This Halloween we’re taking a look into the world of the weird and anomalous with Rob Gandy.
Rob is a visiting LJMU business professor who writes for the long-established monthly magazine Fortean Times where he focuses on anomalous phenomena, mostly road ghosts and phantom hitchhikers.
Whilst not a stonewall believer in these phenomena, Rob has an open mind and his interest in these stories has led him to contribute lots of material to Fortean Times.
Rob goes about finding these incidents by looking for witnesses in local media and providing them with his contact details. He also gets people from around Britain telling him their spooky stories over the internet.
In an article in The Ghost Club Journal he details collections of experiences by motorists on the UK’s “haunted highways”.
One of the stories he retells is about the White Gate Hill Phantom, where a man called Tom was driving his car after dropping a friend off. Whilst driving at 60 miles per hour he turned to his passenger seat to discover a man sitting there expressionless, dressed in a wax jacket and a flat cap.
Shortly after seeing the man, Tom pulled over his car and turned again to discover the man had simply disappeared. Rob focuses on such stories from multiple different years, detailing incidents which first occurred as far back as 1974.
Rob told MerseyNewsLive: “You shouldn’t be completely gullible. You have to test and you have to look for the potential rational explanation.
You should be sympathetic to the witness
“But I found that I’ve got about 170 cases where, you know, there isn’t any necessarily a rational explanation.”
He also encourages people to be respectful to the people who tell him these stories and he writes in a way that allows for this. He said: “The way that you write it is important. You should be sympathetic to the witness.”
Additional reporting by Mackenzie Argent
Featured image (c) LJMU
