Death's Head Drive

By Philip Tice

Featured on Creepy Podcast (11/27/25)

The roads and highways of New Jersey are our lifeblood, a maze of interlacing asphalt veins, decipherable only by those who know our homeland like the back of their hands. For as iconic as they are, every kid in Jersey is brought up with a healthy fear of our roads and what might lurk in the shadows of their shoulders – we’ve all heard the stories about Shades of Death Road in Warren County, where spectral fog rises from the spots where unsolved murders were committed, or Clinton Road in West Milford, where you risk a run-in with phantom prom queens and pockets of lost time, or the Gates of Hell that lurk in the tunnel beneath the Clifton Street Train Bridge. But what they don’t tell you – what you have to learn for yourself – is that the most dangerous roads in the Garden State are the ones without names, those unnotable stretches of packed dirt and cracked blacktop that hide between the map lines, revealing their secrets only to those lost or reckless enough to stumble upon them.

I learned that lesson for myself, one dark autumn night. This is my story, one of countless many.

I had made the trek out to New Brunswick to visit friends who were studying at Rutgers, our state college famed both for the quality of its medical school and its student body’s appetite for wild partying. The last time I had visited my Rutger’s crew, a bicycle was thrown through a dorm window and the police sent everyone scattering to the wind like rats escaping a sinking ship – all in all, a pretty tame Thursday night in New Brunswick. This visit was fated to end much the same as the previous: after a grungy show at the basement punk venue known only as “The Meat Locker”, the raucous afterparty of drunk 19-year-olds was heroically dispersed by the brave men and women of the NBPD – I escaped amongst the chaos, gunning my second-hand Mazda out of there before they could get my name, or worse yet, call my mother.

I flew out of New Brunswick, navigating by moonlight and memory, stars still popping at the corners of my eyes like the cola that had been fizzing alongside the cheap whiskey in my cup only a half hour before. However, my usual route home was jarringly blocked off by road work – one of the countless construction crews that seem to apparate out of thin air on Jersey highways after the clock has struck midnight. By random fate or sinister design, I was shunned from the safe streetlamps and familiar exits of Rt. 78, and instead followed the glinting orange detour signs down a Country Road I hadn’t known existed before that night. I still do not know the road’s name, nor have I ever been able to find it again on a map.

Despite North Jersey’s notorious industrialization, I quickly found myself ensconced in a thick darkness reserved for the most remote stretches of the Pine Barrens, the refineries and their ever-belching smokestacks disappearing on the muddy horizon. The suburbs fell away and were replaced by endless fields of swaying marshland reeds, out of which emerged lopsided telephone poles and the occasional sunken house, whose peeling paint and black eyes lifelessly stared back at me as they slowly surrendered to the sucking mud. Save for the rare streetlamp, which was becoming ever more scarce as I followed the dark detour deeper, my headlights were the only source of illumination – and the only signs of life – on this snaking stretch of road.

This was a place where, should you be unlucky enough to crash, the marsh would swallow you up before anyone even knew to come looking. You may be familiar with places like these as dumping grounds for bodies in re-runs of The Sopranos, but I promise they are real, and even more frightening at night.

With only my headlights and vague sense of direction to guide me, I continued down the reedy road at a steady pace, looking for the inevitable turn-off that would detour me back to civilization – but there were no side roads here, no escape from the strangling swamp grasses. At first, there was the occasional dilapidated gas station or crooked mailbox to mark the roadside, but just like the streetlamps, those soon dried up as well – where was I, that there was so much room for such emptiness? It seemed impossible, liminal even, for such a stretch to be hidden here. But all that overbearing absence, that noisy nothingness, drew my attention to the one companion I did have:

A pair of headlights had appeared in my rear-view mirror.

Another wayward traveler detoured against their will, I assumed. If I didn’t make it home, at least there was now one person would be able to attest to my existence.

How wrong I was.

As the other vehicle drew closer, I began to make out details: it was a rust-peppered pickup truck, sporting a charcoal gray paintjob, blazing halogen eyes, and a snubbed nose hood – a trademark of some boxy, late 90s model.  Despite the truck’s age, the pickup kept pace with my car shockingly well, quickly catching up until it was following about thirty feet behind my bumper.

