Don't Drive The Road
Dublin, Ireland
June 2001
This happened to me eight years ago. Nothing similar has ever happened since.
It happened to me as I was driving home one summer evening. I had finished work, then gone down to the gym for a workout, and was travelling home on a beautiful summer evening. It was about 6.15pm.
The road I was driving on was a notorious accident blackspot. The road was single lane in each direction with a lot of twists, turns and small hills. As the road led from the city out to the countryside, you had to contend with impatient commuters driving way to fast, a lot of trucks, and slow moving agricultural vehicles on the road. To add to this, I was driving a little Mini!
As I was approaching a particular bend in the road, out of nowhere I heard a booming man's voice saying, "Don't drive the road! Don't drive the road!". It got louder and louder repeating the same phrase over and over. The voice got more insistent and urgent as I reached this particular bend in the road and just faded away.
I was the only one in the car. I could not work out where this voice had come from. I felt very uneasy the whole way home, and tried to nationalise this as just being my own imagination.
It seemed a peculiar phrase - "Don't drive the road". I would never say that, I would say something like "Get off the road". It was not ME that said it.
I was very shaken up and confused about this. I definitely heard this Voice, and the Voice was NOT mine!
Anyway, I finally arrived home and as I pulled up into my driveway I burst into tears of sheer relief of getting home safely.
The next day, I finished work, went to the gym and was on my way home. Again it was the same time of the day - 6.15pm. As I approached the same bend in the road, I realised a bus was pulling out in front of me, so I had to slow down. I could not overtake the bus as it was single lane traffic and there was too much oncoming traffic. However, a truck behind me on the road (I later found out the truck driver did not connect his cab brakes to his trailer brakes) started to jackknife. It was completely out of control, swerving all over the place; it's trailer dragging it around; the driver unable to control it at all. It hit an oncoming car first with its trailer, then hit me and sent me flying (literally) across a gap in the oncoming traffic, then hit the bus in front of me.
So there I was, waking up from passing out after the crash, with multiple fractures, sitting in my Mini after being in a horrific car crash.
My car ended up on the opposite side of the road at the exact bend in the road where I heard The Voice.
I wish I had listened to it and did what it said.
My imagination or a higher force?