Detour #666: Britain’s Most Spooky Motorway

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If you’re heading up the M6 this Halloween you might want to call Ghostbusters.

Halloween makes a great time for a detour – a chance to enjoy trees in their autumnal glory, illuminated pumpkins flickering artfully in windows, and, for those with a taste for it, ghoulish displays strewn across gardens. But what if you encounter more than you bargained for?

Take the M6. An innocuous six-to-eight lanes of tarmac, right? Yet the M6 regularly tops lists of Britain’s most haunted roads. And in 2006, the building company Tarmac collected data that proves it, in a survey that revealed more ghostly sightings of clarity on the M6 than any other road in Britain.

Eyes peering out of bushes, phantom hitchhikers, and spectral figures who melt into thin air are frequently reported along the entire length of the motorway. Drivers describe the unsettling sensation of their steering wheels being tugged by unseen hands. Others report chilling encounters with lorries barrelling head-on towards them, only to vanish moments before impact. 

You might expect the spookiest roads to be lonely lanes winding across desolate moorland, so how can a motorway be so haunted? As Tony Simmons, the survey’s sightings coordinator, explained to The Guardian, “When you think about it, these findings make sense. The M6 is one of Britain's longest roads and it travels through many counties – and therefore an immense amount of history.”

Photo Jonny Gios / Unsplash

History may indeed explain why the Cheshire stretch of the M6, between junctions 16 and 19, is particularly notorious for being both a haunted area and accident blackspot. Locals believe ghosts are to blame for distracting drivers, particularly around junctions 16 and 17, where shadowy figures are often seen crossing the motorway. As one eyewitness chillingly described, “To me, it looked like the figure had run across the lanes and was now waiting for me to hit them – as if they were suicidal. But as I got closer the figure didn’t look like a solid figure. It looked almost translucent. And then the figure just vanished. There was nothing there. I literally blinked and it had gone.”

Could this be due to two historical tragedies that occurred in the area? In 1643, during the English Civil War, Parliamentarian supporters taking refuge in Barthomley Church – located right next to present-day junction 16 of the M6 – were smoked out and set upon by Royalist soldiers, resulting in twelve fatalities. Eight years later, around 1,000 Royalist Scottish troops, exhausted and heading north after suffering defeat at the Battle of Worcester, were ambushed by locals armed with pikes and axes near Sandbach. After their slaughter, the troops were buried at nearby Piper’s Hollow, which neighbours what is now junction 17 of the M6. To this day, locals report hearing eerie bagpipes playing in the dead of night. Are the embittered souls of Barthomley and Piper’s Hollow doomed to forever roam the adjacent tarmac? 

In many places, the M6 follows the path of old Roman roads, which may explain the numerous sightings of Roman soldiers reported along its length. The M6 Toll is particularly rich in paranormal activity from the era when centurions were a fixture in the land. Wessex Archaeology excavated the area before the road was constructed, uncovering a Roman cemetery and pottery artefacts. Perhaps this explains one of the most spinechilling apparitions seen along the Toll. Close to where it crosses the ancient Roman route of Watling Street, a family travelling shortly after the road opened reported witnessing the ghosts of 20 Roman soldiers “more like upright shadows than men, walking through the tarmac as you would through water”.

So, while you might have thought that haunted houses, derelict hospitals, or crumbling graveyards are the places to search for ghouls, it turns out that hitting a six-lane highway could be the scariest thing you can do this Halloween. 

Words Indi Bains

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ROADBOOK

CLASS: HAUNTED HIGHWAY

NAME: M6

ROUTE: JUNCTION 16 to 19

COUNTRY: UK

Distance: 32 Miles

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