Weird and Eerie (2) The Phantom Hitch-Hiker

Part Two – The Phantom Hitch Hiker.

i. Thumbs

It is 1981, and my friend Mark had just bought his first car. We would go for night drives, searching for UFOs or headless horsemen or any other ‘weird shit’ that might populate the Lincolnshire Wolds. In their expected – but disappointing – absence, we would share whale tumour stories and lurid urban legends. Cackling as the mists rose and the headlights bludgeoned them to the roadside. 

The dipped lamps picked out the outline of a hitchhiker. Unexpected in such a remote spot and even more surprising on a night as cold and damp as it was. We smirked, having been talking of Phantom Hitchhikers, and quickly decided to pick the hitcher up. I wound the window down. 

‘Where are you going?’ I asked. 

‘Louth’ he said.

We were going nowhere in particular, so it seemed like as good a destination as any. We opened the door and let him in. 

ii. Phantoms

The Phantom or Vanishing Hitchhiker is a very old story. The earliest known representation is seen 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 archetypical phantom hitchhiker story involves a female phantom that approaches lone males. As indicated in Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey’s (Beardsley & Hankey, 1942) study of the phenomena in 1943, variations of the story are manifold and include elements such as the ‘ghost’ leaving an item behind that will warrant further investigation, often leading the driver to the phantom’s family.

Sometimes the hitcher will request a jacket or blanket to keep them warm. This variation would tend to work better with the classic female/male configuration, the male’s sense of chivalry being piqued. The item is later found draped over the gravestone of a young woman, usually one who has died in a vehicular accident close to the place she has been picked up. Often the phantom is still trying to get home. Some iterations have the driver arriving at the house only to be told by the occupant that the description matches a daughter/wife/girlfriend who had died in a terrible accident.

The instances of the ‘Vanishing Hitchhiker’ phenomenon are so numerous that Ernest W. Baughman was able to collect and catalogue the occurrences and types of encounters in his 1966 study Type- and Motif-Index of the Folk Tales of England and North America. The categorisations are thus: 

E332.3.3.1(a) for vanishing hitchhikers who reappear on anniversaries. 

E332.3.3.1(b) for vanishing hitchhikers who leave items in vehicles unless the item is in a pool of water in which case it is E332.3.3.1(c); 

E332.3.3.1(d) is for accounts of sinister old ladies who prophesy disasters; 

E332.3.3.1(e) contains accounts of phantoms who are apparently sufficiently solid to engage in activities such as eating or drinking during their journey; 

E332.3.3.1(f) is for phantom parents who want to be taken to the sickbed of their dying son; 

E332.3.3.1(g) is for hitchhikers simply requesting a lift home; 

E332.3.3.1(h-j) are a category reserved exclusively for vanishing nuns (a surprisingly common variant), some of whom foretell the future. 

iii. Meme

All of the above markers and story elements act to ‘solidify’ Phantom Hitchhiker encounters into an uncertain, unheimlich and liminal reality – how does one accurately catalogue the non-existent? This reality becomes its own stable feedback loop with believer countering non-believer and vice versa. The experience, if it ever was an experience rather than a pure story, is neither provable nor unprovable, but keeps changing, adapting to the times, receiving site-specific embellishments. I have experienced the telling of this and other macabre urban legends, most memorably at a cub scout camping weekend. Some offered by Akela, some by Sixers that had been through this experience in previous camps. These intimate locations – in this instance a ring of tents around a campfire – act as a dual space of both safety and (manufactured) danger with the denouements causing squeals of horror and/or delight. The important thing, though, is that this endless retelling and debate about its truth and origins keeps the story alive and becomes a Gennepian rite of passage.

Regardless of its veracity, the telling of The Phantom Hitchhiker and its numerous subsets fulfils a sociological need for peer bonding. Like a meme, it replicates. Like a virus it infects those communities that hear it and who then pass it on.

William S. Burroughs suggests that humanity, and especially writers, are hosts for a virus from outer space. He speculates, in ‘The Ticket that Exploded,’ (Burroughs W. S., The Ticket That Exploded, 2010) that there is an ‘unrecognized virus, present in language… The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.’

A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us: its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. His later assertion that ‘the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible’ seems less plausible if only that the written word developed much later than the spoken word.

