Full Body Chills - Southbound

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

A story about the cursed causeway over Paynes Prairie.SouthboundWritten by Marvin Monroe and read by David Wheeler. Sound design & mix by Brian Crask and produced by David Flowers with production assistance by Anna Kelley & Caleb Haehl.You can read the original story at FullBodyChillsPodcast.com.Looking for more chills? Follow Full Body Chills on Instagram @fullbodychillspod. Full Body Chills is an Audiochuck production. Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Like you. Thanks for tuning in. Gather around now. Gather close. There was this doctor over at St. Agri's who would kill his patients. Oh yes. It was madness. Aren't you afraid the light take might get you?

I'm sorry to listen to you. I'm traveling. I want more of it. I snapped. Totally lost him. He had no. idea what was on those tapes. It was like a song.

Allie and the outcast. So gather around. And listen. Close. I don't know how to start this. I've been sitting here for three weeks, trying to find the right words, and I keep deleting everything I write.

My physical therapist says writing things down might help. She means like a journal. She doesn't mean this. But here I am anyway. because I need someone besides me to know what happened on that stretch of highway south of Gainesville. I need someone to believe me. I'm not sure you will. I wouldn't.

My name is Earl Pruitt. I'm 52 years old. I've been driving long haul for 26 years, which means I put more miles on me than most cars ever see. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. I live alone since my wife Sandra left in 2019. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because nothing dramatic ever happened,

and she got tired of waiting for it. I don't blame her. I have a daughter named Cassie who calls me on Sundays, when she remembers. I have a cat named Bruiser who is not actually mean at all. I tell you all this, because I want you to understand that I'm not the kind of man who imagines things. I'm not a superstitious man. I don't watch horror movies.

I think ghost stories are for children. I say all of this because of what I'm about to tell you. The run was supposed to be simple. I transported human remains. Not in the way you're thinking. Nothing illegal. Nothing gruesome. Or, well, not in the way most people think of gruesome.

I worked a specialty freight contract with a logistic. company out of Knoxville that coordinated body donation programs. When someone dies and donates their body to medical science, someone has to move that body to the university or research center where it's going to be used. That someone, for the better part of five years, was often me. Refrigerated cargo unit in the back, proper manifest. all above board.

I signed NDAs and everything. You get used to it. That's the honest answer when people ask how I did it. You just get used to it. They're not people anymore, not in the way that matters to the living. They're donations, contributions. I respected that.

I treated every run like I was carrying something important because I was. The pickup was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a regional medical center that partnered with a body donation network. My contact up there was a man named Gerald, 40s, always wore a fleece vest no matter the weather. He met me at the loading dock. We did our standard paperwork, the cargo was loaded, and I was on my way south by 7 in the morning on a Tuesday in late October.

And here's the thing, the thing I keep coming back to. Gerald handed me my manifest, and we both signed it, and I folded it, and I put it in my glove box, and I didn't read it carefully. I was tired. I'd been on the road since four that morning, deadheading up from a drop in Baltimore. I had coffee. I had a breakfast sandwich from a gas station that I regretted within the hour. I had 14 hours of driving ahead of me

and a delivery window the next morning at the University of Florida College of Medicine. I did not count the bodies. I did not verify the number against the manifest. I just drove. That's the part I'll carry the rest of my life. The first eight hours were fine. Fine is boring.

Fine is the whole job, usually. I came down through Virginia and into the Carolinas, stopped for fuel and lunch outside of Santee, got back on I-95 and made the cut west toward I-75 south of Jacksonville. By the time I crossed the Florida State line, it was just past six in the evening, and the sky had gone the color of a bruise. I want to be clear about something.

I had slept well the night before. I wasn't running on fumes or pushing through fatigue warnings the way guys do when they're chasing miles. I was tired the way you're tired after eight hours of highway driving. That low, dull kind of tired that sits behind your eyes but doesn't threaten you. I've driven through worse. I know my limits. Or I thought I did. It started around Alatua County.

