I’ve
owned over 25 cars in my lifetime. Some were good, some were bad, but one in
particular… well if you’re ever seen the Stephen King film Christine, about the
possessed car from hell, yeah it was like that. It was a 1997 Jeep Grand
Cherokee Limited. Black on Gold with every option. This was the only car I ever
purchased from a car dealership and this is why. Every two weeks something was
breaking down on this car and it was costing me thousands to fix. It had one of
those remote starts on the key fab, which is great when you come from a place
where its cold and rainy all the time. But a few days after buying it, it would
turn itself on in the middle of the night. I was living in an apartment and I
would hear its start. It had a big 318 V8 Mopar engine and the lights would
flash and it would start itself. Yeah, it was freaking me out so I took it to Best Buy of all places to have a new stereo installed and asked them to remove
the factory radio and the remote start. I go to pick the car up and the guy told
me every time he went to remove the wires it would shock him. Eventually
he got the old components out and when I got it home now the alarm was going off by itself and
the car would lock me out. About a week before I moved from Chicago to Los
Angeles, the transmission went out. I took it in to a mechanic and he put a
refurbished transmission in it and told me if anything went wrong I had 30 days
to brink the car back. Of course after a week I was ready to move and
drove it to the west coast. Three days after I arrived, the transmission went
out again. This time it was just the reverse so I could still drive it I just couldn’t
park in any place that I had to back out of.
I couldn’t drive the car back to Chicago to get my money back so I was
out $1000 bucks. So I’m at a gas station in Irvine CA, and as I’m coming out of
the store the car starts heading towards me. I run up to the door and its
locked me out again. At this point it’s still moving and I’m scared it gonna
ram into the store so I run over to the other side and open the passenger door to pull the keys out and that’s when I realize
the keys are in my pocket! The car had started itself again. I shove the
emergency brake on and put it in park right before it runs into the store. At this point I’m completely stressed and
decided to put it on Craigslist and just take a loss. I place an ad selling it for
$2000 and say in my post that the transmission has no reverse and then I jump in the
shower. By the time I come out, I have 14 voice mail messages on my phone. I
answer the very first one and the guy tells me he’ll be at my house in 30
minutes. He never arrives so I figured
he flaked so I call back the next guy and he says yeah I live down the street
from you so I’ll come over right now. While he’s test driving the car the other
guy shows up and is pissed because I didn't hold the car for him and I told
him "Listen, you told me you'd be here in 30 minutes, it’s been over an hour and you never called me or
anything. Sorry." He offers me $300 more than
what I'm asking for if I agreed to sell the car to him when the guy gets back.
And I’m thinking what am I supposed to tell the other guy if he comes back and
wants to buy it? Break my word and be like oh this guy just showed up and
offered me more. So I tell him that if this guy doesn’t want it it’s his. He
says “What the fuck asshole?” walks back to his car and the other guy comes back
and says he’ll take it so he pays me the money and a week later I see him at
that same gas station getting gas in his car and I walk up to him and say "Hey,
where’s the Jeep?" He tells me a story about how after he gave me the money, the
other guy followed him back to his house and offered him an additional $300 for
the car so he sold it to that guy because apparently the heated seats started
turning themselves on while he was driving and they were so hot they were burning his back. He couldn’t get them to shut off and the car was doing other weird
stuff like the headlights were turning on and stuff. So I thought to myelf okay, at least
this nightmares over and I shit you not less than a month later I’m
watching the news and they showed a story about a guy whose car accelerator got
stuck and the car drove itself off the 125 freeway off ramp into the water and
trapped the driver and he drowned. When they showed the car being pulled out of
the water it was my Jeep Grand Cherokee! So yeah, that thing needs to be burned
and buried forever. On a side note, I told my buddy about this story last year
(he was the guy who used to work at the car dealership that I bought it from) and
he goes, "Yeah I remember that car. The guy who traded it in just wanted to get
rid of it and didn’t care what we gave him for it and when I was prepping it I
was under the car changing a filter and the jack gave way and the car came down
almost crushing my head." Im like thanks for letting me buy it. I am now convinced I owned a haunted automobile.