Had this truck been behind me before I took the detour? If not, where had it come from? I wondered, my eyes now flicking to my mirrors every twenty seconds or so. There must have been some old service road I missed. I felt a million unseen eyes bearing down on me from the shifting sea of meadow grass as the glaring headlights of the charcoal pickup burned a hole in the back of my head, feeling like judgement for the prickling hackles of suspicion that were starting to climb up my neck. The gap between us held steady, but I could feel that flatbed chomping at some invisible reins, its thrumming engine eager for release – but despite the wide-open lane beside us, it never made a move to pass me, content to huff hot exhaust at my heels.

Finally, we hit a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, a crucifix of backroads overlapping East to West and North to South. I continued straight, not daring to defy the detour should I risk becoming irreversibly lost in this stretch of anonymous backcountry, but I figured that if the pickup wanted to be free of me, he would turn off here and go about his nocturnal activities elsewhere. But the charcoal pickup thundered through the crossroads without hesitation – and as if offended by my mere speculation of its departure, the truck began to speed up.

Questions rattled through my mind as I felt the pit in my stomach sink lower and lower until I worried my guts might scrape the axle beneath me:

Where is this truck going? Could it be police that had mistaken my sleep-deprived driving for a drunken escapade? No, no police officer, county or trooper, drove a truck like that. Maybe my taillight was out or something had fallen off my car and this was just some good Samaritan trying to warn me? But then why had he not flashed his high beams, the universal signal for “beware” in the language of the open road? Even if my gas tank had fallen out of my car and was now dragging behind me, I didn’t dare stop – if I did, he would catch me, whoever he was.

Reflections of the pickup’s blazing beams shined into my cabin from every angle, deflecting off my mirrors until it created a blinding kaleidoscope. The light, which a few minutes ago had seemed as ordinary as any other headlights on any other highway, now felt hateful, vindictive even. Grimacing, I tilted my rearview to deflect some of the glare – but my heart leapt into my mouth when I realized that my vehicular stalker was now looming only a couple of feet behind my trunk.

Almost too afraid to hold my gaze on the rearview and worried I might careen off the road if I stared to long, I forced myself to steal a glance into the pickup’s cabin in a desperate attempt to identify my pursuer. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the seeping blackness of the truck cabin, which seemed to swallow even the glow of my taillights only a few feet in front of it – but as my vision adjusted, I could finally make out the form of a man… or perhaps, what once might have been a man.

Its sharp jaw underlit by the reddish glow of the truck’s dashboard radio, there lurked a figure, sporting a frayed leather jacket that melted into the shadows and thick driving gloves he used to strangle the pickup’s maroon steering wheel. But his face was missing the nose and eyes that might’ve granted him human features, and he lacked the lips to hide the too-wide, toothy grimace that was permanently chiseled across his face. A bare skull – that’s what sat atop his shoulders where a human’s fleshy head should have been, and even without eyes, I could tell that the vacuous black sockets of this Death’s Head were staring right at me.

As the titanic roar of his diesel engine shook my Mazda down to its sprockets and my bones to their marrow, I felt his malevolent presence advancing behind me, as well as another emotion staining his aura – that of amusement, like a wolf toying with a fleeing rabbit. Amused and hungry.

Each passing moment brought the barreling bumper of the coughing pickup closer to the rear of my car, but I evaded the Death’s Head’s attempts to ram me with a few well-timed pumps from my accelerator, keeping myself just inches in front of the dented death machine. My lead foot felt heavier than it ever had before, weighed down by the primal fear that gripped every tense muscle in my body – because I knew if I ever let my speed wane, for even a second, the demonic driver would rear end me and send my Mazda careening into the marsh reeds, where my demise would be swallowed up in the swaying depths of those secretive stalks.

With no one around to help or even hear me scream, an accident like that would surely mean my capture at the hands of the Death’s Head, and then… well, I’d rather not think about the ‘and then’.

That’s when I looked back in my rearview to catch another glimpse of the Death’s Head skull, which ebbed and flowed in the shadows like trying to catch a face in the static of a rabbit eared TV, and I saw something that chilled me down to my toes – whatever passing amusement that had been present in the skull’s boney visage was gone, and his sockets seemed to have narrowed into an impossible glare. I heard the pickup rage behind me, spitting dust and rocks from its tires as it blazed forward and finally made contact with my bumper – not fast enough for a proper slam, but enough to rock my car and nearly send me fishtailing.

