Horror Review: The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981, W.W. Norton & Co.)

Calling The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings a work of horror is, perhaps, a tad exploitative. And yet one cannot deny the power of the urban legend to creep us out. While Brunvand penned this book as the result of his work in the world of folklore research back in the 1960s and 1970s, and its 1981 publication leaves it more than a little dated by today's standards, it's still one of the most eminently readable books on the subject today. Rather than simply collecting and collating a variety of stories we all 'know' to be true (because they happened to someone who knows someone who knows you), Brunvand dives into the reasons behind why such stories are passed around, why they survive, and how they change depending on what part of the country and in what year they are told.

Brunvand has arranged these stories and their backgrounds into chapters dealing with various subject matters, the first of which is "The Classic Automobile Legends", a subclass of which is the titular story which has, believe it or not, been around since the turn of the twentieth century, with the place where it supposedly happened and the method of transportation involved changing and updating itself as technology marched steadily forward from horseback to carriage to automobile. The driver may be alone, or have a single companion. He may be driving his own car, an 18-wheeler, or a taxi, but none of this is key to the telling of the legend. If you're unfamiliar, the story, which I'll quote from one of the tellings recorded by Brunvand in the book, is as follows:

Well, this happened to one of my girlfriend's best friends and her father. They were driving along a country road on their way home from a cottage when they saw a young girl hitchhiking. They stopped and picked her up and she got in the back seat. She told the girl and her father that she just lived in the house about five miles up the road. She didn't say anything after that but just turned to watch out the window. When the father saw the house, he drove up to it and turned around to tell the girl they had arrived--but she wasn't there! Both he and his daughter were really mystified and decided to knock on the door and tell the people what had happened. They told them that they once had a daughter who answered the description of the girl they supposedly had just picked up, but she had disappeared some years ago and had last been seen hitchhiking on this very road. Today would have been her birthday.

This version, related by a teenager in Toronto back in 1973, is archetypal of the tale. Other versions of the story have the ghostly hitchhiker borrow an article of clothing from the driver only to have it turn up in the dead young woman's room when the driver reaches the house and inquires about it, or adorning her tombstone in the local cemetery when the driver stops outside it at the girl's request, whereupon she vanishes. No doubt you've heard variations on this story from your own area, either when growing up or while away at college/university. "The Vanishing Hitchhiker", in one form or another, has been told across the world for over a century. I remember seeing a number of different takes on it on the television program Unsolved Mysteries over the years. Why does it (and the rest of the legends related in the book) persist and endure across physical, temporal, linguistical, and cultural boundaries? How, in this age of instant communication and access to information which makes debunking claims of this sort as easy as pulling up a search engine on a smart phone, can these stories continue to propagate, dying off for a short while before resurrecting themselves in the sleepover tales of a new generation of children? These are the questions which Brunvand sets out to explore with The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and he invites us along, as laymen, for the ride.

The temptation to consider this nothing more than Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for an adult audience must be resisted, for while Brunvand relates many versions of many classic urban legends here, the goal is not to spook or entertain, but rather inform and contrast. And while there are plenty of stories told with the intention of sending shivers up spines, including not only "The Vanishing Hitchhiker", "The Roommate's Death", and (of course) "The Boyfriend's Death", the urban legend has room for comedy as well with stories about vengeful exes disposing of their former spouse's property at a bargain basement price ("The Philanderer's Porsche"), jealous husbands accidentally destroying an expensive new gift ("The Solid Cement Cadillac"), and girlfriends who mortally embarrass themselves when they think no one else is around ("The Fart in the Dark"). If discomfort and disgust are more your speed, Brunvand has you covered there with such classics as "The Kentucky Fried Rat", "The Mouse in the Coke Bottle", and "The Spider in the Hairdo". Finally there are the stories which hinge on the idea of karma, reciprocity, and balancing the scales of justice such as "The Dead Cat in the Package" where a pack snatcher steals the wrong box; "The Red Velvet Cake" where a woman receives both the recipe she requested and an enormous bill accompanying it and decides to submit the recipe to the local paper or pass it out to everyone she meets to get back at the deceitful restaurant, hotel, or chef which sent it originally; and "The Runaway Grandmother" where car thieves wind up stealing not just the family car but the corpse of a recently-deceased relative inside or atop it as well.

From killers in the back seat to babies in the oven, acts of depravity to acts of desperation, once you recognize an urban legend for what it is, you'll see bits and pieces of them cropping up everywhere, and not just teen slasher flicks. Brunvand's book is still used in sociology and mythology classes today as a textbook on the study, adaptation, and transmission of these stories which remain somehow timeless in an age where everything else has a definite expiration date. It's fun reading for personal enrichment, or to read among friends for examples of the awful, the absurd, the comical, and the dastardly.

The best part? Brunvand didn't rest on his laurels after writing The Vanishing Hitchhiker and assume all the work of chronicling and examining urban legends was through. He kept researching, and has published ten more volumes of new stories, tales, and folklore in the years since. Our culture, it seems, thrives on those incidents that happened to a friend of a friend, and as the old ones fall out of favor, new versions arise to take their place as cautionary tales, explanatory fables, or just plain spooky stories told around the campfire.

Brunvand's work is required reading for anyone with an interest in horror, and even if you consider yourself familiar with urban legends, I guarantee there's stuff in here you haven't heard before. I also guarantee there's at least one you've passed on yourself to friends or family, either around the dinner table, at the office, or via social media, either willfully or unwittingly. Knowing these stories gives you an insight into the writing process used by many contemporary and past horror writers, as many of them used these stories, or versions of them, to jump-start their own works. The Vanishing Hitchhiker is a fast, simple read with a scholarly angle providing not just the stories but insight into the people who tell them and why. Five stars out of five, highly recommended, and well worth the price of admission.