An Urban Legend: The Vanishing Car March 8, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This is a very exciting ghost story, because it seems to be an early version of the most famous (and at least to this blogger) the most satisfying modern urban legend: the vanishing hitchhiker: hitchiker picked up who it later transpires was a ghost. Admittedly the story is turned on its head: the driver and the car are the phantoms here. But the principle is the same. The dead and the living interact in a car, the living unaware that they are with a ghost and a final proof emerging afterwards to give the story a satisfying end.
Another part of London has its own legend of a phantom taxi-cab. The story goes that a South Kensington vicar was called upon by a lady in a great state of agitation, who wished him to get into the taxi which she had at the door, and go with her to see a man who was dying. Deeming it no more than his duty to answer such an appeal, the cleric went off with the lady in the taxi. He alighted when they had arrived at the house indicated, and, turning round to speak to the lady, found to his amazement that both she and the cab had vanished. The taxi does not come into the story any more, the end being the death of the man the clergyman was called to see, and the startling discovery that the lady who had brought the summons was his wife, who had been dead for 15 years. Dun Eve Tel, 4 Jan 1939, 3.
There is a long tradition in the west of ghostly or saintly interventions to allow a good death, so this story has genealogy. As to the modern version of the Vanishing Hitchhiker it is easy to imagine someone flipping the story to make the passenger the ghost, something which is, in as much as ghosts can ever be credible, more believable. Jim Harold Brunvand in his wonderful Encyclopedia includes one version along these lines.
A bus driver in an old dinged up school bus gives a ride to a Jewish hitch hiker and drops him off at the synagogue. The men in the synagogue welcome him, since they were one man short of making a minyan. The hitchhiker asks about the bus driver: ‘Oh that’s old Reb Zalman. He was killed in an accident when swerved off the road to avoid hitting some kids with his bus. From time to time he sends us a tenth man when we need on to make a minyan.
JHB also notes that the Large Marge episode in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) may have been the ultimate inspiration for this Israeli tale: it is, on the evidence above, not the oldest though. Can anyone help find other references to the vanishing car: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
28 Mar 2016, James H, first, with “Big Joe and Phantom 309,” by the wonderfully awful Red Sovine:
28 Mar 2016, Bruce T: It goes back well before Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Red Sovine, a country singer had a hit in 1967 with a song called “Phantom 309” [see above, Beach] that the Large Marge scene is a parody of. Red was a distant cousin of mine, I have to defend the family honor. The tale goes back further, my grandmother told it to me, she was dead a year before the song came out. It was a cautionary tale that I suspect evolved to discourage kids from hitchhiking. When would it have originated? The Great Depression would be a good guess. Cross country trucking was taking off with droves young people were hitting the roads and rails to look for work to help out at home.
28 Mar 2016, Ruth writes in: I remember a TV show here several years back that tried to debunk urban legends, one of which was one about a ghost car that disappeared during a filmed police chase (I’ve included a link to the video of that). In the show they did manage to debunk that one in a very plausible way. While this is not technically about a ghost car, thought it would fit in very well with your theme.
https://youtu.be/0PcfLk8elik
Here is a Snopes.com (a site that is basically funded by the CIA, so take it with a grain of salt) discussion thread about it–
I couldn’t remember the name of the TV show, unfortunately. And the chase was filmed in Garden City, Georgia. No jokes about gullible Southerners, please! Another fun tradition in this country, if you talk with a Southern accent any where except the South you are considered to have a lower IQ than normal. This has happened to me several times as I live in a state with a somewhat neutral accent now. And yes, I do test in the upper range and have a college degree, among other things. And yes, this is a very sore point for me! The TV show decided that the car went under a fence and the cop car lost sight of it.
