Carine Kessie
Prof: Van de Water
English 2010-29
02/03/17
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
The vanishing girl is an urban legend about Kerns and his friend who were driving home from a party in San Francisco. It was a raining night and it was really difficult to drive. As they drove near a stop sign on Mission Street, they could see in a distinctive way the form of a woman standing alone on the corner.
It looks like she was waiting for someone. Since it was two o’clock in the morning and that no cars were longer running, they stared at her curiously as they drove up to the corner. When, Kerns brought the car next to the girl who were standing in the heavy rain without a coat or an umbrella, he saw that she was a lovely girl, dressed in a thin white evening gown. She was obviously in some embarrassment or trouble, so without hesitation, so they offered to take her home.
She accepted
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It was and still is pretty much the same story told. Even though the story is told differently in most cases someone is picked up off the road and given a ride, and then when they get to the passenger’s house, the driver found out that there is no one in the car. In order to count as a version of a particular legend, the story The Vanishing Hitchhiker must be told from mouth to mouth, generation to generation with a different version of the same story every time.
According to information published by Americans folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey in the 1940s at this time there were more than 79 versions of the Vanishing Hitchhiker all across the United States (other versions have been added to the list) and all of them were categorized by a different version. However, a common variation involving the Vanishing Hitchhiker departed as would a normal passenger, having left some item in the car, or having borrowed a garment for protection against alleged cold (Bradley and Rosalie,