The GTA San Andreas Myth That Turned Out To Be True

Back in 2005, I was almost 15 years old and I was still playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game at this point was over a year old. But I was still spending hours every week playing it. It was during one of these sessions that I experienced a strange and spooky encounter with an old car in the woods.

One weekend back in 2005, I was playing some late night GTA San Andreas. I was out in the southern area of the map, where it is heavily filled with trees, rocks and not much else. Suddenly, a car rolled down a hill. It was old, beat up and its red paint job stood out in the dark forest. I ran up to the car, only to find it was empty!? I didn’t know what happened and was a bit creeped out, so I left the area quickly. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had just run into a ghost car, a popular myth in GTA San Andreas.

Not long after the game was released, players began reporting strange cars they found in the woods. These cars would drive down hills as if they had human drivers on the inside. But when examined, the cars were empty. People began calling these strange automobiles “ghost cars.”

An older video from 2008. These types of videos were huge in the years after GTA San Andreas was released.

Unlike other famous mysteries in GTA San Andreas, like Piggsy or Bigfoot, ghost cars could easily be found. If you run around the woods of GTA San Andreas for long enough you will probably encounter a ghost car.

After my first encounter with a ghost car, I began looking online for information about cars. I quickly found now-long lost posts about the ghostly cars from other fans. Some were telling the truth, telling tales that sounded like my creepy encounter. Other fans seemed to be making stuff up. I distinctly remember one player sharing a “real” story about how a ghost car actually chased them and honked its horn as it weaved around trees, trying to run over the terrified player. Another player said they saw a ghost car and while leaving they ran into a UFO.

While this stuff might sound crazy today, 15 years ago it sounded a lot more plausible. GTA San Andreas seemed impossibly big at the time and it was still a new game. I remember reading these stories and thinking to myself that some of this could be true. At the time the game felt like a puzzle box that nobody had cracked yet.

I, like many other players at the time, spent hours searching the woods and deserts of San Andreas for secrets and creepy creatures. I remember spending way too much time in the foggy woods using my jetpack to coast around, looking for the elusive Bigfoot...