I wrestled the wheel back under my control just in time for the truck to fall back and ram me again, meaner this time, like a demolition derby vet out for blood. I dared not look back at that crimson-tinted skull, but I could feel his smile widening. Both of us knew that in a battle of brawn, his American steel behemoth would easily crush my Japanese sedan like a tin can on the roadside with one more well-placed blow.

Just as I saw the truck’s hateful headlights drop back for another attack, my pinprick eyes spotted a twinkle emanating from the shadows, growing brighter by the second until it beamed like a florescent star at the mouth of this black tunnel: it was the highway, dead ahead!

The highway meant streetlamps and the shinning facades of used car dealerships, and other drivers! Friendly eyes to corroborate my nightmarish pursuit. Maybe I could find safety in numbers, and the possibility of witnesses might dissuade the Death’s Head from whatever nefarious purpose he had in mind for me. I just had to make it to the highway.

However, the phantom trucker must have experienced the same revelation, as a second later, I heard the pickup’s renewed snarl behind me as it raged forward, its headlights consuming my mirrors as it gunned for one final chance to run me off the road.

The pure terror flooding my synapses chased away any remaining concern for road laws and I flattened my accelerator pedal to the floor, blasting down the last stretch of darkened marshland as the jittering red needle of my speed gauge climbed. 70, 80, 90… my pulse pounded through my palms, clammy with cold sweat as my fingers instinctually dug into the steering wheel leather – but still, the Death’s Head did not yield. Not daring to turn my eyes towards the truck, but feeling the skull’s hot breath on my neck, I peeled a sharp right turn, skidding out onto the illuminated highway with so much momentum I thought my car might flip head over heels. But any fate would have been better than whatever awaited me amongst the reeds at the hands of the Death’s Head.

Barreling out into the harsh electric halo to join the other night jockeys on this nippy Fall night, I exhaled for what felt like the first time in nearly half an hour. Finally, I mustered the courage to look behind me – I expected the pickup truck to have crept back into the shadows like a panther or to have disappeared in the light like the bad dream I hoped he was…

But there it remained, that rusty charcoal tormentor, rolling down the highway behind me like just another commuter on their way back from a late night in The City. Somehow, that made it all the more frightening.

But then came a maneuver therebefore unseen from the vehicular apparition – a turn signal. I watched in my side mirror as the truck glided into the adjacent lane and began to pick up speed yet again – he would soon be directly beside me, his mortal prey. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead, like a kid who thinks that if you don’t look at the monster on the other side of the sheets, it can’t see you either – but I couldn’t resist the morbid curiosity of sneaking a look at my ghastly pursuer after so many miles.

Turning my head like a startled deer, I peered into the pickup’s passenger side window just in time to catch a glimpse of… no one.

The cabin was abandoned, devoid of the Death’s Head or any driver for that matter. The truck’s bench seat was empty, though the pickup still turned and accelerated as if a living pilot was sitting behind its wheel. This was in 2017, mind you, when driverless cars were still fringe ideas – and even if they had existed, they wouldn’t have used a rustbucket Ford to make one.

Dumfounded, my foot instinctively lifted off my accelerator, my frantic speed waning and allowing the empty truck to pull ahead, ignoring me like an old flame you don’t acknowledge after a bad breakup. It proceeded to blow through a red light beyond which I could not follow, and the last I saw of the Death’s Head, the seething red eyes of its taillights were disappearing into the unfeeling night – but its malicious presence clung to me like a bad stench for the rest of the drive, lurking in the shadows of every weigh station and shuttered rest stop I passed on my way home.

To this day, I don’t know what the Death’s Head was, nor why it chose me as its midnight prey. Maybe it was some territorial inhabitant of the sunken marsh house who had been angered by the detour’s disturbance, or the phantom of some hideous car wreck, both truck and man risen from the dead to lash out at a world that had long forgotten them; Maybe it was the motorized cousin of the Headless Horseman, who lurked right over the river in Sleepy Hollow, or a wayward member of the Wild Hunt, those skull-headed omens of doom from Germanic folklore.

But the mysteries of New Jersey are many, and the explanations for them are few, even in this modern age of skepticism. And even if I could find my way back to that nameless road and its skull-faced guardian, far be it from me to pull back the curtain on my homeland’s secrets. You’ll just have to take a wrong turn some night and find out for yourself.