Music:The Be Good Tanyas, "Keep It Light Enough to Travel."
A question about hitch-hiking ghosts.
Almost everybody's heard the basic hitch-hiking ghost story—dude (usually) gives a girl a ride home, and later finds out that she was actually dead way before she got into the car—but there are some really fascinating regional variants. So here is my question for you:
How does the story go? Is she a victim, a predator, or just a confused kid trying to go home? Is seeing a hitcher like seeing the Bean Nighe—you're just doomed to die now? How does it go?
To be clear, I'm not asking you to make something up; I want to know how, in your part of the country or the world, the story goes. Or, if this is the first time you've encountered the idea (outside Disney's Haunted Mansion), I'd like to know that, too.
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.
curious
April 19 2009, 20:20:06 UTC 8 years ago
Ah, Oedipus.
April 19 2009, 20:20:58 UTC 8 years ago