Few games have generated as many mysteries, myths, and legends as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Spooky campfire tales of UFOs, ghosts, and serial killers have haunted the game for as long as it has existed, with communities of curious players banding together to prove or debunk them. I've lost hours reading up on these things, even though most of them are clearly just fabrications or misidentified bugs. I actually saw a UFO myself when the game was first released back in 2005—a ball of light hovering over a deserted country road, then suddenly disappearing. It was probably just a lighting glitch, but it was still a creepy encounter, heightened by the eerie, desolate atmosphere of the game's rural regions.
One such mystery, which has since become one the most well known, is the reported existence of so-called ghost cars. I never saw one of these myself, but an overwhelming number of players have posted videos and screenshots of these empty, bashed-up old cars seemingly driving around with no one behind the wheel. These cars would almost always be spotted in an area called Back O' Beyond, a heavily forested region located in Flint County, which lies west of Los Santos. This is one of the spookiest areas in the game when night falls, which led some skeptics to believe people were simply imagining things or exaggerating for effect.
Here's the thing: the ghost cars were real, but ultimately not very ghostly at all. A dented, smashed up variation of a car called a Glendale exists in the game's files, labelled internally by the devs as glenshit. In some remote corner of Back O' Beyond, several of these rusty old bangers spawn on the side of a steep hill, which makes them appear suddenly out of nowhere and look like they're being driven by some unseen paranormal force. The reality is, they're just rolling, and completely at the mercy of the game's physics engine. It's a somewhat anticlimactic end to the mystery of the fabled San Andreas ghost cars, but still pretty fascinating all the same.
Did Rockstar place these cars here on purpose, knowing they'd roll down the hill and freak people out? No one knows, but it's a devilish trick if it did. Wandering Back O' Beyond is already a faintly scary experience, compounded by all the supernatural stories that have emerged there. So suddenly seeing a car roll into your field of view, beaten and battered, with no one driving, was always gonna catch people off guard. I understand why it has developed into an urban legend over the years. The fact one of the cars looks a lot like the one from Stephen King's Christine, a story about a murderous car possessed by an evil force, didn't help.
In the years since San Andreas launched there have been vastly bigger, more detailed open worlds—yet none of them have generated the same level of enigma and mystery. I'm not sure why exactly, but it's another reason why it remains one of Rockstar's best games. If the next Grand Theft Auto has large rural areas, I hope it spawns its own set of legends. If it's set in a modern day Vice City, as some rumours have suggested, a GTA analogue of the Everglades sounds like the perfect place to do some new mythmaking. Maybe we'll even see the return of the ghost cars.