👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9476
ACTIVE
A75 road
A75 road is a location reputed to be haunted in Scotland, GB. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.
Where is A75 road?
- Location
- Scotland, GB
- Type
- Road / bridge
- Coordinates
- 55.011, -3.345
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
Why is A75 road said to be haunted?
The A75 runs about 95 miles across the south of Scotland, from the A74(M) at Gretna to the Cairnryan ferry terminals, and its reputation as a haunted road belongs to one four-mile section of it: the Kinmount Straight, between Carrutherstown and Annan, beside the Kelhead Moss plantation and the Kinmount estate. The reputation rests on a single night in April 1962, when brothers Derek and Norman Ferguson said that hens, animals, an old woman and a screaming man appeared in front of their car and vanished. No newspaper report from the time has been found; the earliest printed version that can be dated is Peter Underwood's of 1974, and Underwood later wrote privately that he had never been completely happy with the story. Local weeklies did report two named witnesses in 1995 and 1997, both of whom were certain they had struck a man who then was not there. The ranking that made the road famous was a car-repair firm's Halloween list of 2017, in which it came fourth. The documented danger here is traffic, not ghosts.
What is the history of A75 road?
The A75 is a trunk road, not a monument. It runs about 95 miles (159 km) along the south of Scotland from the A74(M) at Gretna to Stranraer and the ferry terminals at Cairnryan, and it has carried the number A75 since the British road classification of 1923. What a driver sees today is the product of forty years of rebuilding. The old county and regional councils bypassed Glenluce, Newton Stewart, Creetown, Gatehouse of Fleet, Castle Douglas, Dumfries, Collin, Carrutherstown, Annan and Gretna during the 1980s and 1990s; a 1.3-mile dual carriageway west of Dumfries opened in 1999 in place of the wooded bottleneck known locally as The Glen; and only two villages, Springholm and Crocketford, are still not bypassed. Between Dumfries and Gretna the earlier road ran further south and survives as the B721 and B724, the road locals call the low road.
That matters, because the ghost stories are not spread along the whole route. They belong to a four-mile section called the Kinmount Straight, between Carrutherstown and Annan, where the carriageway runs beside the Kelhead Moss plantation and the Kinmount estate. Kinmount House is a Greek revival mansion designed by Sir Robert Smirke and built between 1813 and 1820 for the 6th Marquess of Queensberry, with William Burn as executant architect and stone from Cove quarry at Kirkpatrick Fleming. Historic Environment Scotland listed it category A on 3 August 1971 under reference LB3582. The estate was sold in 1896 to the industrialist Edward Brook, served as an auxiliary hospital in both world wars, and belonged to the Olympic runner Steve Ovett between 1988 and 1998.
Two consequences follow, and both correct what this file used to say. The named modern sightings sit at Swordwellrigg, on the Annan bypass: tarmac laid in the 1980s or 1990s, not an old droving line. And the places our text named, Glenluce and Crocketford, are between 60 and 100 km west of the Kinmount Straight; nothing in the catalogued lore happens there.
The road's real character today is freight. Transport Scotland records an annual average daily traffic of about 9,000 vehicles south of Springholm in 2024 and 9,300 at Crocketford in 2023, rising by a fifth in August; heavy goods vehicles make up 12 to 16 per cent of the flow, and the Cairnryan ports together handle roughly twelve ferry arrivals and departures a day. The A75 has been in the improvement queue for a quarter of a century: a Route Action Plan recommended a Springholm bypass in October 1999, the Union Connectivity Review recommended UK funding in November 2021, STPR2 recommended realignment at Springholm and Crocketford in December 2022, and in November 2024 Transport Scotland commissioned Jacobs to take the design work forward.
Timeline: the documented record of A75 road
- 1813–1820 Kinmount House is built for the 6th Marquess of Queensberry to a Greek revival design by Sir Robert Smirke, with William Burn as executant architect and stone from Cove quarry at Kirkpatrick Fleming. Historic Environment Scotland listed it category A on 3 August 1971 (LB3582). It is the house that gives the Kinmount Straight its name.
- 1923 The road takes the number A75 in the British road classification. Its present alignment east of Dumfries is later work: the earlier route to Gretna ran further south and survives as the B721 and B724.
- April 1962 The episode on which the road's reputation rests: brothers Derek and Norman Ferguson say that, driving near Kinmount around midnight, a hen flew at the windscreen and vanished on impact, followed by an old woman with outstretched arms, a screaming long-haired man, cats, dogs, goats and fowl, a drop in temperature, a car that rocked while stationary and finally a furniture van that disappeared. No contemporary newspaper report of it has been found.
- 1974 Earliest printed appearance of the case that I have been able to date, twelve years after the alleged night: Peter Underwood, Gazetteer of Scottish Ghosts (Fontana), abridged from his A Gazetteer of Scottish and Irish Ghosts (Souvenir Press, 1973).
