Urban legends are stories that have been passed down by word of mouth or through emails until they appear to have a ring of truth about them, even though the events are undocumented. They usually start with “this happened to a friend” or “someone I knew told me this tale.” They also stretch the imagination too far to be true. One such legend is The Vanishing Hitchhiker.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: The Basic Tale
A young man driving alone at night sees a young girl dressed in a flowing evening gown standing by the side of the road near a dangerous intersection. He gives her a ride. She tells him she is coming home from a dance and that she had a quarrel with her date. He takes her to the address she tells him, but when he arrives the house is dark and the girl suddenly vanishes. When he knocks on the door, he is told by a sad-looking woman that her daughter had been killed in the same spot where he picked her up several years ago on the way home from a dance. In some recountings, the girl leads him to an empty, burned-out house. In still other variations, she leaves something in the car, or the boy offers her his jacket. The place she leads him to is a cemetery instead of a house, and the jacket is found draped neatly upon a tombstone bearing the name she has given him.
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: Another Version
A couple driving home on a dark, deserted road see a girl standing at the side of the road with a suitcase in one hand and a coat in the other. They give her a ride, and they drive in silence. When the man turns back to ask where she lives so he can take her home, he finds that their passenger has vanished. The suitcase and coat remain. The suitcase has an address in it, which takes them to an elderly woman’s home. She tells them that the hitchhiker was her daughter, who died many years ago at the age of sixteen and is still trying to get home.
What is Known of the History of the Vanishing Hitchhiker Urban Legend
It is known that an early rural version of The Vanishing Hitchhiker made an appearance as a popular ghost story in rural Arkansas around 1930. A study of the vanishing hitchhiker tale was made in the early 1940s when Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey collected 79 written accounts of the story in different versions across the United States.
Source:
Brunfand, Jan Harold. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends. New York: NY.
W.W. Norton, 2004
ISBN 0393326136
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