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  • 1999-09-17 (xsd:date)
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  • The Vanishing Hitchhiker (en)
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  • Vanishing hitchhiker stories as we now tell them date to the turn of the century, but their predecessors go back centuries before that. As time rolled on, the wagons and horses of older times transformed into the cars of today. According to folklorist Jan Brunvand, the legend of the vanishing hitchhiker evolved from earlier European stories, usually about travelers on horseback. In Hawaii, the hitchhiker became associated with the ancient volcano goddess Pele. A prototype of the story shows up in the New Testament (Acts 8:26-39), in which an Ethiopian driving a chariot picks up the Apostle Philip, who baptizes him and then disappears. The most common version of the legend involves a driver who stops for a strange girl on a highway, then during the course of the ride realizes his hitchhiker has disappeared. Upon arriving at the address the girl had mentioned, the driver learns from her relatives that she has been dead for years: Another popular version stars a hitchhiker who makes a prophesy before vanishing in front of the driver's eyes. 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. At the completion of some of these tales, the driver seeks out the police to report the incident and is told he's the fourth person this has happened to this week. Vanishing prophets who predict catastrophes are often said to look like Jesus. 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. The hitchhiker sometimes vanishes after making the predictions: The appeal of vanishing hitchhiker stories lies in the nature of the encounter — an interaction with a ghost occurs not because the main character went looking for the supernatural, but because it came to him. Such tales underscore the belief that representatives from the spirit world can be encountered at any time and by anyone. Adding to the horror factor is the specter's passing for a living person. That the driver does not recognize it as a ghost during their time together makes it all that more easy to believe we won't recognize a ghost when we meet one, either. Variations: Vanishing hitchhikers appear in numerous songs and in the 1951 Orson Welles' short film Return to Glennascaul, the 1985 movie Mr. Wrong, and the 1824 Washington Irving novel The Lady With The Velvet Collar. In 1998 K-Mart ran a vanishing hitchhiker commercial to advertise its Route 66 jeans. Also told in: Healey, Phil and Rick Glanvill. Now! That's What I Call Urban Myths. London: Virgin Books, 1996. ISBN 0-86369-969-3 (p. 5). Holt, David and Bill Mooney. Spiders in the Hairdo. Little Rock: August House, 1999. ISBN 0-87483-525-9 (pp. 67-69). The Big Book of Urban Legends. New York: Paradox Press, 1994. ISBN 1-56389-165-4 (pp. 12-13, 201). (en)
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