We Stopped at a Service Station That Had Been Closed for Twenty Years

Editorial classification: Fiction. This story is written in the form of a realistic first-person account and is not presented as verified testimony.

My sister and I still disagree about how long we were inside the service station.

She says twelve minutes. I remember at least half an hour. The car recorded eleven minutes and forty-three seconds with the engine running, the headlights on and neither of us visible through the windscreen.

That would be strange enough.

The worse part is that the service station had been gone for twenty years.

The road closure

This happened in October 2022. My sister, Emilia, and I were driving south after clearing our aunt’s house outside a small town in Värmland. We had spent the entire day sorting furniture, old clothes and boxes of photographs. By the time we left, it was nearly eleven at night.

Neither of us had slept properly. Rain had been falling since the afternoon, and the road reflected our headlights like black glass.

About forty minutes into the drive, traffic stopped.

A police car blocked the road ahead. An officer in a reflective jacket walked between the vehicles and told each driver that a lorry had overturned several kilometres farther south. The road would remain closed for hours.

Our navigation app suggested a detour through the forest.

I almost ignored it. The route was narrow and added thirty-seven minutes, but the alternative was waiting until morning. Emilia wanted to get home, so I turned around and followed the blue line on the screen.

The first part of the detour looked normal. We passed two farms, a dark church and a row of red wooden houses. Then the streetlights ended.

The road narrowed until branches brushed both sides of the car. There were no painted lines and no signs except small yellow markers nailed to trees.

After twenty minutes, the navigation voice stopped speaking.

The map still showed our position, but the road beneath the arrow disappeared. The blue route continued through a blank grey area.

“That is reassuring,” Emilia said.

I laughed, but I had already slowed down.

Bergs Service

At 12:47, we saw the lights.

A petrol station stood around a bend, alone between the trees. Its sign read BERGS SERVICE in faded red letters. Only half the neon worked, so from a distance it looked as though the building was called ERGS ERVI.

Two old fuel pumps stood beneath a low metal roof. A white delivery van was parked beside them with its rear doors closed.

The station looked outdated but open. Warm light filled the windows. A handwritten sign advertised coffee, sandwiches and motor oil.

“I need the toilet,” Emilia said.

I pulled in.

The moment the tyres crossed from asphalt onto the forecourt, the rain stopped hitting the windscreen.

It did not slow gradually. The sound simply ended.

Rain continued falling beyond the roof, visible in the headlights, but none seemed to reach the car.

I remember noticing that and deciding the roof must extend farther than it appeared.

Inside, the station smelled of coffee, rubber and floor cleaner. A small radio played quietly behind the counter. The shelves held chocolate bars, tins of soup, paper maps and cassette tapes in plastic cases.

There was no card terminal.

An older woman sat behind the counter reading a newspaper. She wore a dark green cardigan and had silver hair tied at the back of her neck.

She looked at us for several seconds before saying, “You came from the closed road.”

It was not a question.

I said we had.

“Then you should not continue behind the white van,” she replied.

I glanced through the window. The van still stood beside the pumps.

“Does it belong to someone here?” I asked.

The woman folded her newspaper.

“It leaves when people leave.”

The clock above the counter

Emilia went through a narrow door marked TOILET. I chose two coffees and a packet of biscuits.

The wall clock above the counter showed 12:51.

I checked my phone. It also showed 12:51, but there was no mobile signal. The navigation app had closed by itself.

“Cash only,” the woman said.

I found a hundred-kronor note in my wallet. She examined it carefully, holding it up to the light.

“New money,” she said.

I thought she was joking.

She gave me change and printed a receipt from a machine beneath the counter. The printer made a slow grinding noise.

The receipt said:

17 OCT 2002 — 00:52

I pointed out the wrong year.

The woman looked at the receipt, then at me.

“It is right in here,” she said.

Before I could answer, Emilia called my name from the toilet corridor.

Her voice sounded frightened.

I found her standing beside an open door at the end of the corridor. Behind it was not a storage room or office. It was another section of road.

Wet asphalt stretched into darkness beneath a yellow streetlamp. The road looked exactly like the one outside, but there was no wall, doorway or building frame around it. The corridor simply ended at the edge of the road.

A car stood beneath the streetlamp.

It was mine.

I could see two people sitting inside.

One was in the driver’s seat. The other sat beside her.

