The Empty Car on Highway 67: A Chilling Folklore Tale of a Driver Who Vanished Mid‑Journey, a Running Engine, and a Road Said to Claim the Living at Night

There’s a stretch of Highway 67 in rural Arkansas that looks like any other at first glance.

Pine trees crowd the edges, ditches collect rainwater and beer cans, and at night the stars lean close enough that truck drivers sometimes turn off their radios just to hear the hum of their own engines.

Most miles of that road forget you the moment you pass.

But there’s one bend—just outside Newport—where people say the night remembers.

That’s where, years ago, a silver Toyota Camry sat with its engine running and its driver gone.

And that’s where folks around Jackson County started telling the story of Lisa Carter and the car that kept running.

I. The Idling Camry

It was a little after two in the morning on a cold November night, the kind of cold that makes exhaust turn into ghost breath.

A long‑haul trucker, twenty years on the road, was pushing his rig north on Highway 67. He knew this route well: which gas stations stayed open, which curves hid deer, which patches of darkness felt thicker than others.

As his headlights swept the shoulder, something bright flashed back: another set of lights, already on.

A silver Toyota Camry sat just off the asphalt, nose pointed toward the blackness ahead, headlights burning a pale tunnel into nothing.

The trucker slowed out of instinct. Late‑night breakdowns were common out here.

But as he rolled past, something about the scene bit at him.

The driver’s side door was standing slightly ajar.

No one sat behind the wheel.

The faint plume from the exhaust pipe told him the engine was still humming.

He eased back onto the gas, drove to the next gas station, and pulled in under harsh fluorescent light.

From there, he dialed 911.

“I’m telling you,” he said to the dispatcher, “the car’s running and nobody’s there. Door open. It ain’t right.”

II. An Empty Driver’s Seat

Deputies from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office reached the Camry about twenty minutes later.

Their cruisers’ blue and red lights bounced off wet pavement and pine trunks.

They approached cautiously, flashlights cutting through the headlight beam.

The engine was still on.

The driver’s seat was empty.

Inside, there was nothing to suggest panic or violence—only the imprint of a paused life.

The keys were still in the ignition.

A woman’s handbag sat on the passenger seat, unzipped: wallet, cash, cards—all there.

A half‑empty coffee cup rested in the holder, gone cold, a skin forming on top.

In the back seat lay a neatly folded denim jacket, as if its owner had set it there for later.

The registration in the glove compartment gave the car a name: Lisa Carter, twenty‑eight years old, from Newport. A schoolteacher, they would learn later, the kind who stayed late at parent nights and sent home kind notes.

No broken glass. No scattered belongings.

Just a car that looked like the driver had stepped out for one minute and forgotten to come back.

The deputies fanned out, beams sweeping the ground.

In the damp soil beside the driver’s door, they found footprints—single set, size small, leading away from the car.

They were deep, as if made in a hurry.

The trail headed toward a patch of woods beyond the shoulder.

After about fifty feet, the prints faded where the ground firmed up into hard dirt and fallen leaves.

Then—nothing.

Just the flat, indifferent forest floor.

By dawn, the call had gone out to Lisa’s family.

Her mother answered the phone in Newport and felt her world tip.

“Of course I know Lisa Carter,” locals say. “Everybody did.”

That day, the whole county did.

III. The Last Normal Night

Lisa’s mother told deputies that her daughter had left the house around nine the night before.

They’d had dinner. Talked about the kids in Lisa’s class. Shared small complaints about the weather and the price of milk. Nothing heavy. Nothing final.

Lisa said she was heading back to her apartment in town.

It was a short drive—fifteen, twenty minutes at most.

She never arrived.

At a gas station outside Newport, camera footage at 9:30 p.m. caught her on camera: jeans, sweater, hair pulled back, fueling the Camry.

She smiled at the cashier. Paid in cash. Walked out alone.

No one watching that video in those first days saw any trace of fear or hurry.

Friends and colleagues said the same things to reporters and deputies alike:

She was dependable.

Organized.

Careful.

Not the kind of person to disappear on a whim.

No enemies anyone knew of.

No messy relationships.

No signs of running from anything.

It made the car on the roadside feel even more wrong.

If someone like Lisa stepped out of a running car and didn’t come back, something had gotten between her and that driver’s seat.

IV. A Road Becomes a Search Grid

By the afternoon after the Camry was found, Highway 67 had changed.

What was usually a quiet ribbon of asphalt turned into the spine of a search operation.

Cruisers lined the shoulder. Volunteers in bright vests parked along ditches. K‑9 units were led along the tree line, noses down.

Bloodhounds picked up a scent at the footprints by the car and followed it into the woods.

After a short distance, they circled, whined, and lost it.

It was as if Lisa’s path had been clipped.

Searchers combed the area anyway, forming lines to sweep the underbrush, calling her name into the trees.

They found no torn fabric, no phone, no sign of a struggle—just the same woods that had been there the night before, now filled with worry.

At the sheriff’s office, technicians took apart the Camry’s silence.

