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The most common form taken by the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend involves a driver who stops to pick up a strange girl on a highway, then during the course of the ride realizes his guest has disappeared. Upon arriving at the address she had mentioned, the driver learns from her relatives that the woman who'd ridden with him has been dead for years. However, that legend also exists in a secondary version which similarly features a hitchhiker who dematerializes from a moving car, but only after solemnly intoning a prophecy. Good crops, the end of a war, a natural catastrophe about to strike, or the imminent coming of Jesus have been predicted by these vanishing prophets. Common to many of these tales is the completing element of the baffled and somewhat unsettled driver's reporting the incident to police or other authorities, only to be told he's the fourth or fifth person that week to have announced having had such an encounter. That element is a plot device necessary to the believability of the story: Without the confirmation from an authority figure that others have shared the same experience, those being regaled with the yarn could quietly conclude the person who heard the prophecy and witnessed its deliverer vanish from the car was off his rocker. While in the spring of 2009 we noted an uptick in the number of reportings of the heavenly messenger version of the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend, the narrative itself is as old as the hills. Modern tellings of the tale have the incident happening in Lexington (Kentucky) or near Warsaw, Indiana or a week or so ago, but other versions of this yarn have been kicking around since the 1940s, and precursors to it appear in the Bible. Vanishing prophets who predict catastrophes or speak of the coming of Christ or the end of the world are often said to look like Jesus, or indeed to have straight-out said they were Jesus. (The latter is a popular element in versions collected in the spring of 1971 and winter of 1972, periods coinciding with religious revival on American campuses.) Alternatively, they are also often said to have done something indicating they were angels (e.g., saying My lips are near the trumpet, a statement meant to identify its speaker as the archangel Gabriel). This form of the legend often surfaces in the wake of a natural disaster, with the encounter said to have happened maybe all of a week before things went to hell in a handbasket. The vanishing prophet set of stories contains a smaller subset in which the prediction of one future event is bolstered by the prediction of a second, equally unbelievable event which subsequently comes true: Simpler forms of the legend omit the man dies in the car, thereby making one outlandish prediction come true and consequently adding credibility to the second, as yet unrealized, foretelling and skip straight to the prophecy the heavenly messenger has been sent to deliver: While Jesus is coming or The end of the world is near messages are the most common ones imparted in prevalent recountings of this tale, at other times in history tidings of a different sort have been the legend's focus — such as conclusion of a war the nation is currently embroiled in, the death of a national enemy, assurances about the harvest, or even pronouncements of pestilence to come. As to how old these sorts of stories are, says folklorist Gail de Vos about the antecedents to the heavenly messenger vanishing hitchhiker legend: As to why this legend endures generation after generation and is told in various countries around the globe, difficult times spawn anxieties that as bad as things are, they are about to get worse. Resurgence of tales about heavenly messengers sent to alert the world that the end is near are expressions of the underlying current of dread that makes itself felt during periods of unease or upheaval. Such legends are also confirmatory tales of religious belief, in that they offer the comfort that all is unfolding as part of God's greater plan. Previous generations (some might say stretching back to the very beginnings of recorded time) have had their doomsday predictors, yet the world is still here, having weathered innumerable dark eras of pestilence, war, and economic upheaval. Such predictions tend to become fewer (or at least get roundly pooh-poohed) when people feel less anxious about their futures.
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