The A75 Kinmount Straight: Scotland's Ghost Road
A four-mile stretch of the A75 between Carrutherstown and Annan has been called Scotland's most haunted road. Its reports run from 1957 to 1997, and two of them, from 1995 and 1997, were covered by local newspapers with named drivers.
Around midnight in 1962, two brothers driving the A75 near Kinmount said a hen flew at their windscreen and vanished, followed by an old woman with her arms held out, a screaming long-haired man and a stream of animals. That is the most famous story from the Kinmount Straight, and it is still only the brothers’ own account. The road does have a real run of reports, though, and two of them reached the local press with named drivers.
What the record actually shows
The Kinmount Straight is a stretch of about four miles on the A75 between Carrutherstown and Annan, in Dumfriesshire. Most of the reports centre on the section beside Kelhead Moss Plantation, near Kinmount House, with a few further east near the hamlet of Swordwellrigg on the Annan bypass.
The earliest report, from 1957, concerns a lorry driver who believed he had hit a couple crossing the road arm in arm. When he stopped there was no one there. No name is given. The Ferguson story came next. Derek and Norman Ferguson said that after the hen and the figures, the air in the car turned cold and the car began to rock violently once they stopped. The rocking ended when Derek got out. A furniture van then appeared ahead of them and disappeared. The tale is retold in many places, including Wikipedia, which cites a 1992 book of road ghost stories and BBC and ITV coverage in 2013. In the 1970s a group of women from Eastriggs are said to have seen a weird figure or creature on the straight.
The strongest reports are the latest. In March 1995 Garson and Monica Miller of Annan were driving east at about 60mph when they saw a middle-aged man with a hessian sack over his head and his arms held out. They reversed to the spot, found nothing and reported it to Annan police. The Dumfries Courier covered it on 7 April 1995. In July 1997 Donna Maxwell, 27, was driving near Swordwellrigg with her two children when a man in his thirties, in a red top and dark trousers, appeared a few feet in front of the car. She braked hard. When she looked again the man was gone. Police searched the area and found no evidence of an accident, and a public appeal a week later brought nothing. The Annandale Observer reported it on 1 August 1997.
The history behind the legend
The A75 has existed under that number since 1923. It runs about 96 miles from the A74(M) at Gretna, near the English border, west through Annan, Dumfries, Castle Douglas and Newton Stewart to Stranraer, and it carries heavy freight to the ferry ports at Cairnryan. Much of it is single carriageway, and many towns along it were bypassed in the 1980s and 1990s.
The haunted reputation is well established. The Scotsman described the A75 in 2006 as a road some writers call Scotland’s most haunted, and Mysterious Britain and Ireland says the hauntings earned the Kinmount Straight the name “the Ghost Road”.
How to read it
The Kinmount Straight is better documented than most British road ghosts. The 1995 and 1997 cases have named drivers, exact months, a police report in one case and a police search in the other. That is still evidence that something was seen and reported, not evidence of what it was. Long straight roads at night invite fatigue and lapses of attention, and a person who steps out and walks away can be gone before a shaken driver looks again.
The 1962 Ferguson account is the centrepiece of the legend, and it is the weakest part of the record. It is a single family story with no contemporary report that we could find. It is best read as folklore. The later cases are real reports of unexplained figures, and they remain unexplained.
Sources
- A75, Kinmount Straight, Mysterious Britain and Ireland (2008, updated 2018) - 1957, 1962, 1970s, 1995 and 1997 reports, citing the Dumfries Courier (7 April 1995) and Annandale Observer (1 August 1997)
- A75 road, Wikipedia - route, length and history of the A75, the Kinmount Straight’s location and the Ferguson account
- List of reportedly haunted highways, Wikipedia - the A75 called Scotland’s most haunted road, citing The Scotsman (29 September 2006)