This story happened on the bleak night of November 14th, 1995, in Beijing, China. An old man (some say an old woman) was waiting at a bus stop at midnight, making conversation with the only other person at the stop: a quiet young gentleman. When the midnight bus 375 – the last bus for Route 375 from the Yuan-ming-huan bus terminus – finally came, they both boarded it. The old man took a seat near the front of the bus while the young man sat a couple of rows behind him. There were no other passengers along with them, except for the driver and a female ticket collector.
After a while, the driver spotted two shadows by the side of the road, waving at the bus. He stopped, and when the doors opened, three people got on; two men who were supporting a third between them, holding him up by his shoulders. The man in the middle looked disheveled, and his head was bowed so that nobody could see his face. There was a dismal, calm atmosphere inside the bus.
Shortly after that, the old man picked a fight with the young man under some silly pretense of stealing his wallet. The altercation escalated, and the bus driver forced them both off the bus.
When they got off and the bus zoomed away, the old man was no longer angry. He told the young man that he had saved their lives. "Those three new passengers did not have feet. They were floating; they were not living people," he said.
After that, they went to the nearest police station to report what had happened, but nobody believed them. The very next day, the bus company issued a statement, "Last night, the final bus of Route 375 vanished, along with the driver and ticket lady." The police immediately chased down the old man and the young man, who were initially assumed to be mentally ill when they tried to report the incident earlier. They were both interviewed on the news.
On the third day, the police discovered the missing bus in a water reservoir about 100km away from its destination, Xiang-shan, or so-called Fragrant Hills. Inside the bus were three very badly decomposed corpses. The mysteries surrounding this finding included:
- The fact that the bus did not have enough petrol to go that far after a whole day’s worth of travel.
- The fact that the petrol tank was filled with fresh blood instead of fuel.
- The fact that the corpses found were too decomposed for just 48 hours; even if it was summer, the process of decomposition would not be this quick. An autopsy confirmed that there had been no intentional meddling with the bodies.
- The fact that, even after the police went through all the security cameras set up around the various entrances to the reservoir, they found nothing out of ordinary.
To this day, it remains an unsolved mystery.
Credited to Scary for Kids
Based on the Beijing urban legend detailed here.