https://oddentitypod.podbean.com/mf/play/i6s22f/s5ep10.mp3
A dozen miles outside of Baltimore, the main road from New York (Route Number One) is crossed by another important highway. It is a dangerous intersection, and there is talk of building and underpass for the east-west road. To date, however, the plans exist only on paper. Dr. Eckersall was driving home from a country-club dance late one Saturday night. He slowed up for the intersection, and was surprised to see a lovely young girl, dressed in the sheerest of evening gowns, beckoning him for a lift. He jammed on his brakes, and motioned her to climb into the back seat of his roadster. “All cluttered up with golf clubs and bags up here in front,” he explained. “But what on earth is a youngster like you doing out here all alone at this time of night?”
“It’s too long a story to tell you now,” said the girl. Her voice was sweet and somewhat shrill — like the tinkling of sleigh bells. “Please, please take me home. I’ll explain everything there. The address is ___ North Charles Street. I do hope it’s not too far out of your way.”
The doctor grunted, and set the car in motion. He drove rapidly to the address she had given him, and as he pulled up before the shuttered house, he said, “Here we are.” Then he turned around. The back seat was empty!
“What the devil?” the doctor muttered to himself. The girl couldn’t possibly have fallen from the car. Nor could she simply have vanished. He rang insistently on the house bell, confused as he had never been in his life before. At long last the door opened. A gray-haired, very tired-looking man peered out at him.
“I can’t tell you what an amazing thing has happened,” began the doctor. “A young girl gave me this address a while back. I drove her here and . . .”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the man wearily. “This has happened several other Saturday evenings in the past month. That young girl, sir, was my daughter. She was killed in an automobile accident at that intersection where you saw her almost two years ago . . .”
Hello ODD Pod Listeners, and welcome back to another episode.
This week, I tell the tale of the Vanishing Hitchhiker and unravel the urban folklore that surrounds this fascinating legend. It’s an old story, some written accounts dating back to 1948, and it seems as if there are many incarnations of this particular urban legend. I’ll get into the history of this legend, dissect the historical tellings that exist, and introduce you to some theories about how it originated. You might even meet some new hitchhikers along the way.
And so, on with the show!
White Lady ghosts are typically reported in rural areas and associated with local legends of tragedy. These legends are found in many countries around the world and all of these stories contain elements of accidental death, murder, or suicide, and themes of loss, unrequited love, or betrayal but, of all the urban legends that exist, The Vanishing Hitchhiker breaks a cardinal rule: urban legends don’t deal in the supernatural. Perhaps this story belongs in its own subgenre, but it’s been circulating for so long that it’s just become part of the canon. That’s not to say that there’s truth to it, but it’s held its weight for a long time.
Fabrication and folklore, that’s where most people hang their hats when it comes to phantom hitchhiker stories. In his book, The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers, Paranormal researcher Michael Goss comes firmly down on the side that these hitchhiking ghosts simply don’t exist. He discovers, through exhaustive research, that most of the tales can be chalked up to hallucinations or folklore stories. Goss states that the stories he’s come across are “fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings.” I applaud Goss for being able to find sources on the subject of urban legends. These tales aren’t just told by one person, they’re relayed from host to host. Because the legend is told from the perspective of a friend of a friend (Jan Harold Brunvand talks a lot about the FOAF phenomena in his work) it’s impossible to find a reliable narrator. Hats off to you, Michael!
Skeptic Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who also writes regularly for the Skeptical Inquirer, investigated two alleged cases and found that there is no reliable evidence to prove either claim. Nickell says it’s all exaggeration or hoaxing. He doesn’t believe a word.
Historical examples of these entities seem to have their roots in folklore, but the examination of the vanishing hitchhiker phenomena has been on researcher’s minds for some time.
From Wikipedia, “The first proper study of the story of the vanishing hitchhiker was undertaken in 1942–43 by American folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, who collected as many accounts as they could and attempted to analyze them.
