Bill Ellis | Dear Mister Thom # 35, 1994

Bill Ellis has written to suggest that maybe the earliest clear reference to the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” plot line can be found in William Henderson’s Folklore of the Northern Counties of England (1866) The story pp 273-4 of the American edition of 1973 (Ottowa: Rowman and Littlefield) has the “hopeless pilgrimage” motif common in “Vanishing Hitchhiker” stories but unusual in a ghost story of the period. Here is the story:

“On St Thomas’s eve and day, too, have carriers and waggoners been most alarmed by the ghost of the murdered woman, who was wont to haunt the path or lane between Cradle Well and Neville’s Cross. With her child dangling at her side, she used to join parties coming or going out of Durham in carriers’ carts or wagons, would enter the vehicles and there seat herself, but always disappearing when they reached the limit of her hopeless pilgrimage.”

Bill Ellis | Dear Mister Thom # 34, 1994

FRACKVILLE – If someone walked up to you and told you a story about an experience they had or about which they heard concerning a hitchhiker who foretold “The end is near” and disappeared from “inside” a vehicle, what would you think?

Like most people, you would probably doubt the report or maybe turn the TV set to the popular “Unsolved Mysteries” show and try to summon its host, Robert Stack, to unravel the bizarre event.

Editorial sceptics

Such a story was brought to the attention of the Evening Herald recently and the reactions of editorial department personnel were predictable “Yeah, right”.

A check with state police, however, revealed troopers had received several calls relating to the hitchhiker incident.

Sgt. Barry Reed, station commander at Frackville, confirmed receiving three or four calls about the mysterious vanishing hitchhiker, from reliable and credible individuals who all shared the same experience.

The “hitchhiker” was described as a tall, thin man with long dark hair and wearing a long dark coat. He was picked up on Route61 near Frackville’s southern end on Monday, Jan 31, between 6 and 7 a.m.

Several stories

However, contrary to the “unofficial” reports, state troopers said they received no reports about the “hitchhiker” in conversation about the weather, the turbulence of society or the Angel Gabriel “tooting his horn for the second time”.

However, troopers did say reports made to them concerned the hitchhiker having said ‘I am here to tell you the end is near,’ before vanishing into thin air.

Some reports relayed to the Evening Herald alleged the mysterious hitchhiker warned, ‘Jesus is coming! Jesus is coming’ and then disappeared.

Sgy. Reed recalled that while he was stationed in Lancaster County about 10 years ago, a similar ‘hitchhiker tale was circulated.

Think it was a hoax

In reference to the Lancaster County incidents and the Schuykill County reports, Sgt. Reed said, ‘I believe it is a hoax. But the people are reliable.’

Sgt. Reed said he travels ‘up and down’ the Frackville grade to Saint Clair daily and never noticed anything.

‘Even people who never pick up hitchhikers pick them up,’ said Sgt. Reed, who particularly pointed to a case involving a Frackville woman who apparently had never before stopped for a hitchhiker.

Motorists tend to feel sorry for hitchhikers, especially during the cold winter weather, and subsequently act contrary to their beliefs by picking them up.

Sgt. Reed said, ‘In at least one of the reports, I regarded the person as the most reliable.’
No calls elsewhere

A check with the Hazelton and Schuyhill Haven state police revealed there were no calls about the mystical man.

Sgt. Reed offered this advice to motorists, ‘Don’t pick up any hitchhikers. That’s always good advice.’

Story by Rosanne M. Hall, Evening Herald (Shenandoah, PA), 4 February 1994.

Mark Moravec | Dear Mister Thom # 30, 1993

Mark has found the clipping below which recounts an English “Vanishing Hitchhiker” story. He asks whether any reader has heard the specific legend mentioned. The item comes from New Idea, a popular Australian women’s magazine. It is also, he observes, “an example of the exploitation of contemporary legend storylines by popular culture, this time as the basis for a song”.

If any DMT reader with access to local newspapers in the South East would like to check whether the story rally did form the basis for a court case in Southend, we would dearly love to hear from you.

“Haunted by a Song

Several times over the past few years rock star and actor Jon English has made the big decision to drop the ghost song She Was Real! From his concert performance.

But for some inexplicable reason, at the last minute before he steps on stage, he always changes his mind.

It’s now 10 years since Jon wrote and first performed She Was Real! Which tells the eerie story of a ghostly sighting of Susie, a teenage girl who had been killed in a traffic accident. And he still can’t bring himself to put the song to rest permanently.

‘Susie’s ghost is just hanging around and haunting me’, Jon lightheartedly confesses wit a hint of nervousness. ‘I could have killed her off from my concerts long ago, but here we are 10 years since I wrote the song and she still won’t go home. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get rid of her.’

She was real! Is based on an 1982 court case in Southend, England, where Jon’s family lived. A young motorcyclist had faced the court charged with causing malicious mischief, and in his defence he said he’d been riding his motorcycle around midnight in Southend when he was hailed by a girl hitchhiker of about 18.

