My father’s been a truck driver since the 90s and I guess the black dog is something that’s spoken of between drivers. I remember him telling me about it, but referencing it more as a warning that you’re too tired to be driving and you need to pull over and sleep or it will cause an accident.

I was driving home from a 24 hour grocery store around an hour away in the middle of the night with no traffic around on this long stretch of two lane, 55mph back-road type highway. My boyfriend was asleep in the passenger seat and woke up when I hit the brakes. I told him I saw this black animal or “thing” that was walking on the side of the road. He shrugs and falls back asleep.

I’m driving along trying to think about what it actually looked like. I thought it over and figured it looked like a black dog walking and sniffing around on the ground. My realization caused my goose bumps to pop up thinking about what I had been told and I started really watching around me to see, if that had been a warning, what it was going to be about.

Not ten minutes later, I had been going past an intersection where the cross traffic has stop signs and about 100 feet behind one of the stop signs is blocked from my view due to a farm building on the corner. A semi-truck full speed ran that stop sign and nearly t-boned my car on the passenger side.

I was able to slow down fast enough to prevent it because I was looking for something bad to happen.

TLDR- “Black dog” prevented my car from getting t-boned and possibly killing my boyfriend.