No signs of forced entry. No broken steering column. Her purse still held cash and cards. Her phone, though, was gone.

Cell records suggested it had been switched off around midnight.

Fingerprints in the car matched Lisa and her family.

On the outside, just above the rear driver’s side door, crime techs lifted a partial print.

Smudged.

Not Lisa’s.

They fed it into databases.

No match came back.

Sometimes, in stories, that’s where the ghost appears.

In this one, it was just a partial pattern—evidence that someone else had touched the car.

Just not someone the system recognized.

V. Voices on the Highway

Deputies knocked on doors along Lisa’s usual route.

An elderly man who lived near the highway, the kind who sat on his porch to watch the world go by, remembered something.

“’Round ten‑thirty,” he said, “I saw headlights stop out there. Didn’t think much. Folks pull over all the time.”

A few minutes after, he heard voices.

Raised.

Too far away to make out words, but close enough to know it wasn’t laughter.

Then silence.

When he looked again, the lights were still there, and eventually he went back inside.

It was easy, at first, to file that away as “one of those things.”

Then it became a piece of a bigger picture.

At the gas station where Lisa had fueled, when detectives watched more of the footage, another detail stepped out of the grain.

Minutes after Lisa pulled away, an older model dark Ford pickup rolled into view, no visible front plate.

Buying gas.

Leaving in the same direction she had gone.

It might have been coincidence.

On country highways, coincidences happen.

But on the second day, with reporters clustering near the taped‑off shoulder and the whole area watching, coincidence started to look more like pattern.

That was when Lisa’s co‑worker mentioned a name.

Eric Dalton.

VI. The Man in the Truck

Lisa had told a colleague about a man who had been hanging around the school parking lot.

Said he wanted to volunteer.

Said he liked kids.

He’d made small talk with her a few times on her way to and from her car. Kept showing up, even after she mentioned it made her uneasy.

His name—according to school staff who’d had to shoo him off campus once—was Eric Dalton.

He was a drifter, people said. Minor arrests for trespassing, disorderly conduct. A man whose life had worn thin at the edges.

Deputies found him in a friend’s living room, the TV flickering blue over his unshaven face.

He admitted he’d spoken with Lisa.

Twice, he said.

Nothing more.

He denied following her.

Claimed he’d been at that friend’s house the night she vanished.

The alibi had holes, but no immediate rips.

Lisa’s mother remembered her mentioning him by name a week earlier.

“Persistent,” she’d said. “Strange.”

Dalton owned a dark Ford pickup.

It became the second shadow on the detectives’ board.

The first was the unknown partial print.

The third appeared on the morning of the third day.

It was a shoe.

VII. The Shoe by the Ditch

Five miles south of where the Camry had been abandoned, a county maintenance worker walked a ditch, checking drains and debris.

At the edge of one culvert, he spotted a black shoe.

It lay by itself in the cold grass, damp with night moisture, as though dropped or tossed.

It was later identified as Lisa’s.

The presence of the shoe there, away from the footprints and opposite the direction of the woods, scrambled the map in investigators’ minds.

If she had walked into the trees, why would her shoe be on a road miles away?

The answer most people have when they hear that part of the story is the one investigators settled on then:

She didn’t walk.

Someone took her.

In another vehicle.

Likely a truck.

A dark Ford pickup with a driver she knew only well enough to name.

VIII. The Diner and the Napkin

On the evening of that third day, the phone rang at the sheriff’s office.

A woman from a nearby county said she’d seen someone who looked like Lisa at a roadside diner the day before.

She had been unsure, then couldn’t get the image out of her head.

The deputies drove out.

The waitress remembered the pair before they even finished describing them.

The young woman had come in with an older, heavyset man. He’d driven a dark pickup. He didn’t talk much. Paid in cash. Ate fast.

The woman—late twenties, long brown hair, slim, wearing a sweater too light for the cold—kept her eyes down, hands clasped.

“She looked like she wanted to be somewhere else,” the waitress said.

At one point, the woman had gone to the restroom by herself.

When she returned, she set a folded napkin on the table. Not under a cup, not misplaced—placed.

After the couple left, the staff cleared the table like any other. They threw the napkin away with the rest.

Only later, when the news showed Lisa’s picture, did the waitress remember that small, desperate gesture and wish she’d opened the napkin before the trash bag swallowed it.

Detectives pulled nearby security footage.

A camera over the bay doors of a neighboring auto shop caught a clip of a dark pickup pulling away onto the highway. The plate was too blurry to read.

On the passenger‑side fender, though, the truck had a distinctive dent.

The kind you can match if you have the right vehicle to put next to it.

The right vehicle belonged to Eric Dalton.

IX. Hair in the Seat

Dalton was brought in again.

He still insisted he’d done nothing wrong.

He still said he’d been at his friend’s house “most of the night.”

When detectives talked to the friend a second time, the story shifted.

Yes, Dalton had been there.

No, he hadn’t stayed put.

