Cars Roll Uphill Backwards On Spooky New York Roads

What are you doing this weekend? Want to really freak your friends out? Drive them out to Spook Hill in Middlesex, New York where you can throw the shifter into neutral and believe it or not the car will roll backwards, uphill! Or will it?

Once you have done that a couple of times for the thrill of it, you and your friends can decide if your car has just been pushed by ghosts, the spirits of Native American Indians buried nearby or if it's just an illusion.

Get our free mobile app

According to Uncovering New York, Spook Hill is on Newell Road near Canandaigua Lake. They say, if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. If you are thinking there is just some trickery in this place you should know this isn't the only 'gravity hill' in New York.

Put Promised Land Road in Portville, New York into your Waze app for another trip to the twilight zone. The Convergence  reports that this location holds the nickname “the illusion” and “the gravity hill,”. So is it an illusion? Tae Cooke, a lecturer in St. Bonaventure University’s physics department, drove to the end of Promised Land Road to see the hill for himself.

It really is just a perception thing. Physics is working just like it would. Putting the car into neutral at the right spot is the key to the illusion. It’s really downhill, but it doesn’t look like it, your eyes are playing tricks on you. - Cooke

Geography Realm points out these facts when observing gravity hills:

• You can’t see the horizon
• Trees are bent in a different manner
• The gradient of the road is offset by the geography
• Our human perceptions are often not enough to discern what is right in front of us; our brains take in so much information and, in the process of filtering some of it out, makes us see things.

I still choose to believe that ghosts are messing with us at gravity hill but you can draw your own conclusions.