Ghost's of Blue Bell Hill. Kent in the uk

 

 a man driving through Blue Bell Hill in 1992 saw a young girl appear and start running towards his vehicle.

The girl looked straight at him as the car hit her and then fell under his car. However, on the investigation, the man found that no one was there. Eighteen years before this incident there was a similar occurrence on that stretch of road. In 1974 a man saw a girl (about 10) who appeared in front of his car. He then found her lying on the road bleeding, so he carried her body to the roadside and covered her with a blanket. The shocked man then returned to the police and found the blanket but no girl.

Maurice Goodenough was driving on Blue Bell Hill between Maidstone and Chatham just after midnight in the very early hours of Saturday, 13 July 1974. A girl, about ten years old, wearing a white blouse, socks, and a skirt appeared from nowhere in Mr. Goodenough's headlights.

Despite braking as hard as possible and skidding, he felt the impact as the car hit the girl. When Mr. Goodenough jumped out he found the young girl lying on the road, bruised and bleeding, though not to an excessive degree. Afraid of what injuries she might have, Mr Goodenough carried the child to the side of the road, wrapped her in a blanket, and left her while he drove to the Rochester police station to seek help. The police joined him to return to the scene where they found only the blanket and no trace of the girl.

A tracker dog was called in to assist in the investigation but was unable to find a scent to follow; no bloodstains were found. Inquiries at local hospitals discovered no reports of anybody injured in the way described by Mr. Goodenough and Mr. Goode-nough's car was undamaged. If Mr. Goodenough described the incident accurately, and there is no reason to doubt that he did, then a supernatural explanation is not quite the only one possible, though we are still left with a mystery.

If the girl's injuries were not so serious she could have left the scene and gone home - it has even been speculated that she may have been on the run from the social services - but all of this is suspect in view of the fact that no one has been able to trace the girl in the time since. Blue Bell Hill has a high incidence of ghost and phantom hitchhiker legends though the report to the police station probably makes Mr. Goodenough's the most reliable report.

The search for the phantom hitchhiker's identity has thrown up a very specific if problematic candidate. On Friday 19 November 1965, around nine years before Mr. Goodenough's encounter, a Ford Cortina was in collision with a Jaguar on Blue Bell Hill.

The Cortina was occupied by four women, a 22-year-old girl who was to be married in Gillingham, Kent the following day, and her three hen-party companions. The bride-to-be died five days after the collision at West Kent Hospital, one of her companions was killed in the accident and a second died on admission to the hospital. The fourth was seriously injured.

Both the Jaguar's occupants survived. One of the three dead women is held to be the phantom hitchhiker, either the bride-to-be or, more often, one of her friends. Having been thwarted on the very eve of her wedding, perhaps the bride was not ready to die and is constantly trying to finish her journey.

It is obviously difficult to reconcile the figure of an adult woman with that of a ten-year-old girl; the bride-to-be may have been small, dressed in a young style, perhaps wearing white ankle socks, and in the panic of the crash, and in the darkness, may have been mistaken by the witness as being much younger than she was.

There are other, frustratingly uncorroborated, reports of sightings of the bride-to-be hitchhiker in the area on the anniversary of her crash.

The Haunted A229, Blue Bell Hill.

Although the paranormal and ghostly haunting history of Blue Bell Hill relates mainly to the stretch of the A229 (running between Rochester and Maidstone), the area itself is the location of many ghost sightings and unexplained events. These still continue despite many alterations to the area due to road and rail construction and other layout changes over the years. In fact, this construction and disturbance may be the trigger to some of the witnessed events

 

Probably the best-known vanishing hitchhiker story in the UK comes from Blue Bell Hill, near Rochester, Kent. One shaken witness went to the police after believing he had run over a young girl - on investigation of the scene of the 'accident', no body, blood, or evidence of any kind of impact could be found. On separate occasions, two families reported a terrifying old hag-like figure standing in front of their cars, causing them to stop sharply.

The lady vanishes. As if phantom women were not enough to keep the area on the paranormal map, Blue Bell Hill has a cryptozoological interest; a gorilla-like creature was spotted here, as was an ostrich which morphed into a large black cat before making its escape from inquisitive eyes.

There are many reports here of a phantom hitchhiker on the A229 south of Chatham. The reports began in 1968, and usually involved a young girl (possibly a bride-to-be or a bridesmaid who was killed at the foot of the hill in 1965), flagging down cars and asking for a lift.

Reports of phantom hitchhikers can be found throughout the world. These are apparitions that seem to haunt dark and lonely roads. Typically, they are usually seen by a lone motorist late at night, and are sometimes the cause of accidents as the unsuspecting motorist skids or swerves to avoid a figure in the road.

But when the frightened driver stops in a panic thinking that he has plowed into someone - there is no one to be seen!

At times a motorist will actually see what he considers to be a real person hitching a lift at the roadside. The driver stops to give the person a lift, only to discover later that he is alone in the car!

The most famous of phantom roadside ghosts in the UK - is the ghost of Blue Bell Hill in Kent. This ghost was reported to police three times within as many months by frightened motorists who thought that they had hit and killed someone out on the forlorn hillside. Details of this haunting have appeared in over 200 newspaper stories throughout the UK over the years.

The most famous encounter occurred in the early hours of the 13th of July 1974. Maurice Goodenough was driving to his home in Chatham when a figure suddenly appeared in front of his car. She appeared to be a young girl, about ten years old wearing a white blouse, skirt, and white ankle socks. Mr. Goodenough stamped on his brakes but he could not avoid hitting her, and the car struck her with a sickening force.

He brought the car to a skidding halt and rushed back to the small girl. He found her battered and bleeding at the roadside. But she appeared to be in better shape than he had first feared but aware that it might be dangerous to move her, he grabbed a blanket from his car to wrap her in whilst he went to fetch help.

He rushed to a nearby police station at Rochester, and police officers came back to the spot, marked by a now-empty blanket, but although they searched for hours with a tracker dog - they found nothing!

It was at first thought that perhaps another motorist may have picked her up, and local hospitals were questioned. They all reported they had had no accident admissions that night!

After the police inspected Mr. Goodenough's car and found no sign of damage they began to suspect that perhaps he had made the whole thing up or the phantom girl had been a product of an overtired mind playing tricks with shapes and shadows caught in the headlights.

However, one fact could not be disputed Mr. Goodenough was not the first motorist to have had the chilling experience of encountering a strange young girl on Blue Bell Hill. Nor, would he be the last