He’d left for “a few hours,” the friend admitted, and come back around two in the morning.

Dalton’s truck, parked in the friend’s yard, bore a dent on the passenger‑side fender.

The same shape seen in the diner footage.

Investigators seized the truck.

Forensics went over it inch by inch.

In the fabric of the passenger seat, woven into the fibers like threads of a story that wouldn’t let go, they found strands of long brown hair.

DNA said what everyone in that lab already suspected:

It was Lisa’s.

At that point, it was no longer if Dalton had been with Lisa after her car sat idling on the highway.

It was when, how long, and why.

Dalton offered an explanation that made the back of people’s necks prickle.

He said he’d come across her car after an argument she’d been having with “some guy” on the roadside. According to him, she’d gotten into his truck willingly, upset and needing a ride.

He claimed he’d dropped her off near the state line.

Couldn’t say where exactly.

“Somewhere out that way.”

When pressed, he stumbled over distances and times like someone trying to tell a story they hadn’t rehearsed enough.

Search teams combed the vague places he mentioned.

Nothing.

No Lisa.

No clothes.

No sign she’d ever stood in those ditches.

Without a body or a clear cause of death, the law found itself in one of those gray places where suspicion is thick but proof is thin.

Folklore, however, is more confident.

X. The Bones by the River

Two months later, hunters walking near the White River came across something the forest had half‑hidden.

Bones.

Scattered, partly covered by leaves and brush.

Nearby, on the ground and caught in roots, were items: a watch, jewelry, pieces of clothing that had once been on a living person and had since become markers.

Lisa’s family identified them as hers.

Dental records confirmed the rest.

The medical examiner, faced with what time and weather had done, had little to work with. No obvious bullet wounds. No clear fractures from a blunt instrument. No ligature marks that survived.

“Undetermined,” the report said.

Not a neat line in a case file.

Not a story with a cause to match the effect.

For Lisa’s family, the river gave back what the highway had taken away, but it did not explain.

Dalton was never charged.

Everyone in the county knows that part.

Without cause of death, without more than hair in a truck seat and a diner sighting, the district attorney’s office balked.

A case built on feeling alone cannot stand in a courtroom, no matter how many people share that feeling.

Dalton eventually left the area.

Maybe he moved to another county.

Maybe another state.

Maybe another strip of highway where a dent on a fender and a partial print on a door wouldn’t mean anything to anyone who hadn’t lived through this story.

XI. How the Road Tells It

Today, Highway 67 rolls on as it always has.

Trucks pass. Teenagers speed a little too much on empty nights. Deer still dart out when you least expect them.

The piece of shoulder where Lisa Carter’s Camry once idled now shows only tire tracks from newer cars and the scuff of road salt.

But for those who remember that November night, the picture never left:

Headlights stabbing into the dark.

Engine humming with no one behind the wheel.

Driver’s door cracked open like a mouth about to say something and then forgetting the words.

In official records, it’s an unsolved homicide. A missing person case closed only by the discovery of remains. A suspect uncharged.

In local lore, it’s something else:

A warning whispered to daughters about men who seem too interested.

A story truckers tell each other on CB radios when they pass mile marker such‑and‑such after midnight.

They say that if you drive alone along that stretch on a cold night and you see a car on the shoulder with its lights on and its engine still running, you should think of Lisa.

They say:

If you’re going to pull over, lock your doors.

If a stranger in a truck offers help and something in your stomach tightens, listen to that feeling.

And if you ever see someone step away from their car with the engine still idling, call someone.

Because in the story of Lisa Carter and the car that kept running, all it took was one moment between a warm driver’s seat and cold gravel for a safe drive home to turn into a legend.

XII. The Napkin and the Unfinished Sentence

There’s one detail people always come back to when they tell this story, sitting around kitchen tables or leaning on the hood of a car after church:

The napkin.

The one Lisa—if it was her—left folded on the diner table.

By the time anyone thought to unfold it, it was already compacted in a trash bag, buried under a day’s worth of coffee stains and crumbs.

Nobody will ever know what it said.

Her name.

A plea.

A phone number.

Maybe just one word: “Help.”

That napkin has become, in the folk version of this tale, the symbol of every moment when someone had a chance to say, “Something is wrong,” and the world around didn’t hear it in time.

People tell it to remind themselves to look twice at the quiet girl in the booth, at the folded note left behind, at the car that sits a little too long on the shoulder with its lights on.

Highway 67 is just concrete and paint and ditches.

But stories give it something else.

They give it the weight of what happened once, and the chance—if people listen—to keep it from happening again.

So when someone new to the area asks why the locals get quiet when they pass a certain bend late at night, someone will usually say:

“That’s where they found her car running, but not her.

That’s Lisa’s stretch of highway.”

And for a mile or so, the conversation dies down, radios lower, and even people who don’t believe in ghosts feel something in their chest tighten as they look at the road ahead, wondering how a woman can vanish from a car that never stopped running—and how close they are, in their own lives, to leaving behind a story half‑told.