The Beardsley-Hankey survey elicited 79 written accounts of encounters with vanishing hitchhikers, drawn from across the United States. They found: “Four distinctly different versions, distinguishable because of obvious differences in development and essence.” These are described as:
- Stories where the hitchhiker gives an address through which the motorist learns he has just given a lift to a ghost.
- 49 of the Beardsley-Hankey samples fell into this category, with responses from 16 states of the United States.
- Stories where the hitchhiker is an old woman who prophesies disaster or the end of World War II; subsequent inquiries likewise reveal her to be deceased.
- Nine of the samples fit this description, and eight of these came from the vicinity of Chicago. Beardsley and Hankey felt that this indicated a local origin, which they dated to approximately 1933: two of the version B hitchhikers in this sample foretold disaster at the Century of Progress Exposition and another foresaw calamity “at the World’s Fair”. The strict topicality of these unsuccessful forecasts did not appear to thwart the appearance of further Version ‘B’ hitch-hikers, one of whom warned that Northerly Island, in Lake Michigan, would soon be submerged (this has not yet occurred).
- Stories where a girl is met at some place of entertainment, e.g., dance, instead of on the road; she leaves some token (often the overcoat she borrowed from the motorist) on her grave by way of corroborating the experience and her identity.
- The uniformity amongst separate accounts of this variant led Beardsley and Hankey to strongly doubt its folkloric authenticity.
- Stories where the hitchhiker is later identified as a local divinity.
Beardsley and Hankey were particularly interested to note one instance (location: Kingston, New York, 1941) in which the vanishing hitchhiker was subsequently identified as the late Mother Cabrini, founder of the local Sacred Heart Orphanage, who was beatified for her work. The authors felt that this was a case of Version ‘B’ glimpsed in transition to Version ‘D’.
Beardsley and Hankey concluded that Version ‘A’ was closest to the original form of the story, containing the essential elements of the legend. Version ‘B’ and ‘D’, they believed, were localized variations, while ‘C’ was supposed to have started life as a separate ghost story which at some stage became conflated with the original vanishing hitchhiker story (Version ‘A’).
One of their conclusions certainly seems reflected in the continuation of vanishing hitchhiker stories: The hitchhiker is, in the majority of cases, female and the lift-giver male. Beardsley and Hankey’s sample contained 47 young female apparitions, 14 old lady apparitions, and 14 more of an indeterminate sort.
Ernest W. Baughman’s Type- and Motif-Index of the Folk Tales of England and North America (1966) delineates the basic vanishing hitchhiker as follows:
Ghost of young woman asks for ride in automobile, disappears from closed car without the driver’s knowledge, after giving him an address to which she wishes to be taken. The driver asks person at the address about the rider, finds she has been dead for some time. (Often the driver finds that the ghost has made similar attempts to return, usually on the anniversary of death in automobile accident. Often, too, the ghost leaves some item such as a scarf or traveling bag in the car.)
Baughman’s classification system grades this basic story as motif E332.3.3.1.
Subcategories include:
- 3.3.1(a) for vanishing hitchhikers who reappear on anniversaries;
- 3.3.1(b) for vanishing hitchhikers who leave items in vehicles, unless the item is in a pool of water in which case it is E332.3.3.1(c);
- 3.3.1(d) is for accounts of sinister old ladies who prophesy disasters;
- 3.3.1(e) contains accounts of phantoms who are apparently sufficiently solid to engage in activities such as eating or drinking during their journey;
- 3.3.1(f) is for phantom parents who want to be taken to the sickbed of their dying son;
- 3.3.1(g) is for hitchhikers simply requesting a lift home;
- 3.3.1(h-j) are a category reserved exclusively for vanishing nuns (a surprisingly common variant), some of whom foretell the future.
Here, the phenomenon blends into religious encounters, with the next and last vanishing hitchhiker classification — E332.3.3.2 — being for encounters with divinities who take to the road as hitchhikers. The legend of Saint Christopher is considered one of these, and the story of Philip the Evangelist being transported by God after encountering the Ethiopian on the road (Acts 8:26-39) is sometimes similarly interpreted.”
