LINCOLN, Ill. (AP) – Driving can be so deadly dull these days.

Strapped in with seat belts, cocooned with front and side airbags, we’re safer than we’ve ever been on our teeming highways. Contrast that with the early years of this century and the huge chunks of Detroit steel – Japan, back then, exported mainly rice – hurtling up and down the narrow lanes of America’s storied east-west artery, Route 66.

It was the thrill of the primitive open road in cars devoid of every safety feature we now take for granted except brakes. You could put the pedal to the metal and go west, young man, with the nonsafety glass windows rolled down and God’s fresh air anointing your smiling face.

The one big drawback to getting your kicks on old Route 66 was getting killed: Head-on drivers obliterated each other on the too-narrow road or lost it on lots of interesting local highway features such as “dead man’s curve” in the town of Lincoln. Drivers who survived that wicked bend found themselves rocketing along a straight downhill stretch between two conveniently placed Lincoln cemeteries, only to come to grief at the hazard formed by the infamous “ghost bridge” bestriding Salt Creek.

All of which has left a treasure trove of highway ghost stories waiting to be mined by enterprising entrepreneurs who know how to feed our hunger for horror. Enter Chris Hotz and business partner Deborah Carr Senger, who run Bloomington-based Timeless Presentations. On Oct. 22, they are offering to take you on a tour they’re calling the “Ghost Bridge Ghost Walk.”

Visitors will wander with them down a long-abandoned stretch of old Route 66 as dusk falls like a dark river through the overarching fall trees that wrap the road in a golden shroud. Your hosts will take you deep down to the skeletal concrete bones of what’s left of the ghost bridge, all the while seeding nervous imaginations with stories about cars that went bump in the night and the fate of their luckless drivers.

Hotz says it’s going to be a scream. “Imagine charging down here at 70 mph,” he adds with relish, wandering down the lumpy abandoned road while dry leaves crunch underfoot as if they were brittle, sun-bleached bones. “There were a lot of deaths right here, especially coming down to this bridge. You just get an incredible feeling of the history.”

Some of the drivers may have met their ends while up to no good. One of the characters fright fans will be introduced to is a Lincoln Prohibition bootlegger and bosom buddy of Al Capone called John “Coonhound Johnny” Schwenoha. His nickname is right on his grave marker that lies not far from the spooky disused stretch of Route 66. “There is a great mystery about how he died in 1944,” says Hotz, 53, who doesn’t want to give too much away ahead of the ghost walk. “It’s real interesting.”

Hotz will be giving a portion of the ghost walk’s ticket price away to the Route 66 Heritage Foundation of Logan County, which is working to save the fabric of “The Mill,” a historic former Route 66 restaurant and haunt of Coonhound Johnny. Geoff Ladd, the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Tourism Bureau of Logan County, says the eventual aim is to resurrect the old watering hole as a Route 66 museum.

“There could very well be a mix of ghosts in there,” says Ladd, eying the building with its faux windmill sails hanging dead despite a light breeze. “Some could be the bodies rumored to be buried under the foundation from gangster days, and there could be spirits from when part of the building was a World War II army barracks.”

Our co-host for the ghost walk, Deborah Carr Senger, is also a practicing medium and says bluntly that parts of the old mill “creep me out.” She’ll be lending her expertise and sensitivity to all aspects of the walk and providing insights as the walkers plod towards the waiting bridge. Don’t be surprised, however, if she goes quiet sometimes.

“I might be talking to them,” she says of the departed.

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Information from: Herald & Review, http://www.herald-review.com

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