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.
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.
curious
April 20 2009, 00:20:49 UTC 8 years ago Edited: April 20 2009, 00:22:12 UTC
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.
April 22 2009, 19:38:46 UTC 8 years ago