Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. Matt broke down the basics of the legend Monday and keep an eye for the finale Friday…

Forget the demure courtesy and silent disappearance of that archetypical vanishing hitchhiker who left her stupid dead-person scarf in your car. If you’re going to haul a mysterious stranger around, you want something a little bit juicer than a sun-faded bandana. Like how about some prophecies? Impending natural disasters. Looming personal tragedies. Even the occasional standard-issue end-is-nigh doomsday harangue.

Sir/Madame, you are in luck -

As folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey sifted through a mess of 79 phantom hitchhiker stories, 9 of the retellings stood out immediately. In these accounts, the kindly driver is less freaked out by the sudden evaporation of his passenger than by the passionate fortune teller act she pulls immediately prior. (Note that the “she” in these stories is rarely the quiet, button-cute lass of the standard tale, but rather a haggard old crone who is only too eager to talk.)

Two such phantom seers predicted that a disaster would occur at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair Exhibition. (The show ran smoothly.) One wrinkly clairvoyant warned that Michigan’s Northerly Island would disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake. (It remains unsaturated.) Another posthumous, psychic ol’ biddy even predicted the end of WWII. (A safe bet given the self-limiting timeline of every past global conflict, though, as this prediction had to have been made prior to Beardsley’s and Hankey’s 1941 study, the statement is still more of an empty logical truth than a spookily prescient observation.) Post prediction, each story played out as usual: hitchhiker poofs away without as much as a “thanks, sonny,” and the curious driver ultimately learns of the ride bummer’s deceased status.

To Beardsley and Hankey, these uniquely strange versions of the tale were merely evidence of a local variation, with 8 of the 9 accounts of mouthy dead know-it-alls coming out of the Chicago area. In a way, these head-scratching foretellings are no different than the supposedly prophetic tabloid articles that use numerology, liberal interpretation of ancient texts and an unapologetic flare for wild BSary to create endless predictions of natural disaster and apocalyptic horror. Except these ghost predictions don’t seem to be based on anything at all, opting instead to use the extant hitchhiker lore as a Trojan horse filled with strange portents of Illinoisan doom. To that end, it’s hard to decipher these legends. After all, tabloids have a bottom line to consider. It behooves them to traffic in the sensationalist and the deathly, no matter how spuriously derived.

Other than to shiver the timbers of the superstitious, what’s the sense in turning a harmless campfire tale into a timely warning of local catastrophe?

Find out, AFTER THE JUMP!

All I can do is offer a baseless, but plausible, possibility: Before the 1933 A Century of Progress exhibition opened in November, Chicago’s large Germanic population was in an uproar. Famed German pilot Hugo Eckener was scheduled to visit the fair in the “Graf Zeppelin,” an innovative passenger hydrogen blimp designed to travel long distances. Theoretically, his flight from the motherland would bolster German American pride, and offer the public a firsthand look at the pioneering airship. The only problem? Eckener was a huge supporter of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement. (Awkward!) Older German Americans insisted that the fair’s German American Building fly their home country’s traditional flag – a fashionable striped number featuring black, red and yellow. Meanwhile, both the German government and recent German immigrants demanded that the building use the country’s new German Reich flag – a red banner with a central white circle containing a black swastika. Soon, Jewish groups got in on the action and threatened a boycott. Things were not looking good.

In light of all this this, it wouldn’t be surprising if any one of these groups (or even frightened outsiders) started rumors of a fair disaster, based on the seething racial tensions or even just the slight possibility of a zeppelin disaster (though this was four years before the Hindenburg explosion). Having proven to be as virulent as it was creepy, the popular vanishing hitchhiker legend was a perfect vehicle for such a fearful prediction of urban chaos. This would also account for the one opposingly optimistic prediction about WWII, and, possibly, the statement about Northerly Island – one of the two exhibition-themed warnings described the entire fair toppling over into the lake, an image that could have easily been co-opted and re-packaged by local Northerly tale spinners.

Just a theory.

(Ultimately, the German American Building opened sans swastika flag, and the exhibition went off without ein hitch. Even the Hitler enthusiasts left the grounds happy after watching the “Graft Zeppelin” flying overhead, its monstrous tail merrily adorned with a pair of giant swastikas.)

But, Hey! That’s hardly the end of the hitchhiker story, though the next epidemic of phantom thumb-waggers – the 1970s invasion of evaporating nuns – would carry even larger socio-cultural ramifications.

Friday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Divinity

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