Summer 1991

I was working for Bob’s Transport. Night shift. I liked working at night. Hardly any traffic on I-95 after midnight except for truckers like me.

I had been to the Giant Food warehouse in Jessup, backed a loaded trailer up to the dock and left it, and then hooked up to an empty trailer to take back to the yard. It was my last trip of the night. I headed north on I-95, and at the place called “Spaghetti Junction” which is so named because of so many on-and-off ramps over elevated highways, both 95 and 395, all looking noodle-like, curling in every direction. The highway was empty. It was between 3 and 4 am, so there shouldn’t have been much traffic anyway. But as I climbed the section that leaves the ground and goes elevated, a feeling I can’t describe came over me like some evil thing had entered my cab. Was it dread? Danger? Fear? Not exactly. At the time I had no idea that I was empathic. I did sense something, like the feelings weren’t mine.

As I got to the first ramp at Spaghetti Junction, I saw flashes of blue light ahead. The source was still out of sight. Uh-oh. Too many to be one cruiser with a speeder stopped. Suddenly nothing mattered to me. I wasn’t looking forward to going home and falling asleep before sunrise. All I could feel now was that something terrible had just happened and I didn’t want to see it.

Ahead was the highest point of the elevated section before the highway descended on approach to the Fort McHenry Tunnel.

God…damn. I’d seen a lot of freaky sights in my time on the road, but you’re usually not caught off guard. Wrecks would suddenly loom as you straightened out a curve or crested a hill. An overturned 18-wheeler made you worry for the driver, now in the ambulance that passed you going the other way ten minutes ago. But rigs lying neat as you please on their sides didn’t shock you.

I geared down, cutting my speed because I was next to the Key Highway exit and I didn’t want to drift into its “Exit Only” lane as I stared to my left.

65 feet off the ground, on a four lane highway, a car lay on its side with its roof against the Jersey wall. I was looking at its chassis. Two transportation authority cops were scrabbling sideways along the wall, crab-like and frantic. They were looking over the wall, shining their flashlights down.

What I’d been feeling changed. It was total shock. Disbelief, astonishment. I realized with an electric surge of horror that all this time I’d thought the decks of the northbound and the southbound lanes were joined, and they weren’t. I continued my trip back to the yard to shut down, turn in my paperwork. And try to find out what had happened.

Hawkins came in right behind me. He was always up on anything that happened in the night. He said a woman had somehow flipped her car against the Jersey wall. She climbed up through the passenger side window, and fell through the gap between the north and southbound lanes, 65 feet to her death on a dirt median on Key Highway.

I didn’t tell him what I realized. That I’d felt her soul, horrified and helpless. I will always wonder if her soul found peace. If she found the light that so many near death experience survivors talk about. Because one thing I knew for damn sure was that her spirit was alone. No angels would come to show her the way.

Nothing I’ve just written can describe what I felt that night or why I can never forget it. I think her shock was so sudden and so powerful that my tired state made me a receiver; I couldn’t have stopped her emotions from flooding me.

There is of course no proof I can offer to support this experience. I can only crudely relate it. I know we think of death in extreme terms. We fear it. Yet we believe in good and bad places after death. Whether it’s Sheol or Purgatory, Heaven or Hell. Atheists may or may not believe in an afterlife; some believe we just reincarnate and live another physical life with the same soul but different body.

I hope this soul found what she believed in, because that was a horrible way to die. I could actually look back and feel her horror as she realized she was falling. But below, there’s total darkness. It would have been a quick end, but I felt her not knowing how far she was falling. At some point in a second or two she may have passed out from overwhelming fear. And at death she was lost and bewildered.

I’ve had my own NDEs. Near death experiences, in other words. Being an asshole, I never saw any light. Just total darkness. I hung in the middle of endlessly black space, all alone. I never want to go back there.