That's what I keep telling people, and that's what they keep not understanding. Because to most people, Alachua County is just another stretch of Florida interstate, flat, dark, lined with live oaks draped in Spanish moss that hang over the highway like fingers reaching for the road. But truckers know, if you run I-75, south of Gainesville, regular enough. You start to hear things. Not ghost stories the way civilians tell them, not floating white ladies and rattling chains. Truck or ghost stories are different. They're practical. They're about what happened to a guy you almost know. A friend of a friend,

someone who drove for a different company but ran the same corridor. The thing about that part of Florida is that the land itself doesn't behave. Paines Prairie sits just south of Gainesville, a big, flat wetland basin, part of a state preserve, and the highway runs right across the top of it on a long causeway. 400 years ago, it was a lake, then it drained, then it flooded again, then it half drained, It can't decide what it is. And on foggy nights, drivers say the prairie gives things back. I'd heard the stories, the way you hear all the stories on the road,

passed between men at truck stops, told in the particular flat voice that means the teller is trying to sound like he doesn't believe it. A driver sees a figure walking the shoulder of the collar. in a fog so thick you can't see the guardrail. He slows down. It doesn't turn around. It just keeps walking. Same pace. Same direction. Regardless of whether he speeds up or slows down or flips his brights.

And then the fog closes in and it's gone. multiple drivers, multiple years, always the same stretch, always the same fog. I'd also heard the one about the hitchhiker, outside of Mikanopee, picked up after midnight, rides 20 or 30 miles, talks the whole time about local roads and local history like someone who's been walking this land for a very long. time. And then the driver looks over at a rest area and the seat is empty. Door never opened. No sign they were ever there. And I'd heard about the CB static, a specific dead zone just north of the Williston Road exit where your radio goes to white noise. And if you're unlucky, you hear something underneath it, not words, just breathing, slow and even, the way you breathe when you're asleep, or when you've been asleep for a very long time. I'd filed all of it away

under the usual category. Exhausted men, empty roads, overactive imaginations. That's always the answer. That was always enough. It was on the causeway, somewhere over the black water of the prairie, that I thought about Lavinia Fisher. I don't know why she came to me then. She doesn't belong to this part of Florida. She's a South Carolina ghost, Charleston, early 1800s. She and her husband ran a roadhouse outside the city. And the story goes, she had a way with traveling men. She'd invite them in,

offer them hospitality, and by morning the guest room was empty. And the ground out back was a little less even than it had been. She was hanged in 1820. She went to the gallows in her wedding dress. And her last words were something about carrying messages to the devil. That's the line that travels.

That's why truckers know her name. She's one of many. That's what I've come to understand since that night. This stretch of Florida, this particular corridor of highway, this basin of old water and fog, it collects them. Whatever Lavinia Fisher

became after 1820. She's not alone down here. The prairie draws wandering things the way low ground draws water. You drive through it enough times and you start to feel it. That sense that the road you're on is older than the asphalt.

That the things moving through the dark alongside you have been moving through this dark for a very long time. I didn't believe any of that. when I crossed the causeway that night. I believe it now. I started to fall asleep somewhere around mile marker 384. Not the hard, sudden kind,

not a wall hitting you. The soft kind, the gradual kind, the kind that's dangerous precisely because it doesn't announce itself. It comes in layers. First, your eyes feel heavier than they should, and the road starts to look a little longer,

a little more hypnotic, the center line becoming something rhythmic rather than informational. Then the sounds in the cab shift, and they blend together into something almost musical, almost comfortable. I turned the radio up, I cracked the window, cold October air hit me,

and I blinked, and I felt sharp for about ten minutes, and then the sharpness bled away again. That's when I couldn't remember the number. I'd been tired when I signed the manifest. I'd folded it and put it in the glove box without reading it, and now I was on a causeway over a black wetland in the dark, and I could not remember what number was on that paper.

I reached for the glove box. That's when I felt the truck drift. Small, just a few feet, just a gentle lean toward the shoulder. I corrected it without thinking the way you do after 26 years, There's muscle memory taking over. And then I heard something. From behind me. From the cargo unit.

Refrigerated cargo units are not quiet. The compressor runs constantly. A low mechanical drone you stop hearing after the first hour. Road noise. Engine noise. Wind noise. There is always sound in a train. truck cab.

