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.”