The Mad Trucker Of Copicut Road

We continue our Spooky series with a South Coast legend, the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road.

Copicut Road bisects the Freetown/Fall River State Forest, and it runs through both Freetown and Fall River. Town lines are a bit fuzzy on Copicut Road. The pictures I took were tagged by my camera as "Copicut Road, Massachusetts," with no town provided.

Either way, Copicut Road is a mega-isolated dirt road running 7 miles through a forest. It made it into our Most Isolated Roads In Southeastern Massachusetts article, which has subtitles like "Where to bury a body" and "Where to stumble onto a Satanic ritual."

It is one of the anchors of the Bridgewater Triangle, a paranormal theory about the rural/deep suburban parts of Plymouth and Bristol counties.

It also is the home of a local (sub)urban legend, the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road.

The Mad Trucker doesn't have the celebrity status of other paranormal icons like Bigfoot or Nessie. The spread of his legend is local enough that he (the Mad Trucker has never been seen, but I think of the Mad Trucker as being male... this is made more sexist when stirring in the fact that the only ghost trucker I can think offhand is Large Marge) is known by the road instead of the town.

That's a plus in my book. I like the Mad Trucker. I like him more because he seems to have been invented by someone for whom Fall River (most beloved resident = an axe murderer) wasn't scary enough.

I should add here that rural, suburban and urban people are scared by different things. I used to teach in Boston, for ghetto kids. I'd drag them out into the sticks for field trips or class projects now and then. I picked one kid up at his home for such a trip, and I was a bit uneasy in a Heart Of Darkness way as I drove through the ghetto he lived in. One kid watching me knock on this student's door lost a bet when it turned out I wasn't a cop.

Once we were out in the woods by Monponsett Lake in Halifax, the ghetto kids were the uneasy ones. I noticed, and asked about it. "This," I was told by a kid making a sweeping arm gesture at the forest, "is exactly the kind of sh*t where Michael Myers kills all them white girls." Another student added that "black people have more sense than to be hanging around in places like this."

The Mad Trucker's gig is that he catches people driving down his road and he menaces them. People report seeing a big truck come up behind them with the high beams on. He's blaring the air horn. The victim generally fears being overrun by the truck, so they pull over.

When they do, the truck vanishes.

That's the story you hear. Non-survivors may have a more dreadful tale.

We don't know if the Mad Trucker is Mad in a way that means crazy, like the Mad Poet of Bedlam. We don't know if he is Mad as in angry, like the Mad Rapper. We just know that he's Mad.

Of course we set out to capture the Mad Trucker, because we are fearless journalists who let nothing stand in the way of our pursuit of truth.

Of course we went at 2 PM, because we are absolute cowards.

Amazingly, we thought that we had the guy... on film, even. When we moved in for the kill, however... he waved to us and kept going. 

He wasn't Mad at all, and could actually be considered friendly... especially when I was filming him, and even on my best days, I look like I might kill somebody.

This means that the Mad Trucker Of Copicut Road is still out there.