Chapter 1
This creepy story is about a bus that suddenly went missing on a bitterly cold night. Mystery surrounding this journey of the last bus haunt locals even today. Popularly known as the midnight bus.
A bus carrying passengers suddenly disappears from its designated route without any trace. When the bus was recovered, it produces a haunting tale to its investigators.
The last bus on route 375 prepares to leave the Yuan-Ming-Yuan bus terminus of Beijing on a cold wintery night of 14-Nov-1995. The destination of the bus was Xiang-Shan, popularly known as the Fragrant Hills.
Route number 375 is a local bus route of Beijing that takes the bus to the outskirt of the city. This route is a popular route among tourists and holiday seekers.
Onboard the bus was a male driver and a lady conductor. It was their last trip for the day, and the bus was nearly empty with few passengers. The night was bitterly chilly with cold gushes of wind.
Chapter 2
The bus departed from the terminus at the scheduled time and followed the route allocated for the bus. With the passage of time and arrival of bus stops, the passengers disembark the bus. The bus had seven more stops remaining to accomplish its journey toward the destination.
On its next stop at the south gate near the summer palace, four passengers board the bus. Among them were a young couple, a young boy and an old lady.
It was almost midnight, and there was no vehicular traffic on the road as the bus had already reached the outskirt of Beijing. As the bus drove through the wintery night, the passengers could only hear the rumbling of the engine, with an occasional gust of cold wind through the windows.
The young couple sat at the front of the bus in a seat just behind the driver while the boy and the old lady sat in the middle of the bus. The old lady was sitting just behind the young boy.
Chapter 3
At the next stop, all the passengers that had boarded the bus at its terminus disembarked. The bus was left only with these four passengers who had boarded the bus just a stoppage ago. The midnight bus continues on its journey route.
The driver suddenly spots two men waving their hand to stop the bus. That was not the designated stop for the bus, but since it was late in the night and there were no other means of transportation, the driver decides to pick up the passengers brings the bus to a halt.
These men board the bus through the door at the back and position themselves on the last seat. While boarding the bus, passengers observed that there were three persons and not two. The two people were holding a third person between them and helping him climb the bus.
The newly boarded passengers were strange-looking people wearing traditional Chinese dress. Their faces were not clear, and they had long hairs that were covering their face.
Chapter 4
The passengers travelling in the midnight bus felt scared and looked at the newly boarded passengers. They started talking among themselves about the boarded passengers as they realised the presence of a third person as well in between them.
Moreover, their face was not visible and covered with hair. These men were dressed in Chinese traditional costume in the middle of the night.
The lady conductor tried to maintain calm around the concerns of other passengers stating that they may be actors shooting nearby and might have got drunk and lost their route. One of them might be so drunk that the other two needed to support him to the bus.
A couple of stops later, the young couple got off the bus leaving only the young boy, an old lady and the three mysterious-looking passengers sitting on the back seat.
Chapter 5
The old lady was not convinced, by the words of the lady conductor and kept looking back towards those three passengers. The conductor and the driver were chatting among themselves and there was an eerie silence in the bus only to be broken by a sudden gust of cold wind.
Suddenly the old lady stands up and starts shouting at the young boy accusing him of stealing her purse. The boy gets baffled and argues with the lady that he has not stolen her purse.
The old lady grabs the collar of the young man sitting a seat ahead of him and shouts to return her bag immediately. The young boy also starts shouting at her, that he is not a thief and allegedly being framed, by the old lady accusing him of being a thief.
The lady conductor approaches them to calm down the situation arising from the commotion between them. Instead of calming down, the old lady starts shouting and accusing the young man of stealing.
The old lady shouts to the driver to stop the bus at the next stop as she wants to hand over the boy to the police and file a complaint against him for stealing her purse.
Chapter 6
Due to this commotion and fight between passengers, the driver stops the bus at the next bus stop. The old lady drags the boy out of the midnight bus by his collar.
As the bus drove off in the night leaving them behind. The old lady heaved a sigh of relief. The young boy was so furious that he shouted at the old lady that this was the last bus and he would not be able to reach his destination.
The old lady replied calmly, that there is no police station around, and you have not stolen my purse. I am not going to hand you to the police; rather I just saved your life. You would have been in a dangerous situation had you travelled further on that bus.
She continues saying that she had to get off the bus in such a way that nobody raises a doubt especially the passengers sitting at the back ensuring his safety. So I had to lie and create this drama of stealing my purse.
The young boy looks astonishingly at the lady. The lady continues, she had doubts about these passengers, so she kept looking at them. They had pale faces covered with long hair. As a gust of wind entered through the window, she observed that these men did not have feet.
Chapter 7
The old lady said the men sitting in the last seat were not men but ghosts. The young boy was surprised to hear that and started sweating and thanked the old lady for saving his life.
The old lady calls the police station and narrates the entire incident that had happened. The police were hesitant to take any complaint. They told the lady that she might be hallucinated or seeing things in her dreams due to her old age.
The police asked the young boy, and he too confirmed seeing those passengers in odd costume but was not sure about their appearances. He also narrates how the old lady accused him of stealing her purse.They listen to their complaint but do not register it and drop the young boy and the old lady at their respective destinations.
It was discovered the next morning by the staff of the Xiang-Shan bus depot that the last bus that left the Yuan-Ming-Yuan bus terminus of Beijing had not reported. The depot manager searched for the bus in the depot and neighbouring depots thinking that the bus was parked there.
Chapter 8
The last bus plying on route 375 was nowhere to be found. The depot manager searched the entire route of the bus but could not locate the bus. The bus didn’t arrive at the bus depot last night.
It was a serious matter, and the entire bus had disappeared without any trace. The depot manager files a police complaint to locate the missing bus. The police started their investigation and soon came to know about the incident reported last night.
They questioned the old lady and the young man and confirmed from the CC TV evidence that both of them did get off the bus and that bus had left after dropping them. The bus scheduled to pass through four more stops before reaching its final destination.
No one has seen the bus after it left that stop where the young boy and the old lady got off. They searched for other evidence related to the bus but as the area was remote hence there were no more such cameras installed in the route.
Chapter 9
The last bus on route 375 was missing along with their crew and passengers. The media reported this event in the newspaper and broadcasted it on their news channels.
Two days later police recovered the bus submerged in Miyun reservoir about 100 Km away from the bus stop where the young boy and lady disembarked in the outskirts of Fragrant Hills.
The bus was hauled in the presence of police, and it was the same bus that had started from its origin on 14th Nov 1995. Five dead bodies were recovered from the bus, among them were the two crew members and three passengers.
The most astonishing thing about the bodies was that two bodies of the crew members were in normal condition while the bodies of the other three passengers were badly decomposed. The corpses of the three passengers were decomposed so badly that it seemed that they had died long ago.
Chapter 10
The rate of decomposition of body during winter slows down, but the decay of passengers’ body raised questions and seemed strange and mysterious. The police cordoned off the area and analysed all the CC TV footage of the cameras installed at the reservoir but could not find any evidence about the bus.
The fuel allocated to each bus is sufficient to reach their destination, but that cannot take the bus off track by 100 KM. The bus didn’t have that much fuel to drive such a long distance.
Upon investigating the recovered bus, another strange thing was observed, the fuel tank of the bus was filled with blood and not fuel. The bus simply didn’t have sufficient fuel left to ride such a distance.
The incident is a topic of discussion among the citizens of Beijing even today. Such was the effect of this incident that people were afraid of travelling in the bus of this route. Beijing police were not able to solve the case and provide any scientific evidence for the happening.
The strange and mysterious case of the midnight bus, yet remains unsolved.
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