- 1992 The story reaches a mass juvenile readership outside Britain: Daniel Cohen gives it a chapter, “The Annan Road Horrors”, in Railway Ghosts and Highway Horrors (Apple/Scholastic), pp. 61–66. This paperback is still the source the English Wikipedia article cites for the Ferguson episode.
- March 1995 Garson and Monica Miller, of Annan, report driving east on the Kinmount section at 60 mph and seeing a middle-aged man with a hessian sack folded over his head and his hands held out; convinced they had hit him, they reversed and found nobody. They reported it to Annan police. Source given: Dumfries Courier, 7 April 1995.
- July 1997 Donna Maxwell, 27, driving near Swordwellrigg at 50 mph with two children in the car, brakes for a man in a red top who steps out in front of her; when she opens her eyes there is nobody. She calls the police, the area is searched and no evidence of an accident is found. Source given: Annandale Observer, 1 August 1997. This is the only A75 report whose outcome is documented.
- 1999 The 1.3-mile dual carriageway west of Dumfries opens, replacing the wooded bottleneck locally called The Glen. In the same year a Route Action Plan for the A75 recommends a bypass at Springholm.
- 18 October 2005 Kirsty Smith photographs the A75 at the Heughs of Barholm, near Creetown (grid reference NX 520 526), for the Geograph project. This is the image that illustrates the road on Wikidata and here: it is genuinely the A75, but it is about 60 km west of the Kinmount Straight.
- 13 September 2008 The Mysterious Britain & Ireland website publishes the list of A75 sightings that almost everything downstream copies, including the English Wikipedia section. It is also the only place where the local press citations of 1995 and 1997 are given.
- 24 and 31 October 2013 BBC News publishes “The A75 Kinmount straight: Trip on ‘most haunted’ road” and ITV Border broadcasts a report in which Hannah McNulty drives the road with Kathleen Cronie and John Hill, of the Mostly Ghostly group. This is the moment the story becomes national broadcast material.
- 31 October 2017 The car-repair booking company ClickMechanic publishes a Halloween ranking of Britain's most haunted roads. The Kinmount Straight comes fourth, behind Blue Bell Hill (A229, Kent), the B3212 on Dartmoor and the Electric Brae in Ayrshire. The local paper group DNG24 reports it the same day. This press release is the datable origin of both the superlative and the long-distance lorry drivers.
- 1 February 2018 Peter A. McCue publishes Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads (The History Press), where he doubts the Ferguson case and reveals that Underwood had written to him that he was “never completely happy with that story”. Reviewing it for the Society for Psychical Research the same day, Chris Jensen Romer reports finding no contemporary press coverage of the 1962 episode.
- November 2021 The Union Connectivity Review recommends that the UK Government fund an upgrade of the A75. STPR2 follows in December 2022 recommending realignment around Springholm and Crocketford, and in November 2024 Transport Scotland commissions Jacobs to design the options.
- 22 September 2025 Transport Scotland publishes the Strategic Assessment Report for the Springholm and Crocketford improvements: about 9,000 vehicles a day south of Springholm in 2024 and 9,300 at Crocketford in 2023, HGVs 12–16 per cent of traffic, and an accident rate at Crocketford three times the national average in 2022–2024.
Is there a rational explanation for A75 road?
The first thing to say about the founding case is that the man who published it did not fully believe it. The episode is dated April 1962, and the earliest printed appearance I have been able to date is 1974, twelve years later, in Peter Underwood's Gazetteer of Scottish Ghosts (Fontana), an abridgement of his A Gazetteer of Scottish and Irish Ghosts (Souvenir Press, 1973). Underwood is also the best sceptic available on it: he told the clinical psychologist Peter A. McCue, in private correspondence quoted in McCue's Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads (The History Press, 2018), that he was “never completely happy with that story”. Reviewing McCue's book for the Society for Psychical Research on 1 February 2018, Chris Jensen Romer added that he had searched newspaper archives for contemporary reports of the Ferguson episode and found none.
Second, the phantom hitchhiker is not on this road. The vanishing hitchhiker is a catalogued legend: Ernest W. Baughman indexed it as motif E332.3.3.1, with lettered subtypes, in his Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America (1966), and the founding study is Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey's “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” (California Folklore Quarterly 1:4, 1942, pp. 303–335). Reidar Th. Christiansen's index of migratory legends does have a band for ghosts and revenants, ML 4000–4030, but no type for the motorcar hitchhiker. What the catalogue requires is a passenger taken aboard, and in the A75's documented reports nobody is taken aboard: the figures are seen at the verge or in front of the car. I measured this rather than assume it. The Paranormal Database's Dumfries and Galloway index runs to four pages and about 6,300 words; it holds three A75 entries and not a single occurrence of “hitch” or “lift”, against 37 occurrences of “ghost” as a control on the same pages. The same database does use the phrase “vanishing hitchhiker”, for Blue Bell Hill in Kent, so the term is in its vocabulary and its absence here means something.
