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.”