meaning someone really was in the passenger seat and did not move in. I could peer in and do my duty and run for help. What I surely could not do was refuse an injured man. I knew

about concussions from the death of my great uncle, who died in an accident on a shoe factory floor. I approached the door, trying to give the stranger a wide distance. He was motionless, expressionless. I bent slightly at the waist and looked into the darkness of the

And I still do not understand how the driver rose and moved so swiftly that I was barely able

“to turn around at the sound of cracking cornstokes before his gangly arms locked around my mid-section”

and my breath was squeezed out of me. I screamed and kicked. I was being pushed ruthlessly into the front seat. The top of my head scraping against the edge of the roof or the top of the door connected. Drawing blood has that cave engulfed me. The driver was crowding me violently from my left, forcing himself inside, too. I heard the door slam shut as he gave me a final shove, and my face struck the shoulder of the inner woman beside me, soft but unyielding. I caught a

terrible odor, unlike anything I had known before, briny and stale. I was squeezed between two bodies,

unable to reach safety. I lashed out with my little fists, twisted my body in different directions

“to free myself. And then a black explosion of collapsing stars as the driver struck me hard”

just below my left eye. Something in my neck popped painfully when my head rocked to the side, and both eyes bulged in their sockets against their tight casings of bone. All my senses were blanketed in fog, neatly snuffed out entirely. I was silenced and stilled with brutal effectiveness. When I was an almost harmless lump beside him, offering only the most token resistance now,

the driver leaned in closer to me as he put the car into gear. He hadn't chaired for days or weeks.

His breath gave off a whiff of cheap fruit gum. The older she got, the faster she liked it to go, he said. And we began to move with me slumped against his mother's shoulder. The acceleration pressed

“me back into the seat, and there was another burst of pain in my cheekbone, right been struck.”

Then the front ends contact with the cornstocks ahead of us, but before again, we began to push through them, they resisting cracking. As they fell beneath the fender, they clawed at the car's underside, creating a sound like a hard rain on a tin roof. We began to pick up more and more speed. The curtain parted. The headlights splashed over a road, into a hit a jolting bump. The tires screeched and we swirled, to align with the right lane of Patriot Road. I fell to the right again,

against the driver's mother, and I saw then that not only was she dead, but she had been dead for a long time. Her flesh had gone bogged dark, and it was stretched taught over her small, wobbling, nearly hairless skull. Her eyes had lost shape and detail, and we like peach pits glued deep inside their sockets. A toothless skull, I found out that night, looks like it's trying to say something to you. The woman likely weighed no more than 60 or 70 pounds. The hornets inside the Malibu's engine began

to truly vocalize in a cruel, rising chorus. I felt the seat vibrating as we were to head. One glimpse of the road through the windshield caused me such a dissonance that I tried to close my eyes for good. I got the sense that the driver had pressed his foot onto the gas pedal as hard as he could, and had no thought of easing up ever again. Upon going over a small rise, the car lifted off the pavement. A feeling that had once before on the old wooden rollercoastered adventure acres,

which had been cleverly designed to fool the brain that contact with the earth had suddenly ended. But this was real. Upon landing again, I tumbled forward at my head, hit the dash. Falling back afterward, my mouth struck the corpses and the paper each in and forced me and it into a crude momentary kiss. The driver started to yell at the top of his lungs and laughed to as the road vanished before us. My injuries and the lunacy of the moment began to cloud out all sound,

replacing it with an indifferent hum. The cascading motion of the double yellow line in my last seconds of sight that night threw my equilibrium into utter chaos, and I passed into a different realm of consciousness entirely. On the stretch of patriot road between

I was simply gone, suspended in a warm mist of hallucination and daydream.

“I was on a raft on the ocean. It was the kind at one scene in a documentary,”

the kind that inflated on its own and created a big curving canopy for shelter from the sun. But there was no sun. Dark mean clouds were above me. I was on my hands and knees. The raft took me on to a barren shore. Someone was standing there, someone small. She was holding a giant branch in her hands and she was struggling to draw letters in the sand. She turned to me. It was dawn. She was much older. I was seen her as an adult. My imagination had given her the

power to stand without her walker and applied premature strands of gray to her oburn hair. She was wearing her favorite sweatshirt, which showed an astronaut giving a cheerful thumbs up while

“floating peacefully past the moon. I clambered out of the raft onto the pebbly sand.”

In her halting bumpy, syllable by syllable way that left hard consonants behind, Dawn asked me why her tape player wasn't working anymore. I told her we might need to get her music in a different way now because years kept going by and things kept changing more than she could understand. Seeing these words made me realize I had aged in this hallucination too. A cried there on the beach while she pointed to the single word she'd etched into the wet sand,

just beyond the reach of the gentle surf. It was the one word she knew how to write when I was nine. It was simply high. The driver of the death car slammed the Malibu's brakes for all they were worth when he saw the improvised police roadblock up ahead. It consists of just two cars. The tire shriek pierced my dream and to save myself I threw my head down onto the corpse's lab.

“To this day I think I heard her hip break under her stiff flower print dress.”

The front of the car made final impact with something metal and my upper torso wound up below the glove compartment. The driver screamed and my childhood effectively ended. The essay about the death car published in the spring 2025 issue of Granta has no words from me personally. I turned down an interview request. So while it does detail the extent of the injuries I suffered at the night they took Otto Clark Warren down, carrying his mother's withered

corpse away in one vehicle, him and another, and me and a third. It does not make any note of the unexpected happy ending to the entire story. The journalist could not know how my anger became more deeply seated during and after my six months of physical recovery. Going through something like what I went through changes you. Makes you really hate even at that tender age. It made junior high

and high school difficult. Me always stuck in antagonism with my teachers and familiars,

but I straightened out just enough by graduation. In adolescence the protective instinct that had fixated me as a nine year old on Don's Care, only sharpened and intensified. In college with my father gravely ill I got deadly serious about a new thing, making money. Someone was going to have to make sure Don was okay in the long run as the velocity of life thrust us both relentlessly forward. My angry focus made me into a bit of a bastard sometimes, as my ex-wife will now surely attest.

Yeah. But while other people I graduated college with were still looking for jobs, I was already making interesting things happen at a well-respected company that made engines to power cruise ships

and tankers. I never told anyone why I shy away from me sounds those beasts made.

By the time Dad passed, I was kind of rich. By the time Mom followed him, I was more than that,

It was all to make sure she was stoutly protected from the horrors of this world.

“I'm proud to say she now lives with me in a house she loves and always will.”

And she lacks for nothing. I am certain I would not have been so driven and had it not been

for my experience inside the death car. Somehow my anger has produced something good and secure

“and talk therapy is very slowly reshaping how I relate to people. So maybe I can feel I can trust”

them, see them as not so threatening. In the meantime, Don and I have good times together.

There is no trace of Otto Clark Warren on this earth anymore, except a headstone.

“His Chevy Malibu is likely in a landfills somewhere. I don't drive, by the way. A very nice woman named”

Elise takes us anywhere we want to go. And in the back seat and the highway, I put on my headphones, so my hands don't shake uncontrollably when the engine takes past 50. You have a lot of stress, this school of course, just relax and then you have a lot of stress. No, not at all. How much stress is my savings? You have everything you want? Yes, exactly. How much stress is the stress of the step that is simply

understood. The egalabstudium, job or to stress. I don't feel like stress at all. Steuern-elevedict? Save. With visa steuern.