Post by hi224 on May 14, 2019 20:27:48 GMT
The vanishing or phantom hitchhiker is an urban legend in which people travelling by vehicle, meet with or are accompanied by a hitchhiker who subsequently vanishes without explanation, often from a moving vehicle.
Public knowledge of the story expanded greatly with the 1981 publication of a non-fiction book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. In this book, the author suggests that the story can be traced as far back as the 1870s and has "recognizable parallels in Korea, Tsarist Russia, among Chinese-Americans, Mormons, and Ozark mountaineers." Similar stories have been reported for centuries across the world.
Variations on the Legend:
A common variation of the above involves the vanishing hitchhiker departing as would a normal passenger, having left some item in the vehicle, or having borrowed a garment for protection against the cold. The vanishing hitchhiker may also leave some form of information that encourages the motorist to make subsequent contact.
In such accounts of the legend, the garment borrowed is often found draped over a gravestone in a local cemetary. In this and other versions of the urban legend, the unsuspecting motorist makes contact with the family of a deceased person using the information the hitchhiker left behind and finds that the family's description of the deceased matches the passenger the motorist picked up and also finds that they were killed in some unexpected way (usually a car accident) and that the driver's encounter with the vanishing hitchhiker occurred on the anniversary of their death.
Other variations reverse this scenario, in that the hitchhiker meets a driver; the hitchhiker later learns that the driver is actually an apparition of a person who died earlier.
Studies:
The first proper study of the story of the vanishing hitchhiker was undertaken by American Folklorist 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.
This study found that most accounts featured someone deceased giving their address to the person who offered them a lift.
The second most common was in which an elderly individual would give a warning of impending disaster before vanishing.
Rarer but still recorded more then once were occurrences of young women borrowing coats or scarves from their driver before getting out of the vehicle, the garment would later be found on the headstone of the person.
One of their conclusions was that 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.
Paranormal researcher Michael Goss in his book the evidence for phantom hitch-hikers discovered that many reports of vanishing hitchhikers turn out be based on folklore and hearsay stories. Goss also examined some cases and attributed them to hallucination of the experiencer. According to Goss most of the stories are "fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings."
Conclusions: Few if any vanishing hitchhiker stories have been substantiated but these stories persist and will likely continue to be a phenomenon for years to come. What is your opinion on this?
Wikipedia link
Public knowledge of the story expanded greatly with the 1981 publication of a non-fiction book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. In this book, the author suggests that the story can be traced as far back as the 1870s and has "recognizable parallels in Korea, Tsarist Russia, among Chinese-Americans, Mormons, and Ozark mountaineers." Similar stories have been reported for centuries across the world.
Variations on the Legend:
A common variation of the above involves the vanishing hitchhiker departing as would a normal passenger, having left some item in the vehicle, or having borrowed a garment for protection against the cold. The vanishing hitchhiker may also leave some form of information that encourages the motorist to make subsequent contact.
In such accounts of the legend, the garment borrowed is often found draped over a gravestone in a local cemetary. In this and other versions of the urban legend, the unsuspecting motorist makes contact with the family of a deceased person using the information the hitchhiker left behind and finds that the family's description of the deceased matches the passenger the motorist picked up and also finds that they were killed in some unexpected way (usually a car accident) and that the driver's encounter with the vanishing hitchhiker occurred on the anniversary of their death.
Other variations reverse this scenario, in that the hitchhiker meets a driver; the hitchhiker later learns that the driver is actually an apparition of a person who died earlier.
Studies:
The first proper study of the story of the vanishing hitchhiker was undertaken by American Folklorist 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.
This study found that most accounts featured someone deceased giving their address to the person who offered them a lift.
The second most common was in which an elderly individual would give a warning of impending disaster before vanishing.
Rarer but still recorded more then once were occurrences of young women borrowing coats or scarves from their driver before getting out of the vehicle, the garment would later be found on the headstone of the person.
One of their conclusions was that 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.
Paranormal researcher Michael Goss in his book the evidence for phantom hitch-hikers discovered that many reports of vanishing hitchhikers turn out be based on folklore and hearsay stories. Goss also examined some cases and attributed them to hallucination of the experiencer. According to Goss most of the stories are "fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings."
Conclusions: Few if any vanishing hitchhiker stories have been substantiated but these stories persist and will likely continue to be a phenomenon for years to come. What is your opinion on this?
Wikipedia link