What I heard was underneath all of that. Three taps on the inside wall of the unit. Slow. Deliberate. Evenly spaced. I told myself it was cargo shift. I told myself a strap had worked free. Something had settled. I was reaching for that explanation.

the way you reach for a light switch in the dark. Desperate. Automatic. When I heard it again. Slower this time. I have driven through tornadoes. I have driven through ice on a mountain pass with a 40-foot trailer behind me. I have never, in 26 years, felt fear the way I felt it in that moment.

Not the sharp kind, not adrenaline, but the deep, cold kind. The kind that starts in the center of your chest and spreads outwards till your hands go numb on the wheel. I looked in my side mirror. I don't know what I expected to see. Rode behind me. Dark. Fog. What I saw was a shape. at the rear corner of the cargo unit.

Not outside the truck, not on the road behind me, at the corner, like something was hanging on to the back of my truck. My arms went straight and out, the way they do when you feel yourself about to fall, and I gripped the wheel a little too hard. Then the roar of rumble strips snapped me out of focus.

My eyes leapt back to the window, and by the time I wheeled, in line, wiped the sleep from my face, and looked back. There was nothing there. I can't tell you what I saw, because I wasn't sure myself. Before I could even fill in the gaps, my mind had poured over poor excuses like how dark it was, how it pressed to the windshield like heavy sleet, how I was due for good sleep, how sometimes when you go that long without a wink, Blurry shadows stick to your eyelashes. It was only the trees.

That's what I thought. Only the shade of twisted limbs waving through the fog. I had just a moment to enjoy that thought when... A sound like scattered hail hit my truck. It was heavier than rain, but with fewer notes. more like a drummer kicking a bass pedal, a boom, played along the trailer at uneven time. It wasn't the road. Any bump or crack would have passed my front wheels first.

This was coming from the back. It wasn't cargo. Cargo moves around from side to side, front to back, with the weight of the truck. This was coming straight for me, getting louder and closer. And it wasn't my imagination. It was nearly on top of me,

just over my shoulder, maybe in between the gap that separates the cab from the trailer. And then, I don't know how else to say this. There was a short, fast drag, like something scratching across the top of the truck, a tree branch or fingernails, sliding off the side. I looked out the passenger mirror where I'd seen something before, half hoping, half dreading to see some shape tumbling behind me.

There was blissful silence and an empty road. Once more I turned to the land. in front. Then I got a flashback to eighth grade American ball and to Joey Turnicle hurling a fast one at my head. I remember swinging and ducking my entire body to every muscle suddenly pulling sideways as I sat behind the wheel. In the mirror, on my driver's side, twisted, wet, pitch black hair flew through the wind. And underneath that, under that tangle of darkness,

was something white as cowhide. I never saw her eyes. She, or it, moved too fast, too close. Out of my periphery and smashing at the window, were five long nails and a human hand. I yanked the wheel too hard. The truck came back onto the road and kept going, left, crossing the center line, and I overcorrected and felt the trailers start to do the thing trailers do when you overcorrected speed,

that slow, terrible pendulum swing. The back end wanting to go one way while the cab wanted to go another. I was doing 65. The Causeway had no shoulder worth speaking of. On either side of me was the darkness of Payne's prairie dropping away below the road's edge. I remember the sound the tires made. I remember my hands on the wheel. I remember the trailer swinging and the cab tilting

and then a sound like the world tearing itself in half. And then nothing. I came back once. before the paramedics reached me. I don't know how long it was. Seconds, maybe. Maybe less. I was on my side.

The cab was on its side. Glass somewhere. The smell of coolant and wet grass. And something else underneath it. Something cold and chemical. The specific smell of the refrigeration unit. The cargo doors were open. Not broken open.

Not torn off by the impact. Open. The way a door opens when someone turns a handle. I couldn't move my head. I couldn't move anything. But I could see through the gap where the windshield had been. out onto the road, lit by one remaining headlight that was somehow still alive, throwing a long, pale beam across the pavement.

There was a figure in the light, standing at the open doors of the cargo unit, facing away from me, whatever it was. It was dressed in something that didn't fit all the way around, like an apron or hospital gown. Its head was turned just slightly at an angle that suggested it was aware of being watched. It did not move. It did not run.

