Phantom Hitchhiker

The phantom hitchhiker (also vanishing hitchhiker) is one of the most popular and widespread of modern Ghost legends, appearing around the world and especially throughout the United States. There are countless variations, and the story continues to be reported in contemporary times.

In most versions, the phantom hitchhiker is a girl or woman, sometimes in distress. She is spotted late at night, standing by the side of a lonely stretch of road. Sometimes she stands in the middle of the road, looming up suddenly in the headlights. She is often dressed in white, and if the night is stormy she is bedraggled from the rain.

The driver, who usually is a man alone, stops and asks if he can help, or where she is going. She tells him, and she always is going to the same town as he is. He offers to take her straight to her home. She accepts and gets in the backseat. He may give her his coat to keep warm.

As they drive on, the man cannot help but notice how stunningly beautiful she is. But she is painfully shy and withdrawn, perhaps even exhausted, for she rarely says another word. She may give her name. When the driver reaches the address she has given him, he stops the car and turns around in his seat, and is astonished to see that she has vanished.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker — Click on the Image to Read this Book

Typically, she leaves behind a piece of clothing or an object, such as a book, pin, purse or scarf. The seat may still be wet where she sat. The driver goes up to the door of the house, which is answered usually by a woman and sometimes by a man and woman. The driver explains the mysterious event. He is told that it has happened before—the girl or woman is their daughter who was killed some time ago, and the night is the anniversary of her death. She was either murdered or killed in a tragic accident at about the spot where the driver picked her up.

Every anniversary of her death, her ghost attempts to come home. The driver is shown a photograph of the dead girl—she is the same one he picked up, wearing the very same clothes. Later, the driver visits her grave. If he had given her his coat in the car, he then finds it draped across her tombstone. The phantom hitchhiker may appear and pick up travelling companions at locations other than lonely roads.

Sometimes she is met at a club or dance hall and is driven home. In one version from the American South, the phantom hitchhiker is a young woman in a cemetery who meets a man walking home alone late one night. He offers to walk her to her home and she accepts. They talk along the way. Later, he decides to call on her, and he is shocked to hear from the man who answers the door that the young woman, his daughter, has been dead for 12 years.

Despite its widespread popularity in the United States, the phantom hitchhiker legend probably originated in Europe with legends of Phantom Travelers. It also appears in Asian folklore as a young woman who walks behind a man to the home of her parents, but vanishes when the destination is reached and he turns around. In America, the phantom hitchhiker legend appeared as early as the late 19th century.

It may have gained a prominent role in American lore because of the emphasis on automobiles in American culture, and the romance of the open road, especially from the mid-20th century on. There also are sexual undertones in the vulnerable female-in-distress motif. In some versions, the phantom hitchhiker story takes on characteristics of the legends of eternally wandering ghosts, such as the Flying Dutchman and La Llorona.

In 1998, ghost investigator Alan Murdie found an oral tradition of the phantom hitchhiker in Bogotá, Colombia. The story, involving a truck driver who picks up a young girl, has no firsthand witnesses.

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits – Written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley – September 1, 2007

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Phantom hitchhikers are said to be a kind of ghost or apparition that seems to be hitchhiking, that stands by the side of the road, or that suddenly appears in the middle of the road. People who believe in these ghosts say that they look like real human beings, and when hit accidentally by a car, they seem so solid that drivers stop their cars, thinking that they have injured a real person. Upon investigating, drivers supposedly find no body and no damage to their cars. Most phantom hitchhikers seem to inhabit one particular stretch of road and reappear on many occasions, to many different people. Some stretches of road become notorious for these sightings. For example, the Blue Bell Hill Road in Kent, England, is well known for its ghost sightings. From the 1960s through the 1990s, numerous drivers thought that they had hit a ten-year-old girl only to find, when they got out of their cars, that no one was there. Others saw a girl after getting out of the car and wrapped her in a blanket, but the girl disappeared—leaving behind an empty blanket—before the police arrived. Interestingly, the same stretch of road was the site of a major automobile accident in 1965, during which three people were killed—though all of the victims were young women, not children. Since many of the sightings along Blue Bell Hill Road were reported to authorities, the drivers were obviously seeing something, though what they saw is uncertain. Skeptics suggest that sightings of this sort are probably attributable to hallucinations caused by extreme fatigue. Skeptics note that many of these phantoms are seen on particularly monotonous roads, where driving fatigue more easily sets in; and most phantom hitchhikers appear at places along these roads, particularly sudden curves, where a sleepy driver might be startled into a more alert state. The circumstances of such sightings, the skeptics say, suggest that the phantomhitchhiker experience is somehow connected to sudden changes in the driver’s level of awareness.

Phantom Hitchhiker

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