They had their backs to us, but Emilia gripped my arm hard enough to hurt.

“That is my coat,” she whispered.

The woman behind the counter called, “Close that door.”

I did.

Do not follow the van

We left without finishing the coffee.

The white van was gone.

Rain struck the car as soon as I opened the driver’s door. It was so loud that Emilia had to shout for me to start the engine.

The navigation app returned. The route line showed we were twelve kilometres from the main road.

I reversed away from the pumps.

As we reached the exit, headlights appeared behind the station. The white van rolled slowly around the side of the building and stopped across the road.

Its engine was running. The driver’s side was too dark to see through.

Then it moved forward.

I remembered the woman’s warning and turned in the opposite direction, even though the navigation app immediately ordered me to make a U-turn.

The van followed.

It remained the same distance behind us no matter how fast I drove. On straight sections, its headlights stayed small and steady in the mirror. On bends, they vanished and reappeared without ever falling farther behind.

“Take the next left,” Emilia said.

There was no left turn on the map, but a narrow gravel road appeared between the trees. I turned without braking.

The van continued past on the main road.

For several seconds, we could see it through gaps in the forest.

There was no driver.

The front seats were empty, but the van continued along the road as though someone were steering it.

The gravel road descended sharply. The navigation screen spun, lost our position and then went black.

We drove for perhaps five minutes before the trees opened.

We were back at the police roadblock.

Only now we were approaching it from the south.

The impossible arrival time

The same officer stopped us.

He looked confused when I told him we had taken the forest detour.

“That road does not reconnect here,” he said. “It ends at an old quarry.”

I showed him the navigation history. The app displayed a continuous blue line from the roadblock into the forest and back to our current position.

The officer checked the time.

It was 1:03.

We had left the roadblock at approximately 11:35. The app said the detour should take more than an hour. We had stopped for coffee, been followed by the van and somehow returned from the opposite direction.

Yet less than ninety minutes had passed.

That did not match either of our memories.

Emilia began crying. The officer asked whether we had taken medication or consumed alcohol. We had not. He tested me anyway. The result was zero.

He told us to park near the patrol car until the road reopened.

At 3:20, the damaged lorry was moved and traffic began flowing again.

We reached home shortly before dawn.

The dash camera

My car had a small dash camera that recorded whenever the engine was running.

The next afternoon, we watched the footage together.

The video showed the road closure and the start of the forest detour. At 12:46, the station lights appeared ahead.

But there was no building.

The car turned into an empty gravel clearing surrounded by trees. The headlights shone across weeds, broken concrete and the remains of two fuel-pump bases.

The car stopped.

Neither door opened.

For eleven minutes and forty-three seconds, Emilia and I sat motionless in the front seats.

Our faces were difficult to see because of reflections, but neither of us seemed to speak or move.

At 12:58, both of us turned our heads toward the back seat at exactly the same time.

Then the video broke into static.

When the image returned, we were driving away from the clearing.

A white van followed us.

The footage ended before we took the gravel turn.

The memory card contained no file for the following six minutes.

What stood there before

We returned in daylight with Emilia’s husband.

The clearing was easy to find. The concrete foundations matched the dash-camera footage. Rusted bolts marked where the pumps had once stood.

There was no building.

At a nearby village shop, an elderly man told us the site had been Bergs Service. It had closed in 2002 after the owner, a woman named Karin Berg, disappeared.

The building was demolished the following year.

I showed him the receipt.

He read the date twice.

“That was the night she vanished,” he said.

He found an old local newspaper in a folder beneath the counter. A small photograph showed Karin Berg standing in front of the station.

She wore a dark green cardigan.

Her hair was silver and tied at the back of her neck.

The article said her white delivery van had also disappeared.

Neither Karin nor the vehicle had been found.

The receipt changed

I kept the receipt in a plastic sleeve.

For almost two years, it showed the coffee, biscuits, date and time.

Then, in March 2025, Emilia asked me to photograph it for a friend who worked with local archives.

The printing had changed.

The items were gone.

There was now only one line beneath the station name:

TWO ARRIVED. THREE LEFT.

I checked the dash-camera file again.

At 12:58, when Emilia and I turned toward the back seat, the reflection in the windscreen became briefly clear.

A woman was sitting behind us.

Silver hair. Green cardigan. Hands folded in her lap.

She was looking directly into the camera.

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