Trucker Captures Dashcam Footage of "Ghost" in Arizona

A still image from the footage taken by Church. *(FOX 10 Phoenix / YouTube)*

Truck driver William Church told FOX 10 Phoenix that he was driving on SR 87 near mile marker 200 in Arizona at around 2:30 a.m. on March 11th when he passed what appeared to be a transparent figure standing on the side of the highway.

He was reportedly between Phoenix and Payson when the encounter took place, and there were no other cars visible on the road.

Church said the figure was "just standing in the roadway as I passed by [and it] looks like you can see the lines through the legs making the figure."

Several days after the encounter, Church, along with passenger Erika Lake, for whom Church had taken over a driving shift, described their experience to the news outlet in more detail.

"At first, I thought it was a human, and then when you can't really see the face and the top of the body up, I wondered what, and we were thinking maybe it was a ghost," Lake said.

The figure seemed real enough that Church reacted to it while driving.

"I actually twitched the wheel to miss whoever it was," Church said.

Once Church and Lake reached the next rest stop, they were able to examine the dashcam footage.

"We don't know if it was a person or something spiritual or something, but it was in the form of a human," Church said. "That's all I know."

The footage has generated significant interest since being shared to YouTube, prompting many others to come forward with their own paranormal encounters had while driving.

From the video’s comments section:

"I encountered something similar while out fishing late one night. At the spot where a fatal car accident just happened a month prior to my fishing trip. To this day I still can’t explain what it is.
I was coming home around 2ish in the morning from the lake up in the Sierra Mountains. Right when I got to the corner where the car accident took place. In the daytime, you can see all the candles that was left there by their loved ones. I saw a little girl standing there facing the direction I was going. What I can’t explained is [why] was the little girl standing there [at] 2 o’clock in the morning by herself. There are no homes in that area. I don’t think anybody in this world would leave their kid in that area." — Hmong Lee
"I read the article for this because it reminds me of an incident I had on an old highway here. I had taken my mom to the airport and it was about 4 something in the morning on my way back. I was going 55[mph] and this transparent figure (very much like this one) started walking in the road. It got about to the yellow line dividing the lanes and I swerved, but as I was next to it, [it] had completely disappeared. Edit: my experience was on Old Nogales Highway in Southern AZ. If anyone else has experiences on this road I would love to hear them." — Reilly Hatcher-Campion
"Seen a ghost standing next to a small drainage bridge. We investigated any accidents in that area when we got home, and a guy died in a car accident a day before at that location. The picture in the paper showed the guy in a red shirt and blue jeans. When we saw the apparition, it had red shirt and blue pants. Real freaky." — Adolph M Martinez

These witnesses aren’t alone.

It’s not unusual for people to report anomalous experiences while driving and, in the era of dashcams, there is sometimes a record of it.

In 2020, 207 Paranormal, a non-profit investigative group out of Maine, posted a video to their Facebook page that shows a mysterious shadow captured on dashcam, and in 2021, Mitch Kuhne said he was driving north with his mother on the Hume Highway near Bardia, south of Sydney, Australia, just before 8 p.m., when he recorded a mysterious figure that "looked to be a child in the middle of the highway."

Explanations for the figure recorded in Arizona vary, with some noting that SR 87 has seen a significant number of deadly car crashes due to it being one of the state's main highways accessing its mountain communities and speculating that this could represent the ghost of someone who died in such a crash, while others look for a more prosaic explanation like light reflecting off of the truck's windshield.

Emily Wayland, the Singular Fortean Society’s photo and video analyst, found the video to be somewhat mysterious, although not completely without potentially prosaic explanations.

"I'm not entirely sure what that object is, but what you might be seeing is an effect from driving at a high speed and the technology at play," she said. "Dashcams have low resolution and slow frame rates which could cause a stationary object to look semitransparent like this. That could even make the line on the highway's edge appear visible through the object. That's just one possibility, though, and without knowing if there was anything present to cause this effect, I can't say for certain what happened."

To report your own encounter with the impossible, reach out to us directly at the Singular Fortean Society through our contact page.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to support the Singular Fortean Society, please consider becoming an official member by signing up through our Patreon page—membership includes a ton of extra content and behind-the-scenes access to the Society’s inner workings.