This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/TwinkTheMan on 2026-05-22 06:05:11+00:00.

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The first time I played, I was six years old. I caught my brother, nearly ten years older, sneaking out of the house to take a drive. I didn’t realize at the time, but he only had a learner’s permit. So instead of telling me to get lost, he told me to get in.

Our first stop was to pick up his buddy, Dial, and a girl I never met named Tiffany. Our destination: A bend in Red Bank Road that shot under an overpass of Terwilliger Road.

My brother slowed the car and entered the underpass at an angle before stopping completely. We sat straddling both lanes. I lifted myself up from the backseat and looked through the darkness to see the night light on either end.

“This is so fucked up,” Dial said, “Someone is going to hit us!”

“That’s the point, dingbat, that’s the game,” my brother said, giving Dial a punch on the shoulder.

Tiffany chimed in from the back to ask who was going to say it. “Are you both too chicken?”

“I’ll do it,” my brother said, turning his head straight forward. “Hannah Ann, Hannah Ann.”

And that was it. Nothing happened. I unbuckled and peered through every window I could until Tiffany grabbed my arm and told me to sit down.

Though no one else had said anything, I could tell there was tension in the air. A soup of fear and excitement and danger and morbidity. Eventually, my brother turned the car back on and drove us all home. He’d leave for college three years later.

The second time I played, I was 12 years old. My best friend Bobby and I were riding our bikes in the middle of summer too far from home. We pulled up to the same dark bend on Red Bank Road and Bobby asked if I had ever played Hannah Ann Hannah Ann.

Him saying those words brought the memories from six years earlier into place. I told him I had, now recognizing the scene in front of me.

“Well, want to play?” he asked.

We wheeled our bikes to the center of the underpass and I cleared my throat. In the creepiest voice a 12-year-old boy could muster, I said, “Hannah Ann, Hannah Ann.”

“You have to say the rest if you want it to work!”

“For what to work?” I asked.

“For Hannah Ann to come and hit you with her CAR!” Bobby lunged at me as he said car, causing me to yelp.

He laughed at me, then I laughed, and then we both kept laughing until Bobby cleared his throat. “Ok, here’s how it goes:

Hannah Ann, Hannah Ann, went and took a drive,

She parked her car under a bridge and said her last goodbye."

“It’s a song?” I asked, still giggling.

“No man, it’s a poem. Like a fucking scary poem. You drive here at night and park under this bridge, and she comes to get you.”

We looked down at our bikes and out onto the horizon to see it was just past sunset, light enough to see for a mile in either direction. For all we knew, we might not have even really played.

As we biked home, Bobby told me the story of Hannah Ann.

In the early 90’s a woman named Hannah Ann went on a drive at midnight. In some versions, she was in the process of leaving her husband. In others, her sister was with her. Sometimes there were even two kids in the back seat. But in every version she found herself parked horizontally underneath the Terwilliger Road overpass and eventually got crushed by a truck whose driver had no reason to believe some whacko would be taking up both lanes with all her lights off.

At some point in my early teen years I called my brother to see what version of the story he had heard, but he didn't pick up. My parents and I would find out later that night that he had overdosed after attending a party the night before: a bad batch of ecstasy was what I would hear later.

The third time I played, I was 16 and trying to impress someone of my own. His name was Preston and while I doubted he liked me, he was always free and interested in hanging out to get away from his stepdad.

From the passenger seat, he handed me the joint he had just rolled and lit it for me. “Okay, what version do you know?” Preston asked.

I repeated the same poem Bobby taught me, the one I’d been saying in my own retellings.

“That one’s alright, but I like the one with the sister more,” Preston said, reaching back for the joint before going on to tell it:

Hannah Ann, Hannah Ann knew she couldn’t stay,

So Hannah and her sister Anna tried to run away,

But Hannah’s car stopped and stalled under the overpass,

Until her husband’s truck caught up and killed them in the crash.

“Damn,” I said, “That one is so gay!”

“Dude, you can’t fucking say that!”

“If anyone can say that, it’s me,” I said, trying to get a reaction out of him but he wouldn’t bite. Instead, he asked what I didn’t like about it.

