A question about hitch-hiking ghosts.

In Dallas she's called the ghost of White Rock lake, or the lady of White Rock lake. There are several versions, but she's not usually malevolent, just tragic. There's a lot more information here:

http://www.watermelon-kid.com/places/wrl/lore/ghost.htm

I've heard a vague version of the story (probably in Weird NJ, I think) that seems to tie with what everyone else says---person riding, goes to their home and finds it empty or burnt out or owned by parents who reveal person has been dead for a long time.
But I have to say that most of my idea of this myth is from the Twilight Zone episode (One of my all-time favorites) though that tells a slightly different tale.

The local versions can vary, depending on whether the tale was meant to teach or scare.

There were a couple different versions in the Haunted Ohio series they did in the early 90's but they were all specific to a place or road.

What I always have hears is that a driver gets in trouble and along comes this hitchhiker who helps him out. Then the driver drops him off near town and heads into the town and they learn...nope, sorry that person died a long time ago.

Oh yeah that is from Michigan. Friends used to tell me about rumors of hitchhiking ghosts near the Brighton MI Womens prison. Prisoners that were executed trying to escape. I don't know if they were supposed to be harmful or not, but most likely just trying to get away.

I also had an instructor from Africa in college and he once mentioned that they too had a version of the hitchhiking ghost. I don't recall the specifics, but I suspsect it is as regional there as it is here.

PA - person picks up hitchhiking ghost of someone sympathic - teenager, or young mother or nice, young colleg gentlemen (or person in army uniform). Person asks where ghost wants to go, gets directions. In the these stories, the person who picks up the hitchhikers is distracted by something major in their life, or it's pouring down raining, or is very tired or there is something going on that means they shouldn't be driving. Ghost keeps talking to them, to their annoyance, until they are wishing they hadn't picked up the hitchhiker. Then something happens (large puddle, deer across the road) - that if they hadn't been alert ('cause they were annoyed and alert 'cause of the ghost) - that would have killed them. Person stops the car to breathe and recover, and realizes that hitchhiker is no longer there. Sometime searches, never finds anything. Often tells the story later and finds out hitchhiker died along long stretch (normally many miles) of a similar accident.

Benevolent.

NJ - person picks up hitchhiking ghost. Ghost acts strangely. Person gets wierded out. Either this person asks the ghost to leave, and it disappears when it get out of the car, or someone at a gas station sees something odd and helps the person ditch the ghost, or the ghost kills the person. How we the hearer of the story of the ghost killing person know the ghost killed the person is never explained (ie, how does anyone know that it was a ghost if all the interested parties are dead).

I think all the different variations I've heard have been mentioned, and I couldn't easily track down where I heard each of them, since it was just one of those campfire/ghost story things that would get brought out every once in a while or show up books of folktales... (Actually, I take it back... that is a variation, though a very minor one... I'm pretty sure one of the Irish folktale books had a couple old variations, though in at least one it was a faerie, not a ghost. And basically went 'if you helped, then they'd reward you, if you turned them down and told them to walk, they'd cause problems with your cart or horse. Which brings us to the Pele-as-hitchiker legends that go around Hawaii. I know, not quite the same, but still feeds into a lot of the same plotlines.)

I do think I got the "Driver takes her up to the house and there are lights on and it all looks fine and clearly people live there, then he goes back the next day and it's abandoned and neglected and empty. Driver asks someone else and they say 'Oh, that family moved out after their daughter died ten years ago.. actually would have been ten years ago last night.'" variation at least a couple times. Sometimes in the context of he just moved into the neighborhood/town.

I've heard variations of the story, but i cant remember the exact details.

Though, i dont know who else watches the show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. They had one of the stories that i think was fact, about this guy who buys a used car from a junkyard or something. And the car kept turning at a specific road (it felt like it was out of control), always the same direction. Finally, he let the car take him where it wanted to, and it was the hospital. He later found out that the car got into a crash while the guy was driving his wife to the hospital, and the car just wanted to finish the journey or something like that...

