Best known for his iconic television portrayal of lollipop-loving detective Theo Kojak, the late great Greek-born actor Telly Savalas had a truly ghostly experience while driving home to Long Island at 3 a.m. one summer morning in 1954, when ran out of gas and decided to walk to a nearby highway where he knew a gas station would still be open for service.
I was walking through a wooded park, as a shortcut, when suddenly this man yelled, “I’ll give you a ride!”
Savalas admitted to being quite shocked by the voice, as he hadn’t heard the big black Cadillac pull up next to him. But the man, who was dressed all in white, looked fine and took Telly to the gas station. Once there, Savalas was instantly embarrassed to discover that he didn’t have enough change for gas. However, the stranger didn’t seem bothered by this, and he just handed over some bills and said that he was fine, as he could pay her back later.
As they drove back to the car, the stranger told Savalas that he knew Harry Agannis. When Savalas asked who he was, the man said that he was a baseball player for the Boston Red Sox. But Savalas had never heard of him. That was the extent of the conversation, and the man left Savalas in his car.
The next day, Savalas received a big surprise when he read in a newspaper that baseball player Agannis had died suddenly at the age of 24. He had apparently died around the same time his name had been mentioned by the stranger in the car. .
At first, Savalas put it down to pure coincidence. However, when he tried to call the guy to return the money, a woman answered and Savalas explained why she was calling. The woman sounded a bit strange and asked why the guy had been driving and what she was wearing. When Savalas told her, the woman began to cry and said that Savalas had just described her husband, who had died three years earlier.
Stunned by what the woman had told him, Savalas began to speculate on all sorts of possible explanations, but he couldn’t think of anything logical that would definitively explain what he had experienced on that lonely road in the early hours of the morning. Thus, Savalas finally came to accept that he had apparently taken a ride in a car with a dead man.