They stopped to have coffee at a café, and she told him her name was Susie. She told the motorcyclist where she lived so he could drop her off.

When they came to the Cheltenham Road roundabout the bike went over a bump and the young man thought he heard a thud from behind. He looked around and the girl was not there.

He rode to the nearest police station to report the accident. The police returned to the roundabout with him and after a lengthy search there was no sign of the missing girl. So the police went to the address the motorcyclist gave them. A middle-aged woman gave them the astonishing information that her daughter Susan had died in 1970 in a motorcycle crash at the Cheltenham Road roundabout.

Police tracked down the motorcyclist and, although he stuck to his story, he was arrested for the trouble he had caused.

‘The guy was so convincing in court, they let him off’, says Jon.

‘It’s a story that fascinated me so much I just had to write a song about it’, he says.

‘She just won’t disappear, Creepy, isn’t it?’

Story: Alan Veitch”

Gillian Bennett | Dear Mister Thom # 23, 1991

In an article, “modern-day folk tales too strange to be true”, in the Sacramento Bee (31 May 1991), the writer, Katherine Bishop, goes on a quest for urban legends and finds Jan Brunvand and Alan Dundes. Brunvand keeps to description, but Dundes engages in some pretty fancy interpretation when asked to comment on thefamiliar legend of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”.

“Dr Alan Dundes” says Bishop, “a professor of anthropology at the University of Caifornia, Berkeley, said the story was widespread and the the driver was always a man and the hitchhiker was always female.

“Instead of viewing the events in the ale from the point of view of the driver, he said, thetale should be told from the point of view of the young woman, since it is usually told by adolescent girls to one another.

“It is a cautionary tale” he said, warning girls that if they allow themselves to be “picked up” – an idea loaded with sexual innuendo and threat – their punishment will be that they can ever go home again.”

There is only one thing wrong with this statement – it is ridiculous.

Unfortunately it is typical of the sort of things that modern legend scholars are coming up with these days – no better, no worse. Grated, if a journalist called me up while I was having my lunch and asked me to say something interesting about ”The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, I probably would say something silly too. But many respected academics are making similar statements in respectable professional journals too, so these sorts of interpretations can’t all be blamed on the importunateness of the press.

The trouble is that meaning is thought to reside in the plot or the content of the story, not in the minds of the tellers and hearers who share it. In effect, therefore, these meanings actually reside in the mind of the commentator him/herself.

In fact, the stories can be fitted into almost any preconceived intellectual formula. Max Muller would have seen that “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” was plainly the remnant of a moon myth. Its central character is a pale virgin who walks the night, disappears at regular times ad places, only to reappear once more at the spot where she was first seen. Obviously the vanishing hitchhiker is the vanishing moon. Even the car can be fitted in to the scheme: it is dark, it is enclosed and secret, it swallows her up – it is plainly the night.

Frazer would have seen it as a very interesting and important vegetation myth. With the aid of comparative data from the Bonka-Bonka tribe of the Upper Limpopo Valley, he would have shown that it is the last remnant of a goddess cult. And very exciting it would have been, for usually the vegetation God who dies and is revived again is a male, but here the hitchhiker who dies and reappears and dies again is a female.

Nowadays the fashion is for psychoanalytic-symbolic approaches, allied to a functionalist orientation which demands that modern legends are dire social warnings. Hence, the Dundes interpretation of the legend as a sexual cautionary tale. However, even given this framework, it doesn’t make sense to say that the story warns girls that if they get picked up by men they’ll never go home again. In these stories, the girl is already dead before she takes the ride. If anything, it would go to prove the reverse – that her only, last chance of life is to be picked up (what’s more it would actually accord with many girls’ opinions).

So, personally, if we have to have a modern “psychological” explanation of the story, I prefer te interpretation which my friend Professor Toni Baloni, a keen student of modern folklore, proposes.

“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, she wrote only recently, “is best understood as a poignant story about an unwanted pregnancy and the consequent stillbirth. The car in which the passenger travels is obviously the womb – an enclosed space in which the stranger travels for a short time, lulled by the drone and vibration of the body’s engine, the parent heart. The hitchhiker – unnamed, unknown, mysterious – is an unborn child. This much is quite clear and allows us to reconstruct the rest of the allegory.

The hitchhiker flags down the driver and imposes herself unexpectedly on him (we can see here the monstrous effect of out paternalistic society, where even the procreative function is linguistically and metaphorically attributed to the male) – so plainly this is not a planned pregnancy. The hitchhiker appears out of nowhere with no past: it appears then that the woman does not know who the father is.

But there the child is, to be carried, silently and passively, to her destination. Alas! The pregnancy doe not continue to full term: the “hitchhiker” disappears from the “car” in mid-journey. Very little is left to mark her short passage of life – a pool of water on the floor (waters of life? Amniotic fluid?), a marker on te grave, maybe a picture. She never arrives at her destination. All that is left of her is grief.

Plainly this is a cautionary tale put out by the London Rubber Company.”