In Brief
Drive Quimby Road in the Evergreen foothills above East San Jose near midnight, and the story goes you'll pass a man running the shoulder. Slow down and he stops, turns, and stares before he vanishes into the hills. Nobody can say who he was.
The Full Story
On Quimby Road, the winding two-lane that climbs into the Evergreen foothills above East San Jose, the story goes that if you drive up near midnight you'll pass a man running on the shoulder. He isn't hurrying. He isn't dodging your car. And if you slow down to look, he stops too, turns, and stares back into your headlights before he vanishes into the hills.
He's one of the most-named ghosts in San Jose. Metro Silicon Valley, which put him on its list of the 23 most haunted places in the valley, warns you off the road outright: "Never drive along Quimby Road at midnight." CBS News Bay Area calls it plainly, "haunted by the Quimby Jogger... the ghost of a jogger that only runs at midnight." Visit San Jose, the city's own tourism site, says he "has staked claim on this creepy road" and disappears into the hills once spotted. Spirit maps even pin him to an address, 3799 Quimby Road, though nobody calls that a confirmed anything.
Here's the part that holds the legend together: nobody can tell you who he was. There's no accident, no name, no death anyone can point to. He's a ghost with no story behind him — just the running, the stare, and the hills.
People still try to fill the blank. In one online account, a driver heading up Quimby in the rain after 10 PM saw a jogger in dark shorts and a navy shirt and a gold chain, and posted on Nextdoor worried for his safety — and the neighbors wrote back asking if she'd seen the ghost. Another describes a runner who "passed by a tree and he disappeared." These are community posts, not news reports, and they don't agree on much beyond the vanishing.
Even the people who set out to solve it gave up. A local podcast devoted a full episode to him and called the legend "surprisingly difficult to research." So the jogger keeps his only habit. He runs at midnight, he lets you see him, and then he's gone — and there's still no one to say why.