I am trying to remember ever coming across this particular story. I think the closest I have come is Large Marge the truck driver in Peewee's Big Adventure.

I don't remember ever hearing this story while growing up (Dublin, Ireland, 1960's) but I am known as Mr Oblivious so I may have missed it.

I'm not sure, since I think most of what I know probably comes from you, but the story in my head says she's just lost, not hungry, and she's getting a ride but either has the car stop at the graveyard to let her go home, or else jumps out of the car when they're stopped near the graveyard, runs off much to the driver's surprise, and disappears.

Not violent, just confusing and sad.

I think the assumption is she died because of a drunk driver...

--Ember--

Two boys and a girl are going to the prom together. The guy and girl in the front seat tease their friend about not having the courage to ask a girl out to the prom with him. They're driving a fixed up 1950s corvette, when they see a girl in an old fashioned pink party dress sitting on the steps of one of the neighborhood houses of the road looking upset. They stop and ask if she wants a ride to the prom, and everyone assumes her date ditched her. She says yes, gets in the back seat with the shyer boy. Her hand brushes against him, and he feels how cold it is. He offers her his jacket, and drapes it around her shoulders. At the prom, they dance together, but no one knows who she is, and she won't tell him her name. He asks her who her date was so he can tell him off for treating her that way, but she insists he isn't there anyway. At the end of the night, his friend, who is erm... with his girlfriend, won't drive them home, so he offers to walk her home instead. She says yes, and he walks her to her house and she kisses his cheek. Again, he notices how cold she is, and when he looks back, she's gone. It takes him the whole day to get up his nerve, but he walks down to the house the next evening and rings the bell to ask if she wants to go to the movies with him that weekend and if he can have his jacket back, because it's rented. A woman answers the door and he asks to see the girl who went to the prom with him. The woman tells him he must have the wrong house, because she has one daughter, and the girl's five. No, he insists, he picked her up here. She had a pink old fashioned dress with a poofy skirt on. The woman tells him again, there aren't any teenage girls living there. On the way through town that night, he passes the cemetery, and, there in the middle of the graveyard is his suit jacket hanging on a gravestone. When he takes it off, he sees the girl's name and the dates. He looks her up in the school library and finds out that she died in a car crash on her way to the prom back in the fifties, and her boyfriend, his dad, had walked away.

Ah, Oedipus.

This version's from New Mexico.

My own regional variation (Wyoming) of that story is a doppelganger story about a young man just back from WWII and (happy for the GI bill) driving to school (across the state) in an unheated jeep and in a blizzard. The young man is tired, has slipped past a road block (the road was closed for weather) and into a rather treacherous canyon. The hitchhiker offers to drive for a bit as the young man is tired from driving all day in bad conditions, so ok, he lets the hitchhiker drive. He wakes as the jeep comes to a stop on the other side of the canyon, the hitchhiker says he needs to go now. He gets out of the jeep and walks back into the canyon. The young man in the jeep is confused because there are no ranches or anything nearby, and the hitchhiker disappears into the blizzard and so the young man drives on. When he gets to school and after he gets some sleep, he realizes that the hitchhiker looked like a younger version of himself.

This story is published in the book Ghosts on the Range by Debra Munn. It is a lovely volume of ghost stories that are as true as any ghost stories, or taken as mostly true, anyway. It is much creepier if you read the original and not my sketch of it here. Or maybe it is creepy since I have had creepy things happen in the damn canyon. Now, I went to that same University and am way too familiar with that canyon in which a lot of weird things happen, and I avoid driving through it at night if I can help it.

I've never encountered it "in the wild" (e.g. as a campfire story), only in books (and Supernatural). That said, the version I've generally found has had her mostly as just a confused kid, with a bit of victim thrown in--the driver comes back to her house the next day for some reason and finds out from her parents that she died in a crash on that road, yesterday, X years ago.

