Why Do So Many People Think This East Bay Road Is Haunted?

For decades now, there have been rumors that strange specters and ghostly goings-on haunt Niles Canyon Road. The winding, seven-mile stretch of highway, which runs alongside Alameda Creek to the northeast of Fremont, has been the subject of paranormal speculation for almost the entire century that cars have been using it. But why?

One major incident happened in 1950 with a man named Fred Rogers (not to be confused with the cardigan-clad hero of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood). Rogers reported that, late one night, he saw a girl wearing a white gown and combing her long black hair next to the creek. Concerned for her safety, Rogers drove towards the rock where she sat, only to have her suddenly disappear.

“She was gone,” he told the Oakland Tribune in 1960. “She vanished the way a rock does when you throw it into a river.” Rogers searched the banks in both directions to no avail and walked down to the area where he had seen the girl. He searched for footprints and found none. “I only know that I saw that girl and I could pick her out of a crowd if I ever saw her again,” he reported.

But Rogers is far from the only person witness to strange happenings on Niles Canyon Road.

On Nov. 28, 1978, a Vietnam veteran named Bill and his wife Pat were driving from Livermore to Fremont when they encountered a massive road block. As they slowly moved around police cars, swirling lights and at least one officer standing outside of his vehicle, Pat saw “a little person” sitting on the edge of the road, laughing hysterically. As the confused couple passed the roadblock, already regretting their decision not to use 680, they both witnessed the figure of a translucent woman with no legs and no facial features floating at the side of the road.

When the couple finally cleared the chaotic corner, Bill glanced at his rearview mirror only to find that the entire scene had vanished into thin air. The tale was later shared on YouTube by Bill and Pat’s daughter, who had spent her entire life being cautioned by her parents to avoid Niles Canyon Road at all costs. She has yet to go.

It was sightings like these that compounded long-held lore that Niles Canyon Road was haunted by a so-called “White Witch.” The origin of that particular legend is unknown, but centers around a tale in which a man picked up a young female hitchhiker who was trying to get to South San Francisco. The story goes that when the driver reached the Dumbarton Bridge, he realized that his mysterious passenger had vanished inexplicably from the seat next to him. When he decided to continue to the final destination she had given him, a woman at that address informed him that her daughter had been killed in a Niles Canyon car crash a full decade earlier, on Feb. 26 or 28. (The date varies according to source.)

The nameless driver, lack of origin year and changing details attached to this particular story suggest this one is the stuff of pure imagination. Over time, however, the story became increasingly embellished. It is said that the mysterious passenger was the spirit of a young woman (the name of whom also varies according to source — Mary, Mary Ann, Lucinda, etc.) who died in a crash alongside her sweetheart, while returning from an event in Sunol. The story persists today not just because of ghostly sightings on Niles Canyon Road; there have also been reports of disembodied footsteps in the hiking trails nearby. One witness who was startled on the road by an unnaturally bright light in 1979 shared his story with SFGate last year.

Whatever the truth about the alleged hauntings, there is no denying the fact that Niles Canyon Road has been the site of tragedy and misfortune since it was first constructed. After major investment to build out the road in the early 1930s, the two-lane stretch of State Route 84 remained plagued by floods, slides and repeated incidents of motorists being robbed at gunpoint, highwayman-style.

On April 6, 1936, one couple was hit by thieves that were so well organized, one assailant held them at gunpoint, while another stole their valuables and a third disabled the ignition wires in the pair’s car. The couple escaped shaken but unharmed. That same year, four men stole a car, robbed a party of picnickers in Niles Canyon and then promptly smashed their vehicle into guard rails near Farwell Bridge.

Indeed, automobile collisions are what have always most plagued Niles Canyon Road — especially in its earliest years. And it seems to have been local children who first suffered the most. In April 1935, 8-year-old Gloria Arias was struck by a car and killed at the entrance to Niles Canyon Road. Eight months later, on her way to the Niles Grammar School where she was in second grade, Gloria’s friend Rafaella Morilla died at the exact same spot, having been mowed down by a gravel truck.

Throughout the ’30s and ’40s, the number of deadly crashes that happened on Niles Canyon Road was so excessive that a 1947 issue of the Oakland Post Enquirer referred to one section of the road as “a traffic hazard and death trap.” The newspapers of the era regularly covered horrific, life-ending incidents there. Any number of young women lost their lives on the road during this time. Perhaps that’s why the name of the White Witch varies according to who’s telling the tale.

Incidents along Niles Canyon Road were also downright bizarre during this period. In 1933, a 30-year-old man named Gene Goss left a party held by a friend and began throwing rocks at vehicles driving on Niles Canyon Road. One of those rocks crashed through the windshield of a car, crushing the skull of its passenger, who was pronounced dead an hour later at Hayward Hospital.

Goss wasn’t the only man seemingly led astray by the road. In February 1940, a 40-year-old Niles Canyon Road worker wandered into Niles, broke into his sister’s home, threw chairs through her windows, then went about trying to break into the Niles jail using a four-foot plank of wood. When Deputy Sheriff Henry Vervais arrived and asked the unruly man what he was doing, he replied simply, “I guess I’m crazy.”

Worse still, in 1944, a “badly decomposed” body was discovered in brush just off Niles Canyon Road after a “carefully drawn mystery map” was delivered to a five-and-dime store in Niles. The map led local law enforcement to what amounted to little more than bones. The Oakland Post Enquirer reported: “Some dry skin remained on the left arm and ribs. A little gray hair held to the scalp. Scraps of clothing and two black shoes, each of different make were also found.”

The plethora of accidents on Niles Canyon Road continued well in the 1950s, with fiery collisions, cars running clear off the road, passengers being thrown from vehicles, cars and trucks overturning and at least one deadly crash that also took out major power lines. Children continued to die in tragic events too, with a 19-month-old dying in Alameda Creek in 1951 while playing with other children, and a 3-year-old named Antone Macias suffering a fractured skull after falling from his father’s car.

The infamy of Niles Canyon Road seemed only to compound its deadliness. In 1959, the Oakland Tribune reported the deaths of five “youngsters” in five weeks, “as the result of violent high speed crashes” on the highway. “Several youths have boasted they could ‘make any curve in Niles Canyon’ at high speed safely,” the newspaper reported. “One youth made this remark and failed on the first curve.”

Is it any wonder then, that Niles Canyon Road and the land around it continue to be of fascination to ghost hunters and thrill seekers? If anything, the lore of the White Witch simplifies the true extent of the route’s tragic history. If she is indeed still there, wearing her white gown and brushing her long black hair, it’s fairly likely that she has plenty of company.