My experience on Australia’s most haunted road

It’s dark, it’s dangerous, it’s eerie, it’s one of the top 20 haunted roads in the world and it’s just a few minutes from where I live: the Wakehurst Parkway. I had so many ‘panic attacks’ while driving this road, it was one of the reasons I have now given up driving completely. It spooks many other locals too.  It’s a bit of local history and an urban legend in the suburbs that surround it and has lately become the theme of a documentary being made locally. And there has been a little bit of extra press about it in the news lately.

The Wakehurst Parkway is a 13 kilometre long, single lane stretch (with some sweeping bends) cutting through the Garigal National Park from Narrabeen to Frenchs Forest (where a brand new hospital is being built) then after crossing Warringah Road, to Seaforth. It has a long history of fatal car crashes, one of which involved my mother in the 70s (luckily, she survived). On very wet days it regularly floods and is closed to traffic which puts a lot of pressure on other roads around it but at least it lessens the number of potential accidents.

It has also an association with a few horrific murders, adding to its notoriety. One of the murders, in the 60s, involved the kidnap and murder of eight year old Grahame Thorne, whose father had just won the lottery. A search, after he went missing uncovered his school case behind a stone monument by the side of the Parkway. Later his body was found in a nearby suburb and eventually, Stephen Leslie Bradley was convicted and jailed for the crime.

A more recent murder at Deep Creek (just off the Parkway) in 1994 involved the killing of Stephen Dempsey with a bow and arrow by Richard Leonard and the subsequent dumping of his body parts in nearby Pittwater. The case was solved and the murderer also jailed.

It is probably due to the large number of deaths, both from car accidents and murder in conjunction with a lot of local tale-telling that has resulted in so many experiences of ‘hauntings’ along the road. One common haunting is the tale of cars driving through the ghostly apparition of a girl in a white dress, who, it also seems likes to hop into cars after midnight, causing drivers to veer off the road. Many who believe in these hauntings think this ghostly girl is the spirit of ‘Kelly’ who died in a car crash in the 70s. Another ghostly appearance experienced by drivers along the Parkway is that of a phantom nun who sits in the back seat of cars and can been seen in the rear vision mirror on dark, moonless nights.

But whatever it is that has given me the ‘panic attacks’ as I used to drive along the road and still gives me goose bumps, even when I am not driving, I know there is something not right about this road. It can’t just be a co-incidence or the eerie shadows of the trees along the sinister stretch. Or is it?

Have you ever driven along this spooky stretch of road, or had a paranormal experience?