In Brief
Reeder Road is an abandoned swamp road between Griffith and Merrillville, Indiana, and its ghost is a hitchhiker named Elizabeth Wilson. She rides as far as Ross Cemetery, then vanishes, leaving the seat wet. A 2016 team asked if anyone knew her, and a voice answered yes.
The Full Story
Reeder Road cuts between Griffith and Merrillville, Indiana, with swamp on both sides, and the woman people go looking for there is a hitchhiker who drowned in it. They call her Elizabeth Wilson. The way the story runs, her car left the road into the water one night and she never climbed back out, and now she stands on the shoulder waiting for headlights, stepping from the trees to get into whatever pulls over.
She never rides the whole way. The story has her asking to be let off at Ross Cemetery, where she was supposedly buried in 1955, and somewhere near there the driver looks over to speak to her and finds the seat empty. No door, no sound, no one — just an empty place where a passenger had been sitting a moment before. The only thing she leaves behind is the seat itself, sometimes found soaked through afterward, as if the swamp had climbed in and ridden along a few miles before slipping back out.
Cars stopped driving the road decades ago, back around the 1970s, and what's left is a walking path now, the marsh crowding in on either side and the trees closing over the top. The road has gathered plenty of other tales over the years — a phantom train, a vanished church in the woods, talk of mob bodies dumped out here in the 1930s — but it's the woman on the shoulder that keeps drawing people out from across Northwest Indiana, parking on the old roadbed in the dark to see whether she'll step out for them.
In June 2016, a seven-person team from the Ghost Research Society spent a night out there with a ghost box, recorders, and cameras, moving down the road one question at a time. Most of it came back empty. Then someone asked into the dark, "Does anyone know Elizabeth Wilson?" and a voice came through the box and answered, "Yes."
So the lead investigator went and checked the name the way you'd check any name. He looked for the 1955 burial at Ross Cemetery, for a death certificate, for any file logging a drowning or a woman who'd lived in Griffith. He found none of it. No grave, no certificate, no line anywhere recording that a woman called Elizabeth Wilson was ever born, ever lived on that road, or ever died in the water beside it.
People report her all over the county. Something answered to her name on tape in 2016. And not one record says she was ever real.
