The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan Harold Brunvand

You might think, after seven years, that the policeman would have been promoted to other cases and the office worker would have aged a bit. The 1982 article says 'tracking down' instead of 'investigating,' and it omits the word 'ghostly.'īut both articles, using present tense, quote police spokesman 'Harald Grella' and refer to a 30-year-old female office clerk who first encountered the ghost. In the 1989 story we read that 'The police in Rosenheim, West Germany, told The News that they are frantically investigating a series of reports' of ghostly hitchhikers. The two articles even have the same byline - 'Pete Cooke.' The 1989 article is an almost a word-for-word reprint of 'Ghostly hitchhiker warns of Doomsday,' a story from the July 12, 1982, edition of the same tabloid. In other columns, and in my first book (titled 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker'), I've traced this general theme back to ancient beliefs in the return of spirits which counsel or warn the living.īut Weekly World News did not get its information from folklorists' research they simply pulled the latest version out of their backfile. In the United States it goes back to the turn of the century, when the mysterious stranger was said to disappear from a horse-drawn wagon or buggy, often after making a startling prophecy. In fact, 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' is one of the oldest legends that folklorists have documented.

This article even cross-referenced an American counterpart, mentioning that 'The first reports of the phantom hitchhiker occurred in Arkansas in the mid-1970s.' 1994, and then disappeared from the moving vehicles. He supposedly predicted the end of the world i. The article described a ghostly hitchhiker, an old man wearing a battered hat and a trenchcoat, who was picked up by motorists on the Munich-Salzburg highway in West Germany. 'Phantom hitchhiker warns motorists of DOOMSDAY - then vanishes into thin air.' A surprising number of these articles report supposed encounters with a hitchhiker who vanishes from a moving car.Read the story's wording, not only its plot, as summed up in the headline: Much of the tabloids' zany contents certainly sounds folkloric, and my mail overflows with clippings from them. So are the tabloids reporting folklore now, or are they creating it? Sometimes I think that 'the vanishing hitchhiker' - a famed theme in folklore - shows up more often on the pages of tabloids than in oral tradition.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan Harold Brunvand