“I don’t know… it’s like this game is supposed to be like Bloody Mary, right? And when you say Bloody Mary three times, it’s like you’re calling her. But when it’s this long poem, are you really calling her?”

“But in your version, she’s the bad one. Like my mom, she had post-partum depression after my sister was born. She didn’t mean to…” Preston trailed off for a second before continuing. “All I’m saying is that if her husband was hitting her or whatever, he should be the bad guy.”

We passed the joint back and forth a few more times before he put it out and packed it in his pocket. 30 minutes must have passed with my car parked like that, facing the wall of the Red Bank Road Underpass. It felt so nice to be with him at that moment.

“Look, Preston, I know you don’t—”

“What the hell was that?” Preston shouted as he pointed out my driver’s side window.

I sighed. “Could you not change the subject anytime I tried to say something? Like really say something?” I asked.

“I’m not fucking joking, dude, just look!”

I turned my head and had to squint through the lingering smoke and condensation. “I don’t see anything.”

“Something was out there. It was like the air out there shifted.” He half-climbed over the center console so his face was inches away from the window. I joined him, his fear successfully infecting me as well.

We heard a click. “What was that?” I whispered.

I reached my arm under him to try and reach the ignition, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Quiet,” he said. “And don’t do anything.”

We kept looking but couldn't discern any movement, or anything at all really.

Preston pulled his sleeve over his wrist and wiped the condensation away from the window, revealing something beyond the glass. Something in the air. A texture.

We got even closer, trying to understand.

Then the brightest light blinded our eyes and a shouting honk flooded the tunnel.

I screamed and Preston jumped up and hit his head on the roof of the car.

“Drive, drive, drive!” he yelled as he collapsed back into his seat at an angle.

I turned the car back on and immediately began backing up at an angle to give myself enough clearance to turn out without hitting the wall.

Instead I made it just a foot before I heard the scraping of metal on metal and even more honking. I threw the car back into drive and peeled out of there.

Unlike the ghostly car of Hannah Ann’s husband, the owner of the truck I just hit was very real and very angry. He chased us for the next five miles alternating between honks and his own brand of expletives.

Preston rolled down the window and stuck his head out. “Hey Dickwad! If you didn’t want to get hit, maybe don’t spend your evening trying to scare a couple of kids you pedophile freak!”

“Why did you have to make him more mad?” I asked right before the truck sped up and hit the rear end of my car. I swerved slightly and regained control. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re gonna get him off our ass,” Preston said as he reached into the backseat and grabbed his backpack. He pulled a three-inch-thick binder out and undid the loose-leaf paper from the rings. “Next time you see a place to turn right, give me a three-second countdown. After one, you turn at full spe—”

Preston’s thought was cut off by another hit to my fender, but I understood what he was thinking. Thirty seconds later I picked up even more speed and said, “Three, two, ONE!”

I turned right and Preston masterfully feathered out each individual sheet of paper. Most just flew around the truck, but one way or another enough of the paper must’ve interrupted his view that he missed the same turn we did.

30 minutes later, I was parked in front of Preston’s trailer. We were both nervous wrecks despite occasionally slipping into fits of crazed laughter. Eventually, he grabbed his backpack and opened up the car door.

Before leaving, he turned to me. He was looking at me, but not really. I started to open my mouth but he spoke first. “I’m sorry I can’t, you know, be that for you. And I know you don’t need me to or whatever, but…”

“But, what?” I asked.

His eyes started to water. “But I’m just too fucked up in the head! My mom’s dead, my sister’s dead, my stepdad hates me, and I can’t even look the only person who’s ever been nice to me in the eye!”

“Preston, I don’t need you to—”

“Don’t. I just can’t. I can’t be your friend or anything else. Don’t come by anymore either.”

He slammed the car door and walked away.

The fourth time I played, I was on the way to my bachelor party. Preston was in the backseat this time. My college roommate, Chris, was to the right of him. I was in the passenger seat while my best friend Daniel drove. We were on the way out of town heading to a cabin up on the mountain.

“You know what we should do before we go?” Preston...

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