#ohio lore

The other night, my boyfriend and I were driving back home from Columbus after a trip. It was rainy and dark. I’m not comfortable driving on the highway so I decide to take back roads.

My boyfriend sits quietly next to me. He had concerns but never voiced them. All is well while we are on a type of expressway. Eventually, the road dwindles down.

The gps tells us to take a sharp left turn, at this weird triangle type intersection (think turn left at a 4 laned area, after there was just another turn left about 20 feet before, connecting a diagonal road branching off with a horizontal road). Then, it has us turn a sharp right onto a 1 lane road lacking any traffic lines. Some houses are along the street, but with little light, and you can’t see further than about 50 feet from the car because of the fog on the left or right side. We have a bad feeling.

We drive for about 20 minutes. The gps wants us to take the road for 17 miles. The road still remains without a center line, there isn’t a single car in sight. There are random, drastic dips in the road. Since when did Ohio have hills? It’s 11pm.

We slowly approach a town, but I can’t identify it. There are no signs for the town. It’s small, you can see the end of it across from you after the first stop sign. My phone is at 1% and I grab the charger from the center console.

“We should take the highway” my boyfriend says. My shaking hands are gripping the steering wheel harder as I turn left toward the highway instead. We are both terrified.

As soon as we pull onto the highway we agreed if we continued to take that road something terrible would have happened. I’ve tried retracing our movements from the time we left Columbus (the exact store we were at, up until we got off the 4 laned expressway). But the weird triangle intersection does not appear anywhere on the map. Neither does the road we took. I’ve looked at about ten different routes, none of which are matching up with the road.