Vanishing Hitchhiker, the

   A common international *contemporary legend, first so named by American scholars in 1942; it became famous as the title-story in Jan Brun-vand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings (1981). It has two basic forms, the first being as well known in England as America. A car driver picks up a girl who is hitching a lift home; she chooses the back seat, but disappears while they are in transit. He goes to her home anyway, where he learns she had died years before, in a car crash; sometimes in the cemetery he finds a jacket he had lent her draped over a grave. In the second form (rare in England), the hitchhiker is male, and supernatural, not ghostly; he foretells some large-scale event such as war, and then adds a minor prophecy before disappearing; the latter soon comes true, and the driver realizes his passenger was an angel, or Jesus.

   Both versions are often told with full belief; the first draws on the widespread current belief in *ghosts, while the second circulates in more restricted groups where its religious implications are credible. How old the story is depends on how you define it; if the criterion is not car travel but the sudden appearance and disappearance of a spectral or supernatural fellow traveller, parallels from the 19th century or earlier are easy to find (Bennett, in Bennett and Smith 1984: 45-63).

   Hitching a lift features in a tale of an allegedly true encounter in Lincolnshire in 1918: two women in a gig take up a weary-looking man, who silently leaves once they reach an inn; it turns out it is the ghost of a drowned man, whose corpse is laid out in that very inn (N&Q 12s:5 (1919), 205-6).