The vanishing hitchhiker is an urban legend in which people travelling by vehicle, meet with or

The vanishing hitchhiker (or variations such as the ghostly hitchhiker, disappearing hitchhiker, 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 Jan Harold Brunvand's non-fiction book The Vanishing Hitchhiker. In his book, Brunvand suggests that the story of The Vanishing Hitchhiker can be traced as far back as the 1870s." Similar stories have been reported for centuries across the world in places like England, Ethiopia, Korea, France, Tsarist Russia and in America among Chinese Americans, Mormons and Ozark mountaineers

The, probably, first vanishing hitchhiker legend can be found in the 400-year-old manuscript Om the tekn och widunder som föregingo thet liturgiske owäsendet, approx "About the signs and wonders that preceded the liturgical event". The author was Joen Petri Klint, a priest in diocese of Linköping, Sweden, and diligent collector of omens.

VARIATIONS
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 cemetery. 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.

Not all vanishing hitchhiker legends involve ghosts. One popular variant in Hawaii involves the goddess Pele, travelling the roads incognito and rewarding kind travellers; other variants include hitchhikers who utter prophecies (typically of pending catastrophes or other evil events) before vanishing.

There is a similar story which is about two travellers sitting next to each other on a train (normally a man and a woman). One of them is reading a book and the other person asks what the book is about, and the first person says that it's about ghosts. They then have a conversation about ghosts, and the second person asks the first if they believe in ghosts or have ever seen one, to which the first person says that they have never seen or believed in ghosts at all. The second person replies that this is doubtful, and vanishes. This was the version used in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series.

CLASSIFICATIONS

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_hitchhiker

TAGS: Vanishing hitchhiker, Hitchhiking, Supernatural legends, Ghosts

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