In every Vanishing Hitchhiker story, there’s an object left behind. Some tangible proof that the woman was actually there. This detail adds realism to the story and the gaps in the narrative allow the storyteller to add on to the current tale, dropping in their own elements as they see fit. Perhaps this time, the hitchhiker is a blonde. Maybe the driver gives her his overcoat. Perhaps that overcoat is found draped over her tombstone in the cemetery. Or maybe she’s a brunette wearing a scarf and the scarf is left behind on the passenger seat. Maybe the deceased woman’s parents are surprised by the arrival of the generous gentleman who gave the ghost of their daughter a ride back home or maybe they’re expecting it because every Saturday night since she passed away has brought a visitor to their doorstep with the same story. As a storyteller, I can tell you that the more bits and bobs you drop into the narrative, the more you rope in your listener. There’s a higher investment for the listener and they’ll devote all of their attention to the tale you’re relaying.
Mike J. Koven, a folklorist at the University of Wales says that the reason why we crave urban legends is because life is just more interesting with monsters in it. The legends are just good stories.
In an article for Live Science.com, Heather Whipps states, “Like the variations in the stories themselves, folklorists all have their own definitions of what makes an urban legend. Academics have always disagreed on whether urban legends are, by definition, too fantastic to be true or at least partly based on fact, said Koven, who tends to believe the latter.
Discovering the truth behind urban legends, however, isn’t as important as the lessons they impart, experts say. Urban legends aren’t easily verifiable, by nature. Usually passed on by word of mouth or—more commonly today—in e-mail form, they often invoke the famous “it happened to friend of a friend” (or FOAF) clause that makes finding the original source of the story virtually impossible.
“The lack of verification in no way diminishes the appeal that urban legends have for us,” writes Jan Harold Brunvand in “The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings” (W.W. Norton & Company, 1981). “We enjoy them merely as stories, and tend to at least half-believe them as possibly accurate reports.”
A renowned folklorist, Brunvand is considered the pre-eminent scholar on urban legends and “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” named for a classic legend, the subject’s seminal work. The definition of an urban legend, he writes, is “a strong basic story-appeal, a foundation in actual belief, and a meaningful message or ‘moral.'”
Most urban legends tend to offer a moral lesson, Koven agreed, that is always interpreted differently depending on the individual. The lessons don’t necessarily have to be of the deep, meaning-of-life, variety, he said.
Urban legends are also good indicators of what’s going on in current society, said Koven, who is part of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) and is editor of its peer-reviewed journal, Contemporary Legend.
“By looking at what’s implied in a story, we get an insight into the fears of a group in society,” he told LiveScience. Urban legends “need to make cultural sense,” he said, noting that some stick around for decades while others fizzle out depending on their relevance to the modern social order.
It’s a lack of information coupled with these fears that tends to give rise to new legends, Koven said. “When demand exceeds supply, people will fill in the gaps with their own information…they’ll just make it up.””
So, let’s take a moment to look at the legend itself and pick out some familiar elements that can be found in every urban legend ever told.
First, let’s examine the element of caution or warning within the tale. The message here isn’t totally obvious as might be the case with other legends like The Hook Man. It seems to me that this legend is saying something about being cautious on the roadway, certainly being aware while you’re driving so as not to cause an accident. The woman in the legend is killed in a vehicle at an intersection and a lot of intersections are notorious for causing accidents. However, I do find it interesting the female hitchhiker is always picked up by a male motorist. As a woman, I’m very aware of my surroundings when I go out and I’m certainly not going to put myself in harm’s way by thumbing a ride if my car breaks down. I think, if not for the supernatural element within it, this might have fallen into the category of a cautionary tale. Perhaps this legend is trying to say something about unsuspecting men falling victim to the lure of a beautiful ghost? I’m not really sure there’s much else there.
