The Hollowville Signal

• Urban legend says if you drive Hollowville Road after midnight, your GPS will suddenly speak in a voice that isn’t yours—and it knows exactly where you’re going to die.
• It started in 2017 when three sophomores from Briar County Community College live-streamed a “haunted highway” run. At 12:03 a.m. the girl in the passenger seat shoved her phone toward the dashboard: the navigation app had renamed itself “Hollowville Signal.” Instead of estimated time of arrival, the screen printed one chilling line:
• YOU WILL ARRIVE IN 14 MINUTES, 27 SECONDS—AND THEN YOU WILL STOP BREATHING.
• The driver laughed, floored the accelerator, and promised chat donations he’d prove the glitch was fake. Thirteen minutes later the headlights cut out. The video froze on a single frame: black asphalt, white fog, and what looked like a second set of hands on the steering wheel—pale, jointed backwards. Viewers heard one final exhale before the stream terminated.
• Rescuers found the empty sedan idling in the middle of the road, doors locked from the inside, engine cold. No footprints. No skid marks. Just the phone still running the same app, now displaying a new destination:
• NEXT PASSENGER: 3.2 MILES.
• Since then the legend mutates online every semester. Someone always claims the Signal hijacks whatever map software you use—Google, Waze, Apple, even offline Russian GLONASS units. The voice is always calm, genderless, and uses your childhood nickname you never told anyone. It offers alternate routes that shave seconds off your trip in exchange for “small compromises.” Miss the exit it suggests and the screen blinks red: COUNTER-OFFER FORFEITED. Nobody knows what happens after that because the recordings cut to static, but uploaders are never heard from again.
• The only consistent survivor story belongs to a pizza-delivery driver named Mateo who followed the Signal’s detour through a cornfield. He says the corn parted into a perfect asphalt lane that wasn’t on any satellite image. At the end stood a 1950s-style diner bathed in sodium light, open but empty except for one waitress whose name-tag read “Route Zero.” She handed Mateo a warm carton of fries and a receipt that showed only a countdown timer starting at 00:10:00. Mateo fled, flooring it back through the field. When he reached the main road the timer hit zero; his rear-view mirror filled with white light, then darkness. The fries were still hot, but the carton was printed with a single logo: a hollow red triangle—the same symbol spray-painted on the missing students’ car.
• Tonight the Signal is trending again under #HollowvilleChallenge. A TikToker with 2.3 M followers has promised to drive the road at exactly 12:00 a.m. PST, donation goals unlocking every spooky mile. His last post shows him pointing at the clock: 11:59 p.m. The screen behind him displays the navigation app—already renamed. The destination line pulses:
• YOU WILL ARRIVE IN 0 MINUTES, 00 SECONDS—AND THEN YOU WILL JOIN US.
• The stream is scheduled to start in seven seconds.
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