A Hillman Imp ghost story for Christmas

It was a dark and stormy night at The Borough Arms on the road between Wadebridge and Bodmin. There were precious few travellers on the roads that evening and we had the usually popular hostelry pretty much to ourselves. There was just me and my friends and fellow members of the Imp Club, John and Sarah Doughty. Outside, the rain beat at the windows, the wind moaned in the chimney and the pub sign rattled on its chains but inside it was warm and welcoming. The fires were lit and after our meal we pulled up the armchairs in a semi-circle and gathered round the hearth.

And, as might only be expected on a night such as this, talk soon turned to the subject of the supernatural.

I happened to remark that I had never heard of a car being haunted. There have been ghost trains and phantom trucks and cars, I said, and I had even heard of a headless cyclist. But while accounts of ghostly cars have often been told, I had never heard of a real car being haunted as a house or a ship might be.

“The well known case of the hairy hands on the Two Bridges to Princetown road over Dartmoor doesn’t count,” I went on, warming to my theme. “That phenomenon affected the steering wheels of many cars and on at least one occasion the handlebars of a motorbike. It was not the cars or the bikes that were haunted but that particular bend in the road.”

At this, I paused. John was looking at Sarah and Sarah was looking at John and they were smiling knowingly at each other.

And this is the story they imparted to me that night.

About a dozen years before, John had been contacted by a widow living in Saltash. Her husband had died some years before and his car, a 1972 turquoise Hillman Imp, remained in the garage. Her husband had loved that car and she wanted to make sure it still worked. John, being the generous and helpful soul that he is, went along to get it going after a few years of standing idle. He soon had it running and drove it up and down the drive to make sure the clutch wouldn’t seize again before she passed the car on.

She was very grateful and became a good friend of the Doughtys. Eventually she decided to sell the car and John checked it over to make sure everything was in order.

A few weeks had passed when she rang the Doughtys up. She was very sorry, she said, but had he done anything to the locks? Nobody could get in it. John went over to investigate. They opened the darkened garage, he squeezed in beside the car, unlocked it and sat in it.

“The lock’s probably worn,” he told her. “The ignition lock on Sarah’s car is so worn the keys sometimes fall out as she’s going along.”

That should have been an end to it but John had a strange presentiment that there was more to this than at first appeared and was not surprised when she rang again with the same problem. To cut a long story short it became apparent that the only person who could get in the car and start it was John.

The owner’s widow wanted the Hillman Imp to go to a good home but advertising it seemed pointless when anyone who came to view it couldn’t even get behind the wheel so she offered it to John and Sarah. They didn’t really want another Imp but it was such a nice one and she was such nice old lady they at last agreed to buy it off her. John took it home and parked it outside his workshop to wait its turn while he finished off some other projects.

It was several months later that John was outside his workshop, working on a car, when he saw a stranger approaching from the lane. He was an elderly man, smartly dressed in a raincoat and wearing a hat (check description). He didn’t pay John any attention but looked around him with approval at John’s Imps outside the workshop. Some were show standard and others little more than spares cars but among them was the Hillman Imp that they’d bought from the widow lady some time before.

John could just as easily have carried on working. He’s always got a lot to do. But – again – something told him that all was not as it seemed. At last, his visitor drew level with him and, before his very eyes, faded into nothing. The Doughtys had kept in touch with the widow and went to see her after this experience.

“Do you mind if I ask you what your husband looked like?” John asked her over a cup of tea.

She hesitated at this somewhat strange question but smiled and replied, “No.”

“Did he wear a raincoat and a hat?”

“Perhaps it’s best I show you his photograph,” was her reply.

Sure enough, the man who had come back to look at his Imp was indeed her husband.

His wife was not in the least bit surprised. “He always loved that car, you see,” she told them.

She’s dead now but the Doughtys still have her husband’s old car in their little fleet. These days, it’s a well kept runabout and John has treated me to a ride in it more than once. But there have been no more sightings of the car’s former owner and never any sense of there being three passengers when by rights there should only be two.

We can only assume that the widow’s late husband, and the car’s former owner, has seen enough to reassure himself that his old pride and joy is in safe hands.

In any case, this remains the only instance that I know of where a car has been haunted – unless, of course, anyone out there knows any different……