The phantom hitchhiker is an urban legend in which motorists travelling at night pick up a hitchhiker who behaves oddly and disappears during the journey, often from a moving vehicle. Subsequent investigations reveal that the passenger – usually a young woman – was a ghost, or other non-human entity.^[1][2][3]

A common variation has the vanishing hitchhiker departing as would a normal passenger, but leaving some item in the vehicle, or borrowing a garment for protection against the cold.^[3] The vanishing hitchhiker may also leave an address, but when the driver follows up on that they discover that their passenger had died several years earlier.^[2] Other variations reverse the scenario, with the hitchhiker later learning that the driver was the apparition of someone who had died earlier.^[3]

The legend was largely popularised by Jan Brunvand’s book The Vanishing Hitchhiker (1981).^[1]

Classification

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The first systematic study of the story of the phantom hitchhiker was undertaken in 1942–1943 by the American anthropologists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, who collected as many accounts as they could and attempted to analyse them.^[4][5]

The Beardsley-Hankey survey elicited 79 written accounts of encounters with vanishing hitchhikers, drawn from across the United States.^[4][5] They found “four distinctly different versions, distinguishable because of obvious differences in development and essence”, which they characterised as:

• Stories where the hitchhiker gives an address through which the motorist learns he has just given a lift to a ghost; 49 of the Beardsley-Hankey samples fell into this category, with responses from 16 states of the United States.
• Stories where the hitchhiker is an old woman who prophesies disaster or the end of the Second World War; subsequent inquiries likewise reveal her to be deceased. Nine of the samples fit this description, of which eight came from the vicinity of Chicago. Beardsley and Hankey felt that this indicated a local origin, which they dated to around 1933; two of hitchhikers in this sample foretold disaster at the Century of Progress Exposition and another foresaw calamity “at the World’s Fair”.
• Stories where a girl is met at some place of entertainment such as a dance, instead of on the road, and leaves some token (often the overcoat she borrowed from the motorist) on her grave by way of corroborating the experience and her identity.
• Stories where the hitchhiker is later identified as a local divinity.

According to the folklorist Gillian Bennett, the Beardsley-Hankey categorisation has not stood the test of time, with the legend much more widespread than they had believed. She has suggested a simpler classification of the phantom hitchhikers would be to distinguish between supernatural entities and numinous beings – those with a religious or spiritual quality – subdivided by how their alleged status is discovered.^[2]

Sceptical reception

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The paranormal researcher Michael Goss in his book The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers reported that many accounts of vanishing hitchhikers are based on folklore and hearsay. He also attributed some cases to hallucinations;^[6] according to Goss, most of the stories are “fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings”.^[3]

The paranormal investigator Joe Nickell concluded that no reliable evidence exists for vanishing hitchhikers, and that historical examples have their origin in folklore tales and urban legends. Modern cases often involve conflicting accounts that may well be the result of exaggeration, illusion, or hoaxes.^[3]