The Vanishing Hitchhiker

The story almost always reaches you second-hand. A man is driving home late on a lonely road when he sees a young woman standing by the verge, often in a party dress or soaked by rain. He offers her a ride; she gives him an address and sits quietly – sometimes in the back seat. When he pulls up and turns round, she is gone. Puzzled, he knocks at the door of the house, where an older woman tells him that her daughter died on that road years ago, and that he is not the first driver to bring her home. In many versions she borrowed his coat, which is later found folded over her gravestone.

Folklorists have studied this tale more closely than almost any other ghost story. In 1942 and 1943 Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey published the first systematic survey in the California Folklore Quarterly, gathering 79 accounts from across the United States. They sorted them into four main types: the hitchhiker who gives an address and turns out to be dead; the hitchhiker who utters a prophecy (often of war or disaster) before vanishing; the girl met at a dance who is later found to be buried in the local cemetery; and versions in which the passenger is revealed to be a figure of local religious belief. Among their examples was a cluster of Chicago-area stories from around 1933, in which an old woman foretold disaster and disappeared.

The motif is much older than the car. Wikipedia’s survey of the literature cites a Swedish manuscript of 1602 in which a mysterious traveller predicts war and pestilence before vanishing, and horse-and-buggy versions circulated in the 19th century; the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand suggested the American form goes back at least to the 1870s. Brunvand, a professor of English at the University of Utah, made the vanishing hitchhiker the title story of his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, the book that brought the term “urban legend” to popular attention. His argument was that such stories are not the property of “primitive” or rural societies: modern Americans tell legends too, and they say a great deal about the anxieties of the people who pass them on.

Part of the tale’s power is that it is always local. Chicago has Resurrection Mary, said to walk Archer Avenue near Resurrection Cemetery; Dallas has the Lady of White Rock Lake; in England, drivers on the A229 at Blue Bell Hill in Kent have reported a young woman who asks for a lift and vanishes – stories that were already circulating when a car crash on the hill killed three young women on 19 November 1965, one of them on the eve of her wedding, and were afterwards attached to their memory. Similar stories are told in South Africa, Korea, Mexico, Russia and among many American communities, each fitted to a particular bend in the road, bridge or cemetery gate.

Folklorists stress that the vanishing hitchhiker is a legend rather than a lie. Most tellers believe it happened to a friend of a friend, and the details – the address, the photograph on the mantelpiece, the coat on the grave – are exactly the kind of “proof” that makes a story feel true. Investigators who try to trace an account back to a named driver usually find the trail ends in hearsay, or in a newspaper story that was itself repeating a rumour.

A young woman, usually pale or dressed in white or a dance dress, seen by the roadside at night; a ride offered, an address given and a silent passenger who vanishes from a moving or parked car; a borrowed coat or sweater later found on a grave; in some versions a prophecy spoken before the passenger disappears.

Lonely stretches of highway near cemeteries, bridges, dance halls or the site of a fatal crash, almost always at night and often in rain. Some local versions say she appears on the anniversary of her death.

The tale has been retold in radio plays, songs and countless ghost-story collections; its twist is echoed in The Twilight Zone (“The Hitch-Hiker”, 1960, adapted from Lucille Fletcher’s radio play) and many horror films. Brunvand’s book launched a series of popular folklore collections, and Chicago’s Resurrection Mary and Kent’s Blue Bell Hill ghost both feature on local ghost tours and in short films such as The Ghost of Blue Bell Hill (2014).