Bataille’s argument, (Bataille, 1991) broadly in agreement with Burroughs, is that communication is best understood using the contagion model, with humanity being a conduit for the process of viral communication.

Regardless of its veracity, the telling of The Phantom Hitchhiker and its numerous subsets fulfil a sociological need for peer bonding. Like a meme, it replicates. Like a virus, it infects those communities that hear it and who then pass it on.

Stories are contagious.

And timeless.

iii. A Short Drive

He threw his bag onto the back seat and settled in, punctuating the night air with a full-stop slam.

‘Thanks, mate. Where are you going?’ His voice chirruped with that falsely jolly tone used when meeting someone new and wanting to make a good impression. 

‘Nowhere, really’ said Mark, ‘just… driving about.’

After a moment’s silence, a thin voice from the back seat said ‘Oh.’ 

The chirp had vanished and even with that single syllable he sounded nervous, as if he had spotted a cryptic meaning to Mark’s response. We felt the atmosphere change and condense into something unheimlich.

Having sensed his unease and thought we would put on some music to calm his worry, forgetting that the music we liked was unlikely to get the alpha waves flowing.

After joining in on three chaotic, screeching choruses – if they were choruses – of Danny and the Dressmakers ‘Don’t Make Another Bass Guitar, Mr Rickenbacker,’ (Dressmakers, 1979) a band who were joyfully aware that a) they couldn’t play their instruments, and b) had no intention of learning, a thin voice called from the back seat. 

‘Can you let me out at the next junction?’

‘Louth is still eight miles away,’ said Mark.

‘It’s okay, I just need to get out.’

‘Okay,’ he said, puzzled. 

We slowed and let him out, watching him fade and blur into the chilled miasma – and in the wrong direction to Louth. 

‘I guess he doesn’t like the Dressmakers,’ said Mark with a shrug. 

‘I guess not,’ I replied.

iv. ‘Hypermasculine’

‘Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It’s the only way to live…’

(Numan, 1980) Time and technology then have caused the updating of the story with phantom carriages in the Elizabethan period becoming covered wagon stories in the Old West, cars in the modern era, but the basics remain the same: a supposedly safe and personal space invaded by an unexplained force. This idea has extended to tales of other items of haunted technology, for example videotapes in Japanese movie series ‘The Ring,’ or ‘Unfriended,’ one of the many recent horror movies that features haunted social media. Perhaps even the horror stories of 5G giving you cancer or Covid-19 are part of the same theme.

So, are these stories simply a realisation of a fear of the new? Is neophobia the root – or at least part of the root – of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, aligning it with both Toffler and Fishers ideas about the fear of, or inability to process the future. Or is it a reaction to traditionally male space is being ‘invaded’ by the ideas of gender equality? I do not think it coincidence that the ‘penetrating force’ in most of these stories is aligned with the feminine. 

Traditionally, the car is seen as a ‘male space,’ a space that is fetishised and sexualised, a space in which women become ‘objects’ or ‘possessions’ subservient to the supposed male mastery of the machine. Cars were made for men, their dimensions were created using the size of the average man. They were designed with pleasing, feminine curves and advertised with half-naked women draped across them. Cars were a bubble of masculinity, a symbol of virility – especially for the male in the midst of a mid-life crisis where his virility is on the wane.

Ironically, cars behave in a way that is both womblike and comforting and phallic and aggressive. In the standard iteration of the Vanishing Hitchhiker story, this womb-like, masculine space is penetrated by an unquantifiable female presence; a feminine spectre that makes the previously ultra-masculine space unheimlich. It suggests the male fear of penetration; a fear of impotence that, despite his best efforts, the driver is unable to satisfy the needs of the hitchhiker. Perhaps the vanishing Hitchhiker story is a ‘rebalancing’ of masculine/feminine space.

An inversion of the legend happens when a young man is picked up by a ghostly driver. These telling of stories in popular culture include Tom Waits song ‘Big Joe and Phantom 309’ and the ‘Large Marge’ section in Tim Burton’s 1984 movie ‘Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.’ The stories are practically identical, with the phantom vehicle transporting the protagonist to safety from a dangerous stretch of road. It is only on being dropped at a truck stop that the hitchhiker learns he has been picked up by a driver who died on that section of road. In Phantom 309, the driver is a jolly father figure; a hero who saved an out-of-control bus full of school children, by driving his truck off the road, causing his own death.

In Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the driver is a very masculine woman that reveals herself to be ‘other’ during the journey. Despite this otherness, she still follows through on an offer of safe passage. Pee Wee Herman and his encounter with Large Marge further confuses the standard scenario, firstly by Marge being a masculine female holding a traditionally male job, and secondly by Pee Wee Herman being an asexual man-child. Although most of the other elements of the story are in place, genders are inverted and abandoned. Despite this, the telling comes across more as a mother/son interaction which makes the penetration aspect either invalid or Oedipal. 

v – Friend of a friend

Investigations by professional sceptic Joe Nickell, in (Brunvand, 2003) concluded that there is no ‘reliable evidence’ to support the existence of vanishing hitchhikers. Confusingly, he says that they have their origins in urban legends – an urban legend having its origin in urban legends? – and folklore. If urban legends are modern folklore, this again is a curiously recursive conclusion. In ‘The Evidence for Phantom Hitchhikers’ (Goss, 2015) by paranormal researcher Michael Goss he confirms that many reports of vanishing hitchhikers turn out be ‘based on folklore and hearsay.’

At the risk of denigrating his work, I do not think this comes as any surprise. He goes on to say that some can be attributed to hallucination and that most of the stories are ‘fabricated, folklore creations retold in new settings,’ bolstering the ‘inability to cope with the future arguments or Toffler and Fisher.

Both Goss and Nickel agree that conflicting accounts are the of the result of exaggeration, illusion, or hoaxing. I would also suggest that local news stories of a genuine tragedy would feed into an established template giving the story more credence and allowing for ‘friend of a friend’ credibility.

The inadequacies in investigating and reporting these stories is unsurprising. No one ever knows the driver who is always a ‘friend of a friend’ and for the story to be credible, local knowledge must be in evidence. Examples of this evidence include knowing the name of the road on which encounter happened or having knowledge of an event that took place that may have triggered the story and often the name – most likely made up – of the friend of a friend.

My problem with both Goss and Nickel is that they are attempting to debunk the actual stories. Whether they like it or not, the stories exist and while they may attempt to destroy the notion of supernatural agency, the story itself is not destroyed. Even if they could definitively disprove the existence of ghosts, the story would still exist and be retold. The clothes it wears are irrelevant, the story still exists beneath the window dressing. 

So, is the story itself the thing doing the haunting? 

Is the repetition the spectral presence? 

The problem is that one simply cannot put the ephemeral and doubtful under the scrutiny of science. The act of an individual’s interpretation renders the oblique indefinable and any attempt to quantify the indefinable is doomed to failure. We cannot have, as Vroomfondel of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons’ demanded, ‘rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.’ (Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy, 1979)

vi. Crossroads

On returning home, and in spite of our best efforts, we found nothing that could be called a token or a message from the spirit world. We checked the boot and back seat to see if he had left a hidden communique but there was nothing except for a vague smell of patchouli left behind to investigate. 

Reluctantly, we conceded that our encounter, however ephemeral and peculiar, was merely a regular hitchhiker that wasn’t keen on the ‘weird noise’ genre of music. 

I wondered if our encounter was how local urban legends started. Could a perfectly ordinary event, after being repeated and embellished become a thing of legend? Has the hiker told tales of the ‘hell car’ he escaped from? Was this overheard and embellished? Do people in the Lincolnshire Wolds now live in fear of a demon carriage filled with the screams of tormented, suffering souls? 

  I wondered whether the hiker was a phantom and we had unknowingly witnessed our own urban legend in progress, sonically disrupting the established order of events. As much as I would have liked this to be the case, it seemed unlikely.

I often wonder whether he had managed to reach Louth and feel a twinge of guilt about leaving him lost in the mist with an eight-mile trek. Even with music choice, I couldn’t see how that decision could be better than a journey in the warmth of a car and a guarantee of getting home safely.

Perhaps he thought we were the phantoms, playing hellish music to unsuspecting victims and racing towards the next crossroads to present him to The Devil as a sacrifice. 

Perhaps not.