The first curve on Gap Creek Road (State Route 362) in Elizabethton is supposed to be haunted by a two-headed hitchhiker ghost, though this legend could be much older than purposed.In their book The Granny Curse and Other Ghosts and Legends from East Tennessee, authors Janet Barnett and Randy Russell identifies this specter as a man named Jubal who was attacked and murdered by a homeless person. Price writes that on July 4th, 1928, the young man was walking home from a celebration in Elizabethton. He had dressed like Abraham Lincoln for the evening. When he took a shortcut through the woods to avoid the curve, the vagrant stole his gold pocket watch and murdered him. The authors write that people mistake this spirit as two-headed when they are actually seeing his stove pipe hat. Curiously, there is no written record of this death. Eddie M. Nikazy’s tomes Abstracts of Tennessee Death Records for Carter County: 1908 – 1925 and Carter County, Tennessee, Deaths: 1926 – 1934 do not mention this death. It is not found in the Carter County Courthouse or with the Tennessee Office of Vital Records.Justin H. Guess with the Haunt Masters Club: Tri-Cities Parapsychological Research & Investigation corresponded with co-author Randy Russell who said: “I do recall that the names in this [retelling] are fictions. The telling is more or less a compilation of about six different ‘hitchhiker’ stories associated with Gap Creek Road.”Folklore suggests ghostly apparitions along Gap Creek Road fit the so-called “vanishing hitchhiker” motif, and as Russell said, there are more purported sightings than just the two-headed hitchhiker. In Appalachia Inside Out: Culture and Custom by Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning and Jim Wayne Miller, there is an instance of a man picking up a lady only to find out she had been a ghost:One cool, rainy evening in the spring, Josh Morton was driving along Gap Creek Road in upper East Tennessee. Gap Creek Road between Elizabethton and Upper Gap Creek contains several sharp curves; at one of them which is especially sharp there is a bridge over a small stream. As Josh was approaching the curve and the bridge, there appeared within the beam from his headlights a young woman standing beside the road. She was dressed in finery, but was wearing no coat; consequently, Josh noticed, she was becoming drenched. (Higgs, p. 452)The story continues in an expected way. He picked her up and offered her his jacket. She was very quiet during the ride, but gave him directions to her house. When they arrived at the address, he got out to open her door, only to find that she had vanished. He went to the house and knocked on the door. The woman who answered said the lady he described sounded like her daughter. Only the unnamed girl died three years earlier, hit by a car at the very spot Josh had picked her up at, wearing her prom dress. The woman said that her daughter was buried at the edge of the property. She showed him the young girl’s tombstone and across it was draped his jacket.Concerning the two-headed hitchhiker made popular by Randy Russell’s book: there is one death that occurred less than a mile from the dangerous curve on Gap Creek Road and coincidentally happened in July. That month in 1776, according to The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture by Carroll Van West, Fort Caswell (now called Fort Watauga) was attacked by Native North American Chickamauga Indians. One man lost his life while out getting supplies: During the time the Indians were around the fort, James Cooper and a boy named Samuel Moore, went out after boards to cover a hut. When near the mouth of Gap Creek, they were attacked by Indians; Cooper leaped into the river, and by diving hoped to escape their arrows and bullets, but the water became too shallow and he was killed by them and scalped. (Ramsey, p. 158)It is possible that stories about the ghost of a man who had his head chopped “right down the middle” by Chickamauga Indians evolved into the story of the two-headed hitchhiker of today.
