Michael Karl Witzel - Strange 66: Myth, Mystery, Mayhem, and Other Weirdness on Route 66

Back in the 1980s, while traveling across the country on the way to start a new contract engineering assignment, my wife and I found ourselves traveling in separate cars. She was driving in her vehicle alone, and I was pulling my own car with a rented moving van. We were driving on old Route 66 into California, and then heading north to Seattle.

This was long before the advent of cell phones and texting, so we had no practical way to contact each other if we were separated. The only plan of action was to call one of our parents long-distance from a payphone, check in with our general location, and tell them that we were safe.

The first clue that this was destined to be no ordinary trip was while traversing the Mojave Desert, heading straight into the setting sun. With our maps marked to Needles, the Joshua trees provided otherworldly set dressing for a moonlit night. But after crossing the Texas panhandle and New Mexico, we were both overly tired. Time and space seemed distorted. In an effort to rejuvenate, we stopped for gas and a cold drink.

A few minutes later, we were back on the road. Unfortunately, the minute I got up to highway speed, I thought I saw some sort of unidentified creature scurry across the pavement. I hit the brakes, and my drink spilled onto the floorboard. I had no choice but to stop to mop up the sticky mess. By the time I was finished, my wifes car had disappeared ahead somewhere into the vanishing point. She was already barreling across that long expanse of desert, heading deep into the night.

I did what I could to catch up, racing across the hot pavement, sometimes topping speeds of ninety miles per hour. But it was getting late, and the ocean of highway ahead made my eyelids heavy. In the distance, eighteen-wheel behemoths bobbed up and down like so many whales, my headlights creating strange shapes when reflected off the diamond-shaped panels on the backs of their refrigerated reefers.

After a few hundred miles of monotonous driving, I could no longer discern if the light was moving away from me or getting closer. Suddenly, I entered a state of highway hypnosis, a place where ones senses can no longer be trusted. The dancing lights began to look like they were coming directly toward me and that an imminent collision was in order. I found myself slamming on the brakes and pulling over to the shoulder to avoid a collision. Of course, it was all in my imagination.

Eventually, I reached Needles, California, where I crossed the border and the agricultural checkpoint. No, I dont have any fruit, I groaned. But is there any chance youve seen my wifes car roll through here, a red Datsun 280Z? Just about then I spied a group of very young children wheeling around on their bicycles. Mind you, it was 10:30 at night. I thought it was odd that kids would be allowed out so late. What were these juvenile delinquents up to?

I began my cruise through town and scoured the motor courts with one eye, hoping to catch a glimpse of my wifes car. But all I saw were scenes evoking an Edward Hopper paintingshady characters leaning against walls, smoking cigarettes in the dark, eyeballing me as if to say, Whadda you want? Nevertheless, my diligence paid off: a few minutes later, I found her car parked in the lot of a roadside motor court. I pulled in and there was my wife under the neon, waiting.

We checked into the hotel and discovered that the layout was disturbingly similar to the Bates Motel portrayed in the film Psycho, with parking directly outside each room. Things got even more strange when the desk clerk assigned us the room next to the office (just like Norman Bates did in the movie)! Even my wife was spooked. After we got settled, we made a close inspection of the walls and pictures to reassure ourselves that there were no peepholes.

That night, my dreams were mixed with the strange lights I had almost collided with out on the highway; those weird kids who were most likely criminals in the making, out there trying to break into my truck; the shady vagrants with nothing to do; and the creepy hotel clerk who most likely had his poor dead mother stored away in a broom closet. It was a fitful sleep, interrupted by strange noises and the urge to peer out the window to verify that everything was all right.

The next morning, I went out to check on my truck, fully expecting smashed windows and a body stripped bare to the chassis. But the sky was blue and birds were singing. In the sunlight of a new day, the ominous back-alley shadows of the night before had evaporated.

As I added sugar and cream to my diner coffee, I pondered the lives that run parallel to our own yet seem so foreign to us. Ive made many high-mileage road trips before, but this was the first time I realized were all just visitors in the realities of others. Yes, there exists another part of the road that most people never experience, a so-called unseen dimension. As we crisscross the country, we see only brief excerpts, highlights from a greater story yet untold.

Bottom line: Yes, Virginia, there is a boogey-man, hobgoblin, or evil clown waiting to sink his fangs into your neck when the lights go out. Like it or not, criminals, murderers, and other miscreants occupy the road too, scurrying underneath that threadbare carpet like cockroaches. Hideous creatures are hiding in the wall, scrabbling through the insulation like rats. Theres a monster beneath the bed waiting to steal your breathhiding under the covers wont save you.

With all these images spinning in my head, I promised myself that for the rest of the trip, I would take off my rose-colored glasses and pull down my protective defenses for a change. Like the audience waiting for the next shock in a horror movie, I wanted to witness the hidden underbelly of Highway 66 that most people miss. I wanted to experience that rollercoaster thrill you get in the pit of your stomach when something unexpectedly pops out to scare and amaze you.

All I had to do was get in my vehicle, hit the gas, and be patient. Before long, the next event would unfold right before my eyes, allowing mefor a brief momentto capture a glimpse of the myth, mystery, mayhem, and other weirdness often found along the forgotten miles of the strange highway numbered 66.

THERES A KILLER ON THE ROAD

Theres a Killer on the Road retrieves the rap sheet of murder and mayhem from the archives of highway history and shines a bright light on the most notorious crimes and criminals that darkened the roadsides of the old Route 66. Americas so-called Mother Road at one time may have been a nurturing road for innocents seeking to flee the poverty of the Dust Bowl for a new life out west, but it also became a road of escape (and opportunity) for bootleggers, robbers, murderers, and others addicted to the roadside noir of Americas Main Street.

CHICAGO AND CICERO, ILLINOIS

Al Scarface Capone was known as many things: gangster, mobster, criminal, lawbreaker, bouncer, bootlegger, racketeer, tax-evader, modern-day Robin Hood, and Public Enemy Number One. What isnt widely known is that at one time he reigned as the de facto king of the Route 66 town of Cicero, Illinoisor Caponeville, as some called it.