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Post by dem bones on Aug 30, 2020 16:07:49 GMT
Jim Sharpe Arthur Myers - A Hitchhiking Ghost: ( World's Most Terrifying "True" Ghost Stories, 1995). Uniondale, South Africa. Army corporal Dawie van Jaarsveld offers a hitcher a ride on back of his motorbike. She accepts the proffered crash helmet and climbs aboard. It's only when they reach town, Dawie realises the girl has vanished. The panicked soldier inquires after the missing hitcher, only to be informed that he's met with the ghost of Maria Charlotte Roux, hit by a car while thumbing a ride ten years ago.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 28, 2020 18:04:46 GMT
Michael Goss - The Evidence for Phantom Hitch Hikers (Coronet, 2015: originally Aquarian Press, 1984) Illustrations Acknowledgements
The Phantom Hitch-Hiker: A Much-Travelled Ghost The Vanishing Hitchhiker: A Much-Travelled Story Nunney Excursions Lies and Mistaken Identities Roy Fulton Meets the Phantom Hitch-Hiker The Haunted Hill Interpretations and Implication
Notes and References Bibliography IndexBlurb: An objective survey of the vanishing passenger from urban myths to actual events.
All over the world motorists report giving lifts to hitch-hikers who then vanish, ghostlike, en route. Phantom Hitch-Hikers, as these insubstantial passengers are called, have become classified as an urban legend and related to historical tales of supernatural travelling companions. But is there more to such stories than picturesque folklore? Are there genuine paranormal experiences behind the reports?
This book addresses itself seriously to such questions and examines the available evidence for these encounters critically and objectively. In so doing, it dispels several misconceptions about the phenomenon and presents new evidence to suggest that in some cases real experiences are being reported.
Aspects covered include: The Phantom Hitch-Hiker as folklore The Hitch-Hiker as prophet Literary precedents - the Demon Lover The role of the press The sexual element The historical background Evaluating the evidence Citing approximately a hundred reports of phantom hitcher phenomena across the globe, this exhaustive (and, at times exhausting) study contains possibly more than most of us need to know about the subject. I particularly like that author quotes several reports from such esteemed (by me) sources as Weekend ( Terror of the Phantom Hitch-Hiker, 29 Sept - Oct 4, 1977: Mystery of the Beautiful Hitch Hiker, 29 Nov - 5 Dec 1978), Reveille ( I gave Ghost a Lift, Says Pop Star, 9th May 1975), Sunday People ( Luigi Takes a Ghostly Ride 11 March, 1973: Ghost Walks After Crash, 14 July 1974: ) and, of course, the much mourned News of the World (George Edwards, Thumbs Down to Ghostly Hiker, 13 April 1975). Alas, nothing for Tit Bits fans to grow moist-eyed over. The aforementioned haunted pop star is Richard Studholme, the guitarist out of the Chicory Tip (a post-hits/ post-banned single line up), who, driving home one night in 1974, picked up a seemingly flesh and blood girl near Blue Bell Hill,dropped her at West Kingsdown and then, as requested drove to a Swanley address to inform her parents of her whereabouts, only to be greeted by the bereaved father who explained his daughter had been killed while hitching a ride home two years ago. Mr. Studholmes first thought was that he'd been the victim of a particularly spiteful hoax - until he learned of others reports of the same ghost girl. In other the Top of the Pops news, Mr. Goss, who has more than done his homework, also makes mention of Dickie Lee's timeless Laurie (Strange Things Happen). I had no idea that, contemporaneous with Dickie's smash hit, something called Keith Kelly released a version for CBS. Photo: David Henderson, Thurrock Gazette. Innocent proto-hoodies, 'The Thurrock pseudo-ghosts,' re-enact the pose that saw them mistaken for phantom hitchers while walking home late one rainy night in 1977. The youths had swathed their heads in towels and squash jerseys to keep their hair dry.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 28, 2020 19:19:38 GMT
Michael Goss - The Evidence for Phantom Hitch Hikers Clearly, this is a sober, scientific look into the matter of . . . phantom hitch-hikers.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 28, 2020 19:33:27 GMT
By the way, I just discovered that "assistant" is an anagram of "satanists," and I felt I should write this observation down somewhere.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 28, 2020 20:17:42 GMT
By the way, I just discovered that "assistant" is an anagram of "satanists," and I felt I should write this observation down somewhere. This explains so much.