It simply stood there at the open doors of my cargo unit, in the headlight beam, on a causeway over Payne's prayer, with all the patience of something that has been waiting a very long time and has nowhere better to be. Then it turned its head toward me, and I went back into nothing. I woke up in UF Health Shans Hospital in Gainesville, broken ribs, fractured wrist, a concussion they called moderate, but felt like someone had replaced my brain with wet sand. The paralysis I'd felt at the scene, the total inability to move, had resolved by the time I was admitted.

They called it spinal shock, temporary. My spine was bruised, but intact. They told me I was lucky. I told them I understood that. I did not tell them everything I understood. A detective came to ask about the accident. I told him I'd seen something in my side mirror and swerved. He wrote that down without looking up.

He asked if I'd been drinking. I said no. He asked if I'd been on the road too long. I said I was within my hours. He nodded and left. On day three, a man from the logistics company came. Very calm, very professional. He said there had been a documentation discrepancy at the point of pickup.

He said it had been corrected. He said he hoped I understood these things happen. I asked him what the manifest had said. He said the matter was under review. I asked him about the cargo doors, whether the investigators had noted how they'd been opened. He looked at me for a moment, and then he looked at his folder,

and he said he couldn't speak to the specifics of the scene report. I did not sign the paper he left with me. I called Gerald in Harrisburg four times over the... the following two weeks. He never called back. I tried the main number for the Harrisburg facility on day 12 and was told that Gerald no longer worked there and that they couldn't discuss specifics of past freight arrangements.

My copy of the manifest was destroyed in the crash. The investigators told me, through the logistics company's representative, that the discrepancy in the count at the scene had been attributed to a processing error at pickup. They said the official count on delivery was correct. They said the matter was closed. They did not tell me what the official count was.

They did not explain the cargo doors. I've been home for six weeks now. Bruiser sleeps on my feet. Cassie calls more than Sundays. My physical therapist says I'm making excellent progress. I don't drive anymore. Not for work, not long distances. I sit in the house and I think about Paines Prairie

and the fog that comes up off the water and the stories that get past between tired men in the dark. Here's what I think happened. Not what I can prove, what I think. I think that stretch of Florida collects things. I think the roads there are older than the roads, if you understand what I mean by that. I think whatever moves through that land at night

has been moving through it longer than there have been highways to move on. I think they're drawn to the corridor, the way they've always been drawn to roads, to travelers, to men moving alone through the dark, carrying things. I think something got on my truck. I think it tapped on the wall and crawled on the side so I would stop, pull over, slow down, or crash. I don't know where it was going,

whether Gainesville was a destination or just a waypoint. I think about those stories. The hitchhiker who knows too much about the local roads, the figure on the causeway that walks the same direction as traffic and never turns around. I think about how many drivers have passed through that. corridor in the last hundred years and how many of them heard something they couldn't explain and filed it under exhaustion and kept going. I think the roads through that part of Florida have been a transit route for a very long time and I think I was carrying a passenger who'd been waiting

for exactly this kind of run. Sealed cargo, a driver who didn't count. a foggy night on a causeway with water on both sides. The perfect conditions. I've told this story, the whole story, to two people in my life. My daughter Cassie, who listened carefully, and then said she thought I should talk to someone. And now you. Maybe Cassie's right. Maybe the concussion did something to my memory.

Maybe the paralysis, the shock, the cold of the cab. Maybe all of that manufactured something my brain needed to explain why my truck flew off the rails. Maybe. But I need you to understand that I am a man who has driven a million and a half miles in 26 years. I know what I saw in. that mirror. I know what I heard in that cargo unit. I know the cargo doors were open when they had

no reason to be open, and I know the count was wrong. If you drive through Alachua County at night, and I mean especially if you drive through it at night, on the causeway over the prairie in the fog, keep your windows up. If something moves in your mirror that doesn't have any business moving, you keep your hands steady on the wheel. You do not swerve, and you don't stop for anyone on the shoulder.

I'm telling you because I need someone to know Whatever used my truck to get where it was going, I think it hitched a ride in someone else. Full Body Chills is an audio chuck production. This episode was written by Marvin Monroe and read by David Wheeler. Sound design and mix by Brian Crask and produced by David Flowers with production assistants from Anna Kelly and Caleb Hale. This story was modified slightly for audio retelling,

but you can find the original in full on our website. I think Chuck would approve.