Scary Stories

Hitchhiking: An Exual Opportunity Terror

My dad is one of those people who has had about 20 different lives. Every so often some random topic comes up and he'll go "Oh yeah, I almost died doing that". This is one of those stories.

As a young man, (1970's) my dad hitchhiked all over the US and Canada. He has plenty of good, bad, and ugly stories from his hitchhiking years, but this one is the scariest I've heard him tell. He was hitching with a girlfriend of his at the time. They were both in their early twenties and making their way across Canada.

A car with four men in it picks them up on a fairly unpopulated highway. They recognize that the men must have been from the nearby Indian reservation and they never spoke a word of English to them, just gestured a ride.

My dad squeezes in between the two guys in the front seat and his girlfriend is squished between two other guys in the backseat. My dad said the pickup happened very quickly, the seating arrangement not what he would have chosen but whatever, they were getting a free ride. Then, as they start to drive, all of a sudden my dad realizes that everyone in the car is really, really drunk. The whole car reeks of alcohol and the men start talking to each other loudly in their native language, and my dad can just tell they are absolutely wasted.

He looks at the driver, who appears to be the least intoxicated (silver lining?) and is trying to decide how to tastefully tell them to drop my dad and his girlfriend off again even though they had just been picked up a minute ago, when his girlfriend starts screaming from the backseat. Both of the men on either side of her had started groping her, and very roughly. She was trapped between them. My dad turns around and starts to yell at the guys/reach back there, but the other front seat passenger (not the driver) starts to grope my dad! My dad starts screaming and swinging around at everyone, but there's not much room in the car and he's outnumbered. And the guy next to him is still trying to get in his pants. Then one of the guys in the backseat whips out a knife and holds it to my dad's girlfriend's throat.

Before my dad can hardly react to that the driver (remember, the least drunk one and the only one who hadn't violated anyone at this point) turns around, hands off the wheel, and punches the knife-holding man really hard right in the face. Stupefied, the guy drops the knife and everyone kind of shuts up, except my dad, who's still yelling and his girlfriend, who is pretty much hysterical at this point. The driver promptly pulls over and my dad and his girlfriend tumble out of the car shaking, barely managing to get their bags out as well before the car speeds off again.

As soon as the car from hell drove off my dad desperately flagged down the next car to come along and told the driver what had just happened. The driver lets them in for a ride and tell them he actually works at the reservation where those guys clearly lived. Trying to calm my dad's girlfriend down, he told them it was unlikely the men would have actually raped her. Apparently drunken groping was a problem on the reservation but not rape (whether this was actually true or not is a mystery).

But then he turns to my dad very seriously and says, "You on the other hand... you're lucky. They found a guy out here just last week who had been hitchhiking. Castrated."