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.
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.
curious
April 21 2009, 00:58:38 UTC 8 years ago
April 28 2009, 00:49:54 UTC 8 years ago