You find yourself alone on a journey, feeling somewhat lost as the houses seemed to have disappeared from the side of the road and all you have seen for the interim has been nothing but trees and shadows thrown from the moon that seems to be playing hide-and-go-seek with the clouds. It is as though you have driven into another world on as dark a night as you can remember and you hope you’ve taken the right road because right now, you feel like maybe you haven’t. Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see her – a white form in the darkness. At first she is there on the side of the road but suddenly, she is standing on the jagged white separator line and you slam hard on the brakes. Miraculously, you miss her. No one should be out here, this far, on their own. No one. You exit the car and see her there, her face ashen white and her expression almost too serene, strangely silent. You ask her if she is alright. She nods. You ask her if she needs a ride. She nods once more. Relieved but still shaken, you let her in and continue on your journey through the long darkness. The silence is too much for you and you attempt to make small talk, but the woman is strangely silent. You ask her questions, but she does not speak. Soon, as you approach the first house that you have seen in a long while, a chill pervades the atmosphere of the car and you cast your glance into the rear view mirror to check on your passenger. Your foot hits the brakes. You stop, wide-eyed, staring into the backseat. You are alone.  Such a tale has been told around many a campfire and is known as one of the most common urban legend motifs. In Maine though, the long dark nights seem longer and darker than in other places. People do take on long journeys all alone. Long before the advent of Interstate 95 linked northern Maine with the rest of New England, there were few ways to travel past Bangor without encountering strange, long and lonely stretches of rough road, especially in the winter. In the early days, there was a particularly winding and dangerous portion of U.S. Route 2A near the town of Haynesville and it cut through a patch of forest known as the Haynesville Woods. Today the road through the Haynesville Woods remains circuitous and dangerous in the winter. Truck drivers and motorists who journey in that area understand that the isolation of the northern Maine woods is unmatched anywhere else in New England and that seeing anything out-of-the-ordinary on a long and lonely night is made more jarring by the idea that you are, indeed, in the middle of nowhere. Most people choose to use the Interstate. As a child, I grew up listening to Maine country music icon Dick Curless sing about the road that might be lined with tombstones instead of trees and it always sent a shiver down my spine. So many died on that road, he claimed, that there could be a tombstone every mile. The song is enjoying new life as Maine singer-songwriter David Mallett (davidmallett.com)  has recorded it on his new album of cover songs, The Horse I Rode in On. Death, it seemed, wandered through the imagination of drivers encountering long, icy patches of road in the winter at high rates of speed. Where the imagination and Death join hands, legends soon follow. In a 1990 article in the Bangor Daily News, journalist Tom Webber detailed the groundbreaking work of students working for the University of Maine Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, scouring the back roads and interviewing old-timers about the lore of their land before they passed away and the knowledge was irretrievably lost. Those interviews detail a legend concerning two standard motifs in folklore – the woman in white and the phantom hitchhiker. Every town or city in New England seems to have its own Woman in White story. She might haunt a graveyard or an old mansion, but in the wilds of Maine, she is often encountered on the loneliest portions of the road by a driver in the dead of nig