The morning had promised to be quiet and uneventful. Our patrol car moved steadily down the highway, scanning the road ahead. A thin mist clung to the asphalt, and the world seemed still half-asleep. Cars were rare; only the occasional rumble of a distant truck disturbed the silence.

Then, in an instant, that ordinary routine shattered.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something strange in the rearview mirror. At first, I thought it might be a crate or a piece of furniture—things that sometimes fall from trucks and end up blocking traffic. But as we got closer, I realized this was nothing ordinary.

Right in the middle of the road, standing alone under the pale morning light, was a pure white, polished coffin with heavy metal handles glinting faintly.

There were no other cars around. No people. No tire tracks. Just that coffin, like a deliberate, eerie message left for someone to find.

I stopped the car, switched on the flashing lights, and called for backup. My chest tightened with a strange unease—this wasn’t something we had ever encountered before. Stepping out onto the damp asphalt, I walked toward it slowly. In the glow of the patrol lights, the lacquered wood shone as if it had been freshly polished.

On the ground, I saw faint drag marks, as though it had been pulled several yards before being placed squarely in the middle of the lane. There was no logic to it—no sign of a funeral procession gone wrong, no accident nearby. Just silence.

Within minutes, my partners arrived. We exchanged uneasy glances, each of us silently hoping someone else would be the one to open it. But waiting wasn’t an option. If there was even the slightest chance that a living person was inside, we had to act.

I gripped one of the metal handles. It was ice-cold, and a thought shot through my mind: What if I see something I’ll never be able to unsee?

The lid creaked open, revealing something that made my stomach drop. There was a body inside—but not in the way we expected. Her face was covered with a black cloth, and on her chest lay a collection of children’s toys: a small teddy bear, a toy car, and a worn-out doll missing one arm.

The smell was strange—not the sour stench of decay, but something like old perfume mixed with dust. Gently, we pulled back the cloth from her face. It was a woman, perhaps in her forties, dressed in a wedding gown. Around her neck hung an antique locket with engraved initials, and on her finger was a ring that didn’t seem to match the rest of her attire.

Her skin was pale—not gray like the dead, but almost porcelain, eerily delicate. For a fleeting moment, I could have sworn I saw her chest rise, but none of us dared to touch her.

We called in the crime scene unit. As we waited, the fog thickened, and in that ghostly haze the coffin seemed like a prop from an old horror film—too strange, too perfect, too terrifying.

Later, the experts would confirm that she had been dead for more than a day. But how she ended up in the middle of an empty highway, and why, remains a mystery. No nearby cameras caught anything. No witnesses came forward. No tire tracks to follow.

Since that day, every time I patrol that road, I find myself glancing into the rearview mirror more often than I’d like. Because deep down, I can’t shake one thought: What if next time, I see that white coffin again—and it’s waiting just for me?