'I crashed because of a ghost'

HARD AS it may be to take this story seriously, it appears that a ghost is being blamed for a spate of crashes, the latest of which involved a biker.

Paranormal researches have even investigated the claimed sightings of the ghostly apparitions of a girl aged between three and five in Victorian dress who apparently appears late at night near the accident blackspot.

David Taylor, chairman of the Parasearch group, said: “Although people who reported sightings didn't actually crash they had to swerve round the apparition.

"It could be an optical illusion of some sort.

"The area around there is an accident blackspot and there have been some serious incidents, so maybe they had all seen the same thing.”

The apparition apparently appears on Oldnall Road, between Wollescote and Cradley in the West Midlands, late at night.

"One person said he'd swerved to avoid a child in old-fashioned - possibly Victorian - clothes standing in the middle of the road; and then, when he looked back, there was nothing there," David added.

A West Midlands Police spokesman said the most recent incidents included a crash involving a motorbike and a car.

Taylor told The Mirror: “In all honesty we are probably not talking about the ghost (or apparition as we prefer) as a spirit of the dead, but rather as a reaction to a complex series of stimuli that results in the witnesses having different experiences from the same stimuli, what that stimuli is, is the really interesting question!”