London Ghost Bus



The London Ghost Bus is an british urban legend that emerged in the year 1933.

Legend
Everything happened very fast. Turning right, the motorist saw the red double-decker bus swoop down on him, its headlights on and its engine roaring malevolently. At the last moment, a sudden swerve allowed him to get out of his way at the cost of invading the sidewalk, where he managed to stop the car without colliding with the houses. Meanwhile, behind him, the bus faded into the dead of night. "The lights on its two floors were on, but I didn't see any passengers or crew," he later told police. On the other hand, he clearly remembered seeing a sign with the number 7 on the front of the bus; but that line, the agents found out later, did not exist in London.

Throughout the spring of 1933 the encounters with the non-existent bus on line 7 were repeated. They always took place late at night and on the corner between St. Mark's Road and Cambridge Garden (streets located in the neighborhood North Kensington), a dangerous blind curve whose poor visibility has already caused a few accidents in the past. The last one took place on June 11, when a driver was killed when he crashed just after the curve into the wall of a house. A witness declared before the judge in charge of the proceedings that he had seen the mysterious bus number 7 approach the car shortly before it left the road.

The magistrate was skeptical, but during the following days, like the city's newspapers, he was overwhelmed by the large number of letters from neighbors who claimed to have seen the bus prowling the area during the previous two months. A local transport inspector even claimed that he had seen him park in a hangar at the bus station and disappear after a few seconds as if by magic, even with the engine running. Faced with the impossibility of finding that mysterious bus that was causing panic among drivers, the London authorities decided to improve the visibility of the intersection between St. Mark's Road and Cambridge Garden by widening the road a few meters. From that moment on the ghost bus did not make an appearance again.