As far as elements of mystery or intrigue are concerned, this legend has them in spades. A mysterious woman walking on a nondescript roadway alone at night. A ghostly remnant left on the car seat when she exits the vehicle. Confusion when the man goes to return the item only to find the woman has been dead for some time. This tale is absolutely spine chilling and it fulfills every desire I’d have for a good ghost story. There are some missing details in the story which only adds to the overall mystique and likely contributes to the spreading of this urban legend.
The driver is surprised to find out the woman is dead and, in some tellings, the parents are shocked to find out that their daughter’s ghost is haunting the intersection and asking strangers to drive her back to her childhood home.
There’s a sense that this could happen to anyone, something that urban legends do very well. The story makes you believe that you too could be driving down a darkened roadway and see a ghostly woman seeking a ride. The roadway could be any roadway in the country and the driver could literally be anyone (though according to North American tellings of this legend I’m thinking being a white male would up your chances of seeing the ghost.)
In other retellings of this legend, the woman will sometimes offer a prophecy about the future, she might vanish before the final destination is reached, a photo of the hitchhiker (while still living) is always present at the home where the driver ends up to let him know he’s in the right place, the driver always learns that the woman died several years ago, though the number varies, and an item lent to the hitchhiker (primarily a jacket or coat) is found on a grave stone in a local cemetery. Sometimes, the address the woman gives the motorist is that of the cemetery in which she’s buried. In an interesting twist, this urban legend, when told in Hawaii involves the goddess Pele who travels the roadway in disguise and rewards those who pick her up.
We often associate the paranormal with creepy old houses and bumps in the night, but the motorist in this story finds the paranormal in a place he least expects to. It gives us the idea that the paranormal can be anywhere and everywhere. Would we even know if we’d encountered it? Pretty spooky, huh?
Have you ever heard of Resurrection Mary? The ghost of Archer Avenue? This tale is a spin on the urban legend set in Chicago, IL and the phenomena is a popular subject for documentaries. In a past episode of this podcast, you might remember I talked about one such documentary by Derek Quint of Addovolt Productions titled A Murky Path Down Archer Avenue. It’s a short documentary, only about 13 minutes long, but it tells the story of Resurrection Mary quite well and frames the appearance of a ghostly hitchhiker as something that might not be abnormal at all. Truthfully, we’re surrounded by the spirit world all the time. We just don’t always realize it.
The story of Resurrection Mary is often confused with the tail of the wailing woman in Archer Woods or the multitude of female ghosts that have supposedly been seen wandering the roadways dressed in white, but Mary herself is unique. The woman we know as Mary is presumed (by some) to be Anna Norkis (possibly Norkus), a woman who was killed in a car crash in 1927 somewhere along Archer Avenue. Another tale explains that Mary went dancing with her fiancée at the O’Henry Ballroom (it eventually became the Willowbrook Ballroom) and left after the two had a disagreement that ended in a verbal altercation. Mary decided to walk home down Archer Avenue, but was struck and killed by a motorist. Of course, I couldn’t verify any of this information, aside from the locations in the story that absolutely do (or did) exist, so take all of this with a rather large grain of salt. Archer Avenue is around 33 miles long and Mary has supposedly been spotted at various points along it, looking for a ride. If a motorist picks her up, she’ll sometimes engage in cryptic conversations and eventually disappear out of the car. Sometimes she’s in the front seat, other times she’s in the back, but the stories that have been told about Mary are all basically the same. They even share elements with The Vanishing Hitchhiker.
In addition to Pele and Resurrection Mary, there are several other ghosts that share similarities. For example, the White Woman (or weisse Frau) ghost who haunts the Belchen Tunnel that is located on a part of the A2 motorway in Switzerland. The tunnel was opened in 1966 and renovated in 2003. In January of 1981, a myth began to circulate involving a woman clothed completely in white who appears in the tunnel out of nowhere, apparently hitchhiking to points beyond. She often speaks to the drivers who pick her up. The first known report of the phenomenon was actually of a male ghost who was picked up in June of 1980. The male hitchhiker supposedly vanished from the vehicle while it was in motion. Toward the end of the 1980’s, the tale of the white woman persisted. The tabloid Blick told the story of the phantom hitchhiker and soon other media outlets picked up on the story. There wasn’t any proof or witnesses to corroborate the stories, just the story itself, but that was apparently enough to help the legend spread. The police received dozens of calls which they dutifully logged regarding this phenomenon.
