The Lantern at the Crossroads
- 4 minute read
- Ages 9-13
- Horror Stories for Kids
My uncle drove a lorry between two towns, and the road between them ran through thirty kilometres of nothing at all.
Fields, then scrub, then a stretch where even the fields gave up. Halfway along there was a crossroads with no signpost, where a dirt track cut across the tarmac and went off into the dark on both sides.
Drivers on that route had a saying about the crossroads. If you see the lantern, keep going.
The rule
My uncle had heard it from an older driver on his first week.
There was sometimes a light at that crossroads at night, the old man said. A yellow light, low down, the height of a lantern held in someone's hand. Sometimes it was still. Sometimes it moved a little, like someone shifting their weight while they waited.
"And what is it?" my uncle asked.
"Doesn't matter," said the old man. "You don't stop. That's all you need."
My uncle drove that road for eleven years and saw it four times, and four times he kept going.
The fifth time
The fifth time was in February, and it was raining hard, and he was tired.
He came round the long bend before the crossroads and there was the light, low and yellow and steady in all that rain, which he thought about afterwards, because rain like that should have moved a flame.
And this time, standing behind it, he could see a person.
An old man in a soaked shirt, holding a hurricane lamp, with one hand raised.
My uncle slowed down. He did not mean to. His foot did it.
And as he came level he saw the old man's face lit from underneath by the lamp, and the man was looking straight at him and smiling, and his mouth was open too wide for a smile, much too wide, and it kept going.
My uncle put his foot down and did not look in the mirror.
What was there
He got to the depot at two in the morning and sat in the cab for a while before he went in.
And he told the man on the gate, because he had to tell somebody, and the man on the gate listened and then asked him one question.
"Did you stop?"
"No."
"Good," he said, and went back to his book.
My uncle asked him what happens if you stop.
He said nobody knew, because in thirty years the drivers who stopped had never come back to say.
The last part
My uncle drove that road for two more years and then took a job in the town instead, and he told this story maybe four or five times in his whole life.
And the part he always ended on was not the face.
It was that on the way back the next morning, in daylight, he pulled over at the crossroads and got out and looked around properly.
There was no house within eight kilometres in any direction.
There was nowhere for an old man with a lamp to have walked from, and nowhere for him to have walked to.
Moral of the story
If everyone who does a thing tells you the same warning, the warning is worth more than your own curiosity. My uncle did not stop, and that is the whole reason there is a story.
Questions and answers
- What was the saying among drivers on that road?
'If you see the lantern, keep going.' Drivers warned each other never to stop at the crossroads at night.
- How many times did the uncle see the light?
He saw it five times in eleven years of driving that route.
- What was strange about the lamp in the rain?
It burned steady and yellow in heavy rain, when a real flame would have been disturbed or put out.
- What did the man on the gate say about drivers who stopped?
That nobody knew what happened to them, because in thirty years none of them had ever come back to say.
- What did the uncle find at the crossroads in daylight?
Nothing. There was no house within eight kilometres, so there was nowhere the old man could have come from or gone to.
Word meanings
- scrub
- Rough land covered with low bushes and poor soil.
- tarmac
- The hard black surface of a road.
- depot
- A place where lorries or buses are kept and loaded.
- hurricane lamp
- An oil lamp with a glass cover that protects the flame from wind.
Questions about The Lantern at the Crossroads
What is the moral of The Lantern at the Crossroads?
That collective warnings usually exist for a reason. The uncle survives because he followed a rule he did not understand, rather than testing it.
Is this story appropriate for children?
It suits ages nine and above. Nothing violent is described and the frightening moment is brief, but the atmosphere is tense throughout.
Why is the ending scarier than the face?
Because it removes every ordinary explanation. A frightening man is one thing; a frightening man with nowhere to have come from is another.
Are lonely-road ghost stories common in South Asia?
Yes. Stories about lights, figures and hitchhikers on empty highways are told by long-distance drivers across India and Pakistan.