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. Look for new installments Wednesday and Friday…

It’s isn’t that I necessarily think that ghosts oughta have cars. It’s depressing to imagine an ectoplasmic ex-president or dead astronaut shoving some stalled out spectral beater along the shoulder of a deserted interstate. But they should have some form of transportation, right? Even if there were just a criss-crossing network of transastral zip lines that they could clip their faces to or something. The dead shouldn’t have to hitchhike. Looking through the annals of American folklore, though, I’d caution all of you to croak with at least one thumb intact because it looks like you’re going to be bumming a crapload of postmortem car rides to nowhere. Especially the ladies.

The vanishing hitchhiker is such a ubiquitous folktale that Jan Harold Brumvand, the University of Utah professor who, through a series of books, introduced the culture at large to the concept of urban legends, titled his first volume, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” If you haven’t heard the legend (or if it’s been updated so now it’s about a ghostly Facebook poke or something), the basic story goes as follow:

It’s late at night. A lonely dude is on his way home from a party. As he steers his car around a particularly spooky curve, his headlights catch the figure of an attractive female hitchhiker thumbing down his car from the shadows along the shoulder. The guy picks up the girl, who seems shy and distant. She quietly tells him where to drop her off, and they continue on in silence until they reach her nearby destination, at which point the pretty wayfarer vanishes without a trace.

Find out how the family or the vanishing hitchhiker gets dragged into all this nonsense AFTER THE JUMP…

Like every threepeated tale of a hook-handed killer or a crybaby bridge, this legend has variants. A lot of variants. In fact, it has so many alternate endings and interchangeable spine tingles that numerous folklorists have conducted exhaustive studies of the legend in an attempt to map out, both in space and time, the story’s multiple evolutions. One version finds the hitchhiker leaving a scarf or a hat behind in the car. When the driver grabs the forgotten accessory and runs it up to the hitchhiker’s door, the house’s current resident (sometimes a relative of the hitchhiker, sometimes not) informs him that the scarf’s owner, who matched the description of the hitchhiker to a t, died years ago. In another version, the driver offers the hitchhiker, who appears chilly and pale, his own coat or scarf, which he later finds draped over a cemetery headstone. Upon making some inquiries, he discovers that the person he picked up is the marked grave’s occupant. Sometimes the wandering ghost is hitchhiking on the anniversary of her death. Other times she was picked up at the former site of the horrific auto accident that killed her.

(Use of the female pronoun in regard to the hitchhiker is fairly consistent. I can’t think of any reason for this other than the obvious – it’s unlikely that a lonely midnight driver would pick up a pale, brawny man on the side of the road, no matter how shy he appeared.)

Obviously, the crux of all of these stories is a lone traveler’s unknowing encounter with the other side – a random act of kindness punctuated by a moment of wholly unexpected mortal dread (often on the part of both the driver and the queried family member) in the wake of the wandering ghost’s unceremonious departure. In one way, the story offers a strange sense of comfort – a restless spirit lost and desperate for a posthumous homecoming finds momentary deliverance in the kindness of a lonely stranger. In another way, though, the story is chilling in that its confronts us with a vision of death that finds wayward souls wandering dark roads in continual searches for the comfort of home… searches that always end fruitlessly in the cold passenger seat of an anonymous car.

Folklorists Richard Beardsly and Rosemarie Hankey were the first scholars to collate and organize all of the thumb-waving road-weary specter stories. Their 1941 study collected 79 disparate
American accounts of the tale. Their resulting report on the data managed to separate the tellings into four distinct categories, the first being the full version I related above, which was the most common and, in all likelihood, the original, “authentic” version. Another category involved the aforementioned ill-fated return of the forgotten personal affect. The other two versions? They get a bit more interesting…

Wednesday: Vanishing Hitchhikers and Prophecy

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