Reports of the weisse Frau dropped off until the 1983 edition of the book Baselbeiter Sagen reported further sightings. This time, two female motorists, both were apparently lawyers or law students, claimed to pick up a middle-aged woman. She was pale and sickly and offered a cryptic message to the two women regarding a future event. “Something really awful is going to happen, “she said. “Something very dreadful!” When the women turned to look in the back seat, they found it empty. The woman had disappeared.
These visitations apparently don’t only happen in and around tunnels. Similar cases have been reported in a re-edited edition of the Baselbieter Sagen. “the Heidegg castle’s lady,” “the maiden on the goat,” and “the grey woman in Zunzgen.” In Läufelfingen, the woman wears a green loden coat. In the Canton of Bern, a girl in a short leather jacket appears. In the area of Basel, as with the case in Tenniken, a man wearing black is seen. The man prophesizes an earthquake and a hard winter before disappearing. The mysterious hitchhikers can even disappear if the car has only front doors and no back doors.”
A 1981 article in Schweizer Volkskunde describes additional visitations of what they call “modern ghosts of the road.” Apparently, they’ve also been spotted in other Swiss Cantons and tunnels in Luzernerland area and in Toggenburg.
The Niles Canyon ghost story might also sound familiar to you as it’s based off the Vanishing Hitchhiker archetype. All versions involve a woman being involved in a vehicle accident, sometimes she’s walking and is struck by a car and other times is driving herself and is killed in the vehicle, but February 26th is a common date. The year changes depending on the storyteller. The girl was supposedly killed in a car accident on Niles Canyon Road off the 680 freeway in Sunol, California, on the way to her senior prom.
From Wikipedia, “The girl died on impact and to this day is said to haunt Niles Canyon road every February 26. The tale of the haunting goes that people traveling along Niles Canyon road (now Highway 84) on the night of February 26 will see a normal-looking high school-aged girl walking along the road in a prom dress (many people have said it is white). People traveling along the road (mostly those traveling alone) have said to have stopped and offered the girl a ride. She accepts the ride, giving the driver an address across the bridge (either Dumbarton or Bay Bridge depending on the storyteller). Once the driver gets to the beginning of the bridge, the girl will disappear. Sometimes people have gone to the address to find that a girl many years ago matching that description once lived there.”
Over the years, there have been many accounts of white or gray lady ghosts haunting roadways all over the world, but how much of the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend can be believed? According to some experts, every word can be debated and picked apart, but I wonder about the concept of highway hypnosis and whether or not this might have something to do with all the otherworldly experiences people have supposedly had.
Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is an altered mental state that some drivers experience. The motorist is able to drive their automobile great distances and respond to traffic changes and external events in a safe manner, but their consciousness is focused elsewhere. It’s akin to automaticity, the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required. Sort of like muscle memory.
In an article for thoughtco.com, Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. writes, “Have you ever driven home and arrived at your destination without remembering how you got there? No, you weren’t abducted by aliens or taken over by your alternate persona. You simply experienced highway hypnosis. Highway hypnosis or white line fever is a trance-like state under which a person drives a motor vehicle in a normal, safe manner yet has no recollection of having done so. Drivers experiencing highway hypnosis may zone out for short distances or hundreds of miles.”
