Phantom Ships, Trains & Roads

Phantom travellers are ghosts on the move: ships, trains, coaches, cars and the people in them. The most famous is the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship said to beat forever against the storms off the Cape of Good Hope; in 1881 the future King George V recorded a red-lit phantom brig crossing his ship’s bows off Australia. On land there are phantom trains and coaches that appear on anniversaries, and above all the vanishing hitchhiker – the young woman picked up by the roadside who disappears from the car, told everywhere from Chicago’s Resurrection Mary to Blue Bell Hill in Kent.

Folklorists have studied these stories closely. Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey collected 79 American versions of the vanishing hitchhiker in 1942–43, and Jan Harold Brunvand made it the title story of his 1981 book on urban legends. Phantom ships, meanwhile, are often linked to mirages: over cold water, layers of air can bend light so that a ship far beyond the horizon appears to float in the sky, then vanish.

Other explanations include fatigue and “highway hypnosis” on long night drives, misidentified real vehicles in fog or spray, and the power of a story that every local driver already knows. The entries here trace each legend back as far as the records go.