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Post by Swampirella on Sept 28, 2020 20:50:03 GMT
Michael Goss - The Evidence for Phantom Hitch Hikers (Coronet, 2015: originally Aquarian Press, 1984)
It really is a serious look at the topic, worth reading if you're interested in that kind of phenomena. But at a puny 143pgs, it's nothing compared to "The Ghost of Blue-Bell Hill and Other Road Ghosts " (Sean Tudor) at 432pgs + bibliography & notes.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 11, 2020 15:08:26 GMT
L. A. G. Strong - Danse Macabre: ( The Strand, Dec. 1949: Second Ghost Book, 1952). A ringer for the Chicory Tip guy's experience (see above). Flanagan, the village Romeo, picks up a gal at the Red Cross dance, offers her a lift home. Passing Finstown cemetery, Maud Gille - that's her name - asks to get out of the car. Flanagan pulls up. Maud just vanishes! Not a little worried, lover boy drives to the address she'd given to let her parents know what's happened. Mrs. Gille answers the door. As Flanagan explains the situation, she flies into a tearful rage, threatens to set the police on him for playing such a callous trick. Her daughter died a year ... you know the rest.
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Post by dem bones on Oct 19, 2020 12:13:17 GMT
You could always rely on the Spellbound readers. Angela Russell, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and Linda Wood, The Gipsy Curse, both Spellbound #63, 3rd December 1977 Karen Sampson, The Ghostly Hitchhiker, Spellbound #8, 13 Nov. 1976
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Post by dem bones on Jun 15, 2021 11:08:00 GMT
Tim Stout - Road Hog: ( Hollow Laughter, 1979). A callous hit-and-run driver is stalked by his gory victim. A delightful Tale from the Crypt. Meet Gordon Roper Blair, despicable upper crust rotter & Co. Blair has only that afternoon escaped a driving ban when he knocks down an elderly cyclist while speeding along a country lane. Mindful that the do-gooder judge is an idiot — "You couldn't expect a man behind a superb machine like the Shadow to conform to restrictions intended for the masses in their miserable little saloons." — he disposes of old codger and bicycle in a convenient ditch. When, a week on, the corpse is discovered by tiny children, a postmortem reveals the victim survived the hit and run only to drown in filthy pond slime. Blair is in the clear - until, some nights later, lost on the Essex marshland, he stops to pick up a hippy hitch-hiker (in fetching, pink 'Jack the Ripper was innocent' t-shirt) after first establishing the idle loafer can direct him to the Lamencha Hotel. Much to Blair's annoyance, the grubby passenger is conversational and informs him of the most ridiculous superstitious nonsense he's heard on his travels, the most laughable legend concerning a skull-faced lollypop men. Blair turns to tell him to shut up, but the hitcher is no longer there. Instead ...
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Post by dem bones on Sept 22, 2021 17:03:13 GMT
"Around Halloween it gets the heck played out of it...that song did cause a bit of trouble. There was a report of some kids who went out and wrote 'Laurie' on a bunch of tombstones in a cemetery." - Dickie Lee on his 1965 hit vanishing hitchhiker death disc, Laurie (Strange Things Happen). ( Ill Folks). Laurie's sweater - on one with similar uncanny powers - returns to haunt anew in Stefan Dziemianowitz's Stay Away From Wilson's Drive ( Bloody Mary & Other Tales For A Dark Night, 2000). Dziemianowitz's book also includes stories inspired by such enduring urban legends as The Hook, "room for one man inside," the rotting corpse in the wine casket, drugs stashed up dead babies, and yet another take on Oscar Cook's Boomerang (which, perhaps, was his own take on an extant FOAF story?)
