The Uniondale Hitchhiker

Uniondale is a small Karoo town on the N9, founded in 1856 and once known for wagon-building and ostrich feathers. Over the Easter weekend of 1968, in stormy weather, a young engaged couple travelling on the road between Uniondale and Willowmore crashed some 20 kilometres from town. Their Volkswagen Beetle overturned, and the woman, usually named as Maria (or Marie) Charlotte Roux, aged about 22, was killed. Accounts place the crash on Good Friday, 12 April, or on Easter Sunday. Her fiancé, often described as a young Air Force officer, survived.

Eight years later, on Good Friday 1976, a driver named Anton le Grange said he picked up a young woman on the same stretch of road in the dark. She got into the back seat and, a little way on, was gone. He drove to the Uniondale police station, and in the best-known version a constable – named in retellings as “Snowy” Potgieter – followed him back and saw the car’s rear door swing open and shut by itself. That detail comes from later retellings rather than from any published police statement. A journalist later showed le Grange a photograph of Maria Roux, and he said she was the woman he had picked up.

More reports followed, mostly around Easter. In 1978 an army corporal riding a motorcycle said a short, dark-haired woman climbed on behind him and vanished within a kilometre or two; in 1980 another young motorcyclist said hands gripped his waist on the empty road. Police told reporters that they had received several such reports over the years, and some accounts date press stories of the hitchhiker back to 1973. The folklorist Sigrid Schmidt, quoted in Jan Harold Brunvand’s Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, argued that the South African press turned the tale into an “official report” and left people expecting the ghost at the same spot every Easter – which turned a local tragedy into a national legend.

The story fits the shape of the “vanishing hitchhiker”, a legend told on roads around the world, and the writer Arthur Goldstuck, who has studied South African urban legends for decades, treats it as one: a story told as true that gathers details each time it is repeated. Names, distances and dates differ between versions, and the young woman’s surname is given several ways – Roux, Rue, Grimbeeck or Groesbeeck. Behind it, though, is a real death: a young woman killed in a road accident at Easter, whose memory deserves more care than a campfire tale.

A young woman, usually short with long dark hair and wearing slacks and a jersey or duffel coat, seen at the roadside at night and given a lift; she disappears from the back seat or from behind a motorcyclist. Some witnesses report a sudden cold, laughter or a scream, and a car door opening by itself.

The N9 north of Uniondale towards Willowmore, especially around Easter and on wet, stormy nights.

The Uniondale ghost is South Africa’s best-known road legend, retold in newspapers, Arthur Goldstuck’s books on urban legends, radio, podcasts and an Afrikaans feature film made in 2014. It is the story most South Africans think of when they hear of a vanishing hitchhiker.