In the story I heard, she was a teenage runaway...and my memory kind of goes to pot after that. Maybe she was hit by car, maybe she was starved to death...but death was due to lack of safety after running away from home.

I'm from Missouri, and our version was pretty tame and lacking detail. Guy picks up girl, gives her a ride home, finds out later that she had previously died. There's no indication whether or not she knew she was dead -- she didn't indicate to the guy or make any sort of leading comment.

Or, if this is the first time you've encountered the idea (outside Disney's Haunted Mansion), I'd like to know that, too.

*in Ghost Host voice* Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention: beware of Hitch-hiking ghost! Bwa HA HA HAAAAA!!!!

Sorry, that's all I really know. Also, I know that their names are Ezra (the tall skinny one), Gus (the little one), and Phineas (the big one). I actually just found this: http://wdccduckman.blogspot.com/2007/10/meet-hitchhiking-ghosts.html, and while I don't know how Disney!canon it actually is, I'd bet it's pretty good, and it's a great story anyway.

... *sings* grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize~~~

Honestly, I don't remember coming across the idea until your Rose. That's not to say I haven't, but if I did it didn't stick. Make of that what you will. :)

In Ohio, the Girl Scout camp versions of this tale I heard are that the guy picking up the hitchhiker is a man cruising to kidnap and rape teen girls. In the stories, he has already picked up an unsuspecting young sweet thing. He then picks up the ghost girl, (usually dressed for a high school dance) who somehow gets the sweet young thing out of the car on the side of the road, (and ticked) or home safe (and still clueless.) In most of the stories, the sweet young thing finds out the next day that the bad guy is found in bits and pieces in his car, along with all of the stuff he was going to use on her like chloroform, rope, knives, etc., and trophies from other victims, which usually include something like a purse with id or yearbook or even a note explaining all from the ghost girl. Sometimes the ghost girl is a former victim of the bad guy, sometimes she's just a vengeful ghost heroine saving the night because that's what creepy ghost girls *do* with their time now that they're dead.

On the Big Island of Hawaii, the mysterious hitchhiker is not a ghost but the volcano goddess Pele. From what I remember, seeing her is a warning that there will be an eruption soon.

So here's a return question for you: What do you know about the folklore, if any, connected to Disney's choice of appearance for the Hitchhiking Ghosts in the Haunted Mansion?

--Ember--

I realize you probably don't need more of these, but I read through and didn't see the version I grew up with (Alaska) and thought I'd share:

The guy leaves prom early because he's a) had a bad time b) been ditched by his date or c) all his friends are drunk and up to no good. He's the nice type, quiet, polite, very "boy scout," and he's heading towards a bad path in life, on the wall about college. And then he sees a girl walking down the side of the road. Being the good kid he is, he stops. She gives him a sob story about a drunk date, and how she just wants to go home.

He gives her a ride, but before they get there she disappears. Poof. Gone. He becomes obsessed, and starts looking for her in yearbooks, newspapers, birth announcements, so on. He ditches the evil people he was hanging out with before, and avoids a dangerous drug-and-party-centric lifestyle that would have consumed him. Finally, desperately, after coming back from college, becoming a successful insert nice doctor-teacher-psychologist-professor type profession here. He's lamenting about the girl that might have been to a patient/student's parent. She asks about the girl, he tells her, lo and behold, her dead daughter/sister. He's told she died, and to deliver a message if he ever sees her again. Armed with knowledge, the next year, he waits for her to show and tells her that her mom/sister is still waiting for him/sent him. There she is, like clockwork, night of the prom, same girl, same dress, yadda yadda yadda. This time, they make it to the door, he gives her a kiss on the cheek, and says goodnight. She's never seen again and he goes on to marry the sister/be a great doctor/teacher and/or name his child after her.

...I'm going to guess it was an attempt at cautioning us about the evil of peer pressure, underage drinking, partying, and falling in with a bad crowd? But then, there's also a reward element.