Cock Lane, High Wycombe, England

Cock Lane in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, is reputed to be haunted by at least one specter, maybe even two of them. In the 1980s and 1990s, people reported seeing a woman dressed in gray either walking or floating along the road, only to have her vanish.

On another occasion (described in the podcast linked below), a man was walking along the road late one night, and encountered someone in a hooded sweatshirt. Figuring that it was better to walk with someone else than alone, the man walked up alongside the other int he sweatshirt, and asked to walk with him.  The fellow in the sweatshirt crossed the road to get away from the man.  Trying again, the man walked to the sweat-shirted individual and again asked if they could walk together, only to see the silent pedestrian again cross the road to get away.  Finally, the original pedestrian demanded to know why the one int he sweatshirt was being so rude, and they turned to him, revealing only blackness under the hood of the sweatshirt.

Commentary:  The story of the pedestrian encountering a phantom is in most respects a fairly standard "encountered a ghost on the road" tale, elements of which are common from both pedestrian stories and phantom hitch-hiker tales.  The unwitting person going on about their normal business (walking/driving/working) encounters what they take to be a normal individual, normal individual does strange things/exhibits strange traits (avoiding the unwitting person/having very cold skin/speaking with a strange voice/etc.), and then the reveal, where the strange individual is revealed to be not human (they vanish/they turn and have no face/the unwitting person finds out that the person they encountered has been dead for decades). 

The other phantom people have reported is also interesting in that it is a grey lady - a common type of ghost sighting.  Women dressed in grey, usually in 19th/early 20th century garb, are reported throughout the English speaking world, and usually are part of a local tradition, being integrated into stories about warnings of disaster, lost loves, or unfinished business.  Although there are places where you will read that grey lady ghosts always accompany prophecies of doom, the truth is that most grey lady stories are just like this one, stories of a particular ghost that has no connection with any particular future event, but may be associated with past events.


Sources: Paranormal Database, Anything Ghost Podcast