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Post by dem bones on Oct 18, 2021 10:12:54 GMT
Richard Stodholme and the Phantom Hitchhiker, New Witchcraft #4, 1974. For more 'seventies pop stars in peril terror see our fab Spellbound thread.
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Post by dem bones on Dec 25, 2021 18:45:49 GMT
Can't have Christmas without a Phantom hitch-hiker;
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Post by dem bones on Feb 21, 2022 11:00:42 GMT
Jan Harold Brunvand - Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: A Book of Scary Urban Legends (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004) Ames Design A Note on the Texts Introduction: Gore Galore on the Bedroom Floor
1. Precursors 2. Chills up Your Spine 3. If A Body Meets A Body 4. Along Came A Spider .... Or A Snake, Or A Rat ... 5. Poor Baby 6. Accidents 7. Criminal Intent 8. Thoroughly Modern Horrors 9. Chiller E-mails and other Scary NetloreBlurb: Urban legends are those strange but seemingly credible tales that always happen to a friend of a friend. For the first time, Jan Harold Brunvand, “who has achieved almost legendary status himself” (Choice) has collected the creepiest, most terrifying urban legends, many that have spooked you since your childhood and others that you believe really did occur — even if it was one town over to some poor hapless coed who left a party early only to be followed by a man who just got loose from‘ a mental hospital.
From the classic hook-man story told around many a campfire to “Saved by a Cell Phone,” these spine-tingling urban legends are ones that will give you goose bumps, even when you know they can’t be true. Still, you’ll continue to check the backseat of your car at gas stations and look under your bed at night before praying for sleep.
"Not all urban legends are horrific, and not all horror stories are urban legends but ... in my humble opinion, the scariest modern stories are the urban legendary ones" — Jan Harold Brunvand. Opening chapter provides early examples of urban legend and Foaflore in literature. Daniel Defoe was quick off the mark with A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which recalls "frightful stories" of atrocities committed by nurses and watchmen, purportedly tending the infected, who instead delighted in "using them barbarously, starving them, smothering them, or by other wicked Means hastening their End, that is to say, murthering of them." Defoe notes that the region of the Capital where all this was taking place fluctuated wildly depending, the one constant being that it was at the opposite end of town from where you were hearing it. Nathaniel Hawthorne remarks the phenomenon in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), when rumours concerning Colonel Pyncheon’s death — by natural causes — grow more grisly and outrageous with every re-telling; "But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the earth." Sarah Bowditch, writing in Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Animals, 1852 , shares the cautionary tale of two fashionable woman walking in Regent Street who were persuaded by a street trader to buy the cutest little "doggie" - a rat in a fleece: further instances cited include Alexander Woolcott's Vanishing Lady (and surely his Moonlight Sonata qualifies as among the most horrific urban legends?); 'Room for one More' and 'The Poisoned Dress,' as included among Bennett Cerf's Current Crop of Ghost Stories (see previous post); two of twenty-nine variations on 'The corpse in the Car' collected by Marie Bonaparte in Myths of War, 1947), and a pair of proto-Vanishing Hitch-hikers from the 1940s. TBC
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Post by dem bones on Feb 24, 2022 12:41:36 GMT
Disappointing for Oscar Cook fans that Professor Harvard provides neither source nor date for the following.
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Post by samdawson on Feb 24, 2022 19:39:23 GMT
Disappointing for Oscar Cook fans that Professor Harvard provides neither source nor date for the following. Isn't this a Twilight Zone episode and a short story before that? I may be going ga-ga, but I think I remember reading it as a Somerset Maugham (or similar) story where the bug was introduced into the victim's ear by a cuckolded husband. The description of the agony caused was rather horrifying and then you had the punchline that the bug that had finally exited the exhausted and broken man's other ear had been pregnant.
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