Third, the superlative has an author and a date, and it is marketing. On 31 October 2017 the car-repair booking company ClickMechanic published a Halloween list of Britain's most haunted roads; the Kinmount Straight came fourth, behind Blue Bell Hill on the A229 in Kent, the B3212 across Dartmoor and the Electric Brae in Ayrshire. That press release, reported the same day by the local paper group DNG24, is also where the long-distance lorry drivers come from: its copy says that “long-distance lorry drivers, in particular, have also reported traumatising experiences” and that one “even quit his job”, without a name, a date or a newspaper.
What is left is a road and its driving conditions, and they are unremarkable in exactly the way that matters: an unlit single carriageway with hedge and plantation close to the verge, carrying night freight off the Cairnryan ferries, with mean open-road speeds of 52 to 53 mph. Figures that appear at the edge of a headlight beam and are gone when the driver looks again are what those conditions produce. And the danger this road has actually documented is traffic: between 2012 and 2024, 5.7 per cent of A75 accidents were fatal and 24.7 per cent serious, and in 2022–2024 the accident rate at Crocketford was three times the national average and at Springholm 2.2 times.
What I cannot explain is the recurring shape of the modern reports: a driver certain of having hit a man who then is not there. The only case with a documented outcome is Donna Maxwell's, in July 1997. She called the police, the area was searched, and no evidence of an accident was found. That is what can be said about the police here, and it is a good deal less than the blanket denial this file used to print.
Can you visit A75 road?
This is not a place you visit. It is a working trunk road, and the only honest advice about it is practical.
The Kinmount Straight runs between Carrutherstown and Annan, about seven miles east of Dumfries, with the Kelhead Moss plantation and the Kinmount estate on its south side. It is single carriageway, unlit, with no pavement and nowhere legal to stop, and it carries ferry freight through the night. Do not stop on it and do not walk it; the lay-bys are working lay-bys used by lorry drivers.
Kinmount House is private. It is a category A listed mansion in a designed landscape, run today by the Brook family's leisure company as accommodation and a wedding venue. It is not a museum, and driving past does not give access to the grounds. The same applies to the Kelhead Moss plantation, which is forestry, and to the Swordwellrigg area on the Annan bypass.
Annan is the practical base at the eastern end and Dumfries at the western; both sit on the A75 itself, and Gretna and the A74(M) are about ten miles east of Annan. Cairnryan, at the far western end of the road, is roughly 90 miles away. Anyone driving the whole length should plan around freight and ferry times rather than around ghosts.
If you drive it, drive it as a road. Transport Scotland's own assessment describes overtaking pressure, a seasonal peak in August and an accident rate at Crocketford three times the national average. The most useful thing this file can tell a reader is that the A75 is considerably more dangerous than it is haunted, and that it is dangerous for entirely ordinary reasons.
Sources consulted
- Peter Underwood, «Gazetteer of Scottish Ghosts» — Fontana/Collins, 1974 book
- Daniel Cohen and Stephen Marchesi, «“The Annan Road Horrors”, in Railway Ghosts and Highway Horrors, pp. 61–66» — Apple/Scholastic, London, 1992 book
- Peter A. McCue, «Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads: Phantom Figures, UFOs and Missing Time» — The History Press, 2018 book
- Chris Jensen Romer, «Review of Peter A. McCue, Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads» — Society for Psychical Research, 2018 web
- Jacobs for Transport Scotland, «A75 Springholm and Crocketford Improvements: Strategic Assessment Report» — Transport Scotland, 2025 report
- Historic Environment Scotland, «Kinmount House and Conservatory, with Office Court and Gateways: listed building record LB3582 (category A, listed 3 August 1971)» — Designations portal, 1971 report
- Ernest W. Baughman, «Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America (motif E332.3.3.1)» — Mouton, The Hague, 1966 book
- Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, «“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, California Folklore Quarterly 1:4, pp. 303–335» — California Folklore Quarterly, 1942 academic
- Ian Topham, Mysterious Britain & Ireland, «A75, Kinmount Straight (published 13 September 2008; cites Dumfries Courier, 7 April 1995, and Annandale Observer, 1 August 1997)» — mysteriousbritain.co.uk, 2008 web
- The Paranormal Database, «Dumfries and Galloway: ghosts, folklore and forteana (index consulted 17 August 2026)» — paranormaldatabase.com, 2026 web
- Fiona Reid, «A75 among UK's most haunted roads» — DNG24, Annan, 2017 newspaper archive
- Kirsty Smith, «Road cutting, Barholm Wood (photograph, grid reference NX 520 526, taken 18 October 2005)» — Geograph Britain and Ireland, 2005 web
- English Wikipedia contributors, «A75 road (bypass history and route description)» — Wikipedia, 2026 web
- BBC News, «The A75 Kinmount straight: Trip on ‘most haunted’ road» — BBC News, south Scotland, 2013 web
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-17 · How we verify our content
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