High Beech

So a friend is learning to drive, and a part of their insurance conditions is to have a licence holder of at least three years sitting in the passenger seat when they're out and about practising. This was the second time I was playing co-pilot for them so that's nothing new, but what makes tonight different is where we had decided to go...

High Beach is Epping Forest's very own haunted spot. It's home to the pretty common urban myth of that couple innocently making out in a car when all of a sudden they hear a violent banging on the roof - and you know the rest. It's where college students go when they first past their tests to scare the bejesus out of the girls in their group. Not that I've ever been before; still, ten years late is better late than never, eh?

Apart from being in a forest at night (which frankly is scary enough), High Beach has it's own church and graveyard. But the scariest and therefore best thing there is Hangman's Hill itself. This is a place where strange, strange things happen.




So there we were, at the bottom of the hill, engine off. Nothing happened at first, although we then realised that was because the driver had their foot on the brake. Doh. So then we lifted off the pedal... And that's when the car begun to roll...


... UP THE HILL!!!

Believe me, it was weird. So weird we had to do it four more times (and quite amusingly we weren't the only ones there doing so - don't people have better things to do on a Sunday evening?). Now, some people talk about optical illusions and "magnetic hills" but in our scientific opinions (we were both Imperial grads, y'see), it was certainly unexplainable by mere conventional physics. Although my friend's claim that they had felt something on their foot while the car was rolling UP THE HILL(!!!) I did take with a pinch of salt.

It was scary, man. Hold me.