The Annan Road Horrors: Derek and Norman Ferguson on the Kinmount Straight

The A75 carries traffic from Dumfries to Annan. Between Carrutherstown and Annan lies a four mile stretch. This is the Kinmount Straight. One section passes beside Kelhead Moss Plantation, an avenue of trees near Kinmount House, in the parish of Cummertrees.

April 1962. Derek and Norman Ferguson, two young men, were returning home to Annan after a week spent touring Scotland in their father's car. At midnight they topped up the petrol tank in Dumfries. They had only 15 miles to go.

Then, they claim, a large hen flew towards their window screen. It vanished on the point of impact. Next came an old lady, running towards the car and waving her outstretched arms. Behind her was a screaming man with long hair.

The figures gave way to a procession. Great cats, wild dogs, goats, more hens and other fowl, and stranger creatures. One retelling has wild animals leaping at their windshield. Every one of them disappeared. Then the temperature dropped.

The brothers stopped the car. It began to sway violently back and forth. Derek got out, and the movement stopped. In one version the rocking started again when he climbed back in, and the brothers heard what sounded like many fists hitting the car.

Last came a furniture van, which came towards them before disappearing. Some tellings make it a white van and a collision that seemed certain, until it vanished. Another has Derek fighting a strange force trying to take over the steering wheel, and seeing the van ahead with relief. The whole ordeal lasted about 30 minutes. One later retelling adds that Derek learned others had seen the same van, and that witchcraft had once been practised in the area.

The earliest written version found is Peter Underwood's Gazetteer of Scottish Ghosts, published in 1973 and in paperback in 1974. Daniel Cohen retold it in Railway Ghosts and Highway Horrors in 1992, under the title that stuck: "The Annan Road Horrors". No police, clergy or scientific investigation is on record. There are no photographs, film or recordings.

Chris Jensen Romer, reviewing Peter A. McCue's Paranormal Encounters on Britain's Roads for the Society for Psychical Research, searched newspaper archives for any contemporary report. He found none. Underwood himself told McCue privately that he was "never completely happy with that story." McCue treats the "'high strangeness' experience they reported" with caution. A Scotsman columnist went further: "I strongly suspect that this particular tale is an invention."

No evidence of a hoax has been offered, and there has been no confession. The versions drift, too. A hen or a white bird. A furniture van or a white van. A long haired man or an old man.

The Ferguson story is not the road's only one. A lorry driver in 1957, women from Eastriggs in the 1970s, Garson and Monica Miller in 1995 and Donna Maxwell in 1997 all reported phantoms on or near the A75. In 2013 the Dumfries group Mostly Ghostly appealed for accounts and later ran Halloween bus tours. Stacey's Coaches of Carlisle called the Kinmount Straight "Ghost Alley". That October, the BBC and ITV Border both took a trip along what was being called Britain's most haunted road.