Famous Cases: The Haunting of Maidstone- Rochester Road (A229)

Source:Copyright(Sean Tudor 2001)http://www.lowerbell.com/page12.html)
There are other cases of Road Ghost sitings, the most famous of which is the Blue Bell Hill Ghost. Whether it remains an active haunting no one in recent years has had an encounter, as far as anyone knows. The story is sourced from (Sean Tudors website 2001).

The recent history of the haunting of the Maidstone - Rochester Road (A229) over Blue Bell Hill probably begins with the terrible crash of 19 November 1965, but recent reports may have provided us with some earlier reports which we are still investigating. On a Friday evening a Ford Cortina was heading towards Maidstone with four young women on board. S, an Australian-born shorthand typist was to be married the next day and was driving the other girls to the Running Horse pub, Maidstone, in the hope of meeting some of their boyfriends. J was in the front passenger seat and P and G were in the back. It was never decided what caused the accident, no blame was ever attributed to anyone, but as the Cortina rounded a bend on what is now the Old Road it collided with a Jaguar that was coming up the hill.

J died almost at once, followed by P an hour later in Maidstone and S the following Wednesday. G was hospitalised for over four months but survived. A photographer from the Maidstone Gazette, Mike Pollard, was on his way home when he encountered the carnage and he took some harrowing pictures of the crash scene.

There were only odd mentions of the Ghost of Blue Bell Hill over the next few years, with nothing significant until 1974, when events were to mark a change in the phenomenon. A Rochester man, MG, was driving home in the early hours of Saturday morning when he knocked down a young girl who he thought may have been about ten years old. Distraught, he ran back and picked up the girl who was bruised and crying for her mother. Laying the girl by the side of the road, he tried to flag down passing motorists. When no one would stop, he covered her in his car blanket and dashed to the nearest police station for help. When the police arrived at the scene a few minutes later the girl had gone, though the blanket remained. At first light a search was conducted in the area with dogs, but nothing was ever found.

The Kent Messenger marked the occasion by putting together all the ghost stories to date in an article by Nigel Nelson called 'Drivers beware the Phantom on the Hill'. The next encounter was reported in an article in the Evening Post on Tuesday, 30 August 1977, when two men reported seeing a blond woman in a white evening dress in a slightly dishevelled state waiting as if for a lift. They were from Welling and reportedly had no knowledge of the hill's unusual history