So, are drivers simply hallucinating when they claim to see a ghostly apparition by the roadside? Can highway hypnosis also account for the action of pulling the car over and letting the woman into the car? Did the person having the experience just think that all of this happened when it was really all a figment of their imaginations? What about situations where there are two people in the car like the reported sighting in Switzerland with the two jurists? Were they both hallucinating, traveling for such a long period of time that they’d both slipped into some trance-like state and succumbed to this form of hypnosis? According to many experts, highway hypnosis kicks in when the driver has driven a long distance and uses familiar roadways. I’m thinking of someone who commutes an hour or more from a rural area into the city for work on a regular basis. They’ve taken the trip so many times that they don’t really need to check road signs or pavement markers. They’re on autopilot. According to Jim Horne of the Sleep Research Centre in Loughborough University, highway hypnosis is “like reading the newspaper at breakfast but you’re not taking in the words because you’re listening to what’s going on in the kitchen.”
I also wonder about the mental states of the individuals having these experiences. If you’re under severe stress or experiencing grief, you are vulnerable to having hallucinations. Intense negative emotions have been known to make the mind go a little wonky. Even individuals who suffer from anxiety are susceptible to hallucinations, though many studies have shown it’s not as common for people who have nonpsychotic disorders to hallucinate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. A case from the Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry by Dr. Ankur Sachdeva reports on a patient presenting signs of severe anxiety and also hallucinating.
“The patient also reported seeing images of a lady that no one else could see during the last 2 months. These clear and distinct images occurred when he was awake and fully conscious and appeared real. He reported seeing them five to ten times a day, for 5 minutes at a time. Sometimes, the image would say some words to him in a language he could not understand. The patient was usually fearful of these images. His father reported that the images appeared when the patient was very anxious, fidgety, and sweating heavily.
The patient had previously had two depressive episodes that lasted for around 3 months each and resolved completely with treatment, one 1 year previously and one 7 years previously. However, no medical records were available about these episodes. There was no family history of significant mental illnesses. The patient had no history suggestive of drug or alcohol abuse, head injury, significant medical illness, or other psychiatric illness. No symptoms suggestive of depression were reported during the current episode.
On mental status examination the patient appeared anxious and fidgety. There was increased psychomotor activity, increased rate of speech, and poor eye contact. He reported visual hallucinations that he believed to be real (i. e., he had no insight about these symptoms) but his higher mental functions were intact except for inattention and distractibility. His general physical examination was normal except for tachycardia (pulse 120/minute), increased sweating, hand tremors, and a trembling voice. The patient’s test results including blood cell counts, kidney and liver function tests, electrolytes, and blood glucose were all within normal limits. A Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan of the head revealed no significant abnormality.”
Perhaps we can hang our hats on the idea that the individuals who have seen the lady in white were experiencing some sort of mental distress at the time they claim to have had the experience. It’s certainly one explanation and it makes a little sense. Unfortunately, we can’t ask the people who have had these experiences what their mental states were at the time because the Vanishing Hitchhiker stories, in true urban legend fashion, are told about a friend of a friend and finding those links is all but impossible.
I’m a firm believer that ghosts are around us all the time. Just because we don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. After all, some people can’t see certain colors and just because you can’t see the color red doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
That’s it for this week, dear listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in. I’ll be back again soon with more tales of the creepy, weird, and paranormal.
Until next time, Stay Spooky!
The ODDentity Podcast is brought to you on a weekly basis by host Janine Mercer.
The podcast is written, produced, and edited by Janine Mercer (unless otherwise stated), and the music is provided by Garage Band.
Find the odd pod on Twitter and Instagram @oddentitypod and on Facebook as The Oddentity Podcast. You are welcome to email suggestions for future episodes to theoddentitypodcast@gmail.com and if you’d like a transcript of this episode, one will be available at theoddentitypodcast.wordpress.com.
Please take a moment to leave a 5* review on iTunes and, if you haven’t already, please make sure to mash that Subscribe button to be sure you’re in the know when a new episode drops. Sincerest thanks to those who have promoted The ODDentity Podcast to their family, friends, and coworkers. Every little bit helps.
Sources:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-vanishing-hitchhiker/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_hitchhiker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asgvJQtwwpU
http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/origins13483-the-hitchhiker.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZIQ9S8G5fA
https://www.livescience.com/7107-urban-legends-start-persist.html
https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-highway-hypnosis-4151811
The ODDentity Podcast 