In the middle of the 1930s a large red London Bus, bearing a “7” route number harassed motorists in the North Kensington area of London.
“I was turning the corner and saw a bus tearing towards me,” the motorist testified before the police:
“The lights of the top and bottom deck, and the headlights were full on but I could see no sign of crew or passengers. I yanked my steering wheel hard over, and mounted the pavement (sidewalk), scraping the roadside wall. The bus just vanished.”
The motorist who who made this report to the local authorities in North Kensington, London, in the mid-1930’s may have been drunk, hallucinating, or dreaming at the wheel when he had the accident. But if he was, so were hundreds of other motorists who complained of being forced off the road by a phantom bus careening round the corner from St. Mark’s Road into Cambridge Gardens, near the Ladbroke Grove underground station. After one fatal accident, during which a driver had swerved and hit a wall head on, the local coroner took evidence of the apparition and discovered that dozens of local residents claimed to have seen the spectral double-decker. Many claimed that they had crashed while swerving to avoid a speeding double decker bus that hurtled down St. Mark’s Road in the small hours, long after regular buses ceased service. Among the most impressing of these witnesses was a local transport official who claimed that he had seen the vehicle draw up to the local bus depot in the early hours of the morning, stand with engine purring for a moment, and then disappear. Eventually the local council straightened out the road there, and the accident rate was greatly reduced. Thereafter there were no more reports of the ghostly red bus.
Paranormal Mysteries 