Quimby Road

Drivers on Quimby Road in East San Jose have reported the same ghost for decades: a man in running clothes who stops and stares back at you before vanishing. Nobody knows who he was in life, and "San Hauntse" podcast hosts called him "surprisingly difficult to research."

If you drive up Quimby Road at midnight, watch the shoulder. The legend says you'll see a man running. Dark shorts, navy blue T-shirt, maybe a gold necklace glinting in your headlights. He's not in a hurry, and he's not trying to avoid you. If you slow down to get a better look, he'll stop too. Then he'll stare. That's the part nobody warns you about until it's happening. The midnight jogger of East San Jose holds eye contact before he vanishes.

Quimby Road winds up into the Evergreen foothills above San Jose, a scenic but unforgiving drive with tight switchbacks and long drops. The road has been here since the 1860s. It's named after John Alonzo Quimby, San Jose's mayor from 1863 to 1869, and it originally served as a carriage path to his hilltop ranch. Somewhere along the way it picked up a ghost.

Nobody knows who the jogger was in life. That's the frustrating and interesting thing about this legend. The "San Hauntse" podcast devoted Episode 15 to him, and hosts Manuel Ávalos and Carmen Sánchez called it "surprisingly difficult to research." Author Elizabeth Kile included the jogger in her 2022 book Haunted San Jose but couldn't pin down an origin story either. No car accident, no heart attack on a morning run, no identified name. He just shows up, dressed like a jogger from sometime in the last forty years, and he only shows up at midnight.

The accounts go back decades. A woman named Dilea remembers being seven years old and watching a man in a bright green or yellow jogging outfit run past her family's hilltop home. "He passed by a tree and he disappeared," she told local reporters. Her cousins saw it too. They never got an explanation.

In January 2023, Michelle Bayquen was driving up Quimby in the middle of a storm. It was dark and pouring, mud running down the road, wind howling. She saw a jogger. Dark shorts, navy T-shirt, gold chain. She worried about his safety and posted on Nextdoor asking if anyone knew him. The responses came back quickly. "Did you see the ghost?" her neighbors asked. She wasn't sure anymore. "He looked real to me," she wrote, "though I don't recall his face."

The "don't recall his face" detail shows up in almost every account. Witnesses remember the outfit, the stance, the location, the moment the figure stops and looks at them. They don't remember the face. That kind of selective memory hole is exactly how human brains process a mismatch between what the eyes see and what the rules of reality allow.

There are secondary stories along the same stretch of road. Residents near the top report an elegantly dressed woman in period clothing who seems to be searching for her husband. Objects get thrown inside houses by nothing. Some locals think Quimby Road is just a hot patch of weirdness, a collector of ghosts rather than the home of one specific story. The jogger is only the most famous resident.

Thrill seekers have been driving up at midnight hoping for a sighting for at least twenty years. He's known to disappear into the trees once he's been spotted, which is inconvenient for the TikTok era but keeps the legend intact. The best accounts are still the accidental ones. The woman out walking her dog. The stormy night Uber pickup. The person who wasn't looking for a ghost and got one anyway. That's the version worth remembering, if you're going to drive up there. He's probably not waiting for you. He's running a route he was running long before you got here, and you just happen to be the witness he turns to face this time.