Last Sunday Wayne was working from home and was using our SONOS to play one of his Pandora stations. On comes this song I never heard before, but which caught my ear pretty quick: “Phantom 309.”
It wasn’t perhaps the catchiest of tunes, though it was catchy in its own right. It mostly appealed to me because of the subject matter.
It was about a trucker driving a rig he called “Phantom 309.” I’ve always had an infinity for anything trucking. My dad’s family used to own a trucking company called Mroch Movers in Calumet City, Illinois. After his parents passed, my dad closed the business but stayed in the trucking industry. He mostly worked for trucking companies as their safety and compliance guy. When I was little he had a job where he’d go out and investigate the wrecks, document what happened, and try to determine whether it was driver error or equipment failure, etc. Later he trained drivers and made sure companies were compliant with all the various legislation and regulations.
Anyway, growing up I was always around trucks and truckers and loved it. The song brought back happy memories of spending time with my dad at his jobs during my childhood.
The truck’s name and subsequent song title, Phantom 309, was the other reason the lyrics caught my ear. For obvious reasons. It was ghost-y!
But then the song’s storyline took a twist at the end and the truck’s driver, Big Joe, turns out to be a ghost who gives this hitchhiker a ride –and ends up being the reason for his free cup of coffee. (And the reason a bunch of kids on a school bus didn’t give up the ghost many years before.)
Huh. A song about a phantom truck and a hitchhiker? Cool!
It was actually a very sweet song. I found it on YouTube and thought it’d make a great Friday Fun share.
Hope you enjoy!
Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, as well as obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.
Speaking of healing, to learn how she channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.
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