You’re driving down Strasburg Street in Detroit on a warm night. It’s 2 a.m. and as you approach a stop sign, you notice how desolate and quiet everything is. You glance to your left and see a small girl standing on the sidewalk. Worry sets in and a little bit of uneasiness as she stares at you. Something doesn’t feel right about her. Why is she out this late and all alone?
The above retelling of the Knock-Knock Road story is the typical tale circulating these days and made popular by the book, Weird Michigan by Linda Godfrey. According to the book, teens and thrill-seekers have been driving down Strasburg Road for years hoping to have their car knocked on by the ghostly child. The story has supposedly been around since the 1940s. The legend says the little girl was killed on that road and she now haunts it, always looking for the driver who killed her.
The legend has been so popular over the years that police have given it extra attention, especially at Halloween. No story has ever surfaced to validate the death of the little girl on that street or suggest an origin for this tale, so for all it’s worth, it’s nothing more than another spooky, Michigan urban legend.
Is the true Knock-knock Road lost?
Another version of the legend tells about a couple parked in their car somewhere on Grosse Ile. The area had a “Lover’s Lane,” where people would go to make out. The woman told the man nothing romantic was going to happen between them, so he pushed her out of the car and shut the door. Unfortunately, her hair or dress got stuck in the door and she was dragged for miles and killed. Some say it’s her ghost that knocks desperately on cars to get them to stop as if she’s perpetually reliving her last, horrible moments. Other stories talk about a “babysitter” that was killed after refusing romantic advances.
A few websites out there like to mention the date June 12, 1962, from The Detroit News and a story about a babysitter who was seduced and killed by the children’s father on Grosse Ile. I have not been able to look at this particular issue of The Detroit News yet, but if you have, let me know what’s there. I can not find any story about a babysitter being killed in Michigan in any of the other Michigan newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press and it seems newspapers all over would have reprinted the story of a “babysitter” murdered by her employer.
However, I found a very similar story from around the same time from the Lansing State Journal, April 25, 1962, but the story took place in Jackson, Mississippi, not Michigan. The story is eerily similar and it makes me wonder…
15-year-old Sandra Holderfield was hired by Kennedy Slyter, a 26-year-old ex-convict, to be a babysitter for his family. But when he picked the girl up, he took her to a “Lover’s Lane” where she resisted him. Angered, he beat her in the face with a tire iron, ran her over with his car, and shoved her body under a tree. Swell guy. He then came home, told his pregnant wife he had picked up a dog that had been hit by a car, cried to her how “beautiful” the dog had been, and then drank DDT and kerosene while he went to a priest to confess. The priest took Kennedy to a hospital, where police showed up to arrest him and his stomach was pumped.
Of course, no place is without tragedy and Grosse Ile over the years has had incidents that could have sparked the “Knock-Knock” Road legend. For example, a four-year-old’s body was pulled from the Swan Island canal on December 8, 1964. The death was ruled an “accidental drowning and it’s news like this that often helps spark these spooky legends.
Early paranormal websites such as The Shadowlands index, majorly helped propagate urban legends like this during the early to mid-2000s. Thrill-seekers hoping for a midnight scare would comb the state-by-state list of haunted places. Early on, Knock-Knock Road was listed as being located on Gross Ile (with no actual road name mentioned), not Strasburg in Detroit.
So with multiple tales and locations, there is speculation as to what road/area was the original, “Knock-Knock Road.”
If you grew up with this legend, are familiar with a variation of this one or have a different street, comment below, or email.
Common sense warning: Big cities can have bad areas. Be mindful if you are legend tripping in areas that may or may not be safe, especially at night. The living will do more to you than the dead. Don’t be an idiot.
The story my grandmother used to tell us went like this: A young lady received a new convertible for her 16 birthday. She and all of her friend took it out for a spin. She was begged by her 8 year old sister to go along, but she was told she was too young. They visited Belle Isle, drove up and down Woodward Ave, and ended up at a drive in movie. It was almost midnight when they headed home. As she dropped off the last of her girlfriends, she began to hear a “knock-knock.” Panicked, she began to speed home. She ran a stop sign and was killed by a car in side street traffic. When the police arrived, they noticed that not only had the 16 year died on impact, but the body of her 8 year old sister in the trunk. The moral of the story, spend time with your younger siblings when they want to tag along.
This is totally bogus. I grew up on this road. Nothing has ever happened.
I used to live on Pembroke West of the Southfield Freeway. When I was about 14 (1960) a car came down the street. Pembroke used to make a knocking noise as cars ran over the different sections of the pavement. I think it was the concrete shifting. One night a car came down the road and stopped and told us that they had heard that it was a little girl who had fallen out of the car but was caught by the door and the girl’s ghost was knocking on the car doors to try to get back in. We laughed about it and said it was the pavement shifting. However Strasburg Street is 12 miles from where I lived.
Thank you for sharing this! The stories and locations of this legend seem varied so I appreciate when people contribute what they have heard in the past or grew up with.