Drive through the Chicago suburb of Willow Springs late at night and local lore says you might see a forlorn young woman in a white dress on the side of the road. If you take pity and ask if she needs a ride, she’ll quietly accept. She’s soft-spoken and won’t say much, save that she’s headed your way. Then, a couple miles down the road, she’ll ask you to let her out—just as you pass the gates of the Resurrection Catholic Cemetery. You may well turn around, confused, to ask if this really is her stop, only to find that she’s vanished.
Many Midwesterners likely know a version of this story; “Resurrection Mary” is one of the region’s most famous and enduring ghosts. But Mary is just one of the dozens of “vanishing hitchhikers” who supposedly haunt roads across the United States—and beyond. There’s the hitchhiking Los Angeles woman in white who asks to get out at a cemetery and then vanishes. Or the cackling flannel-clad redhead with hollow eyes who hitches in rural Massachusetts but vanishes in the backseat. Or the man looking for a lift on a lonely stretch of South Carolina road, only to vanish when the car passes the site of a ’50s prop plane crash.
Vanishing hitchhiker legends are so ubiquitous that there’s an entire subfield of folklore research, going back more than 80 years, dedicated to tracking and unpacking them. What’s more, these tales are likely modern incarnations of much, much older legends. And they continue to spread and evolve.
Accounts of Resurrection Mary and a handful of other vanishing hitchhikers started making the rounds in the 1930s. There was no compendium of these legends at the time, so as folklorists encountered one version, they treated it as a unique local tale, perhaps one born of the memory of a nasty early auto accident and anxieties about the proliferation of automobiles.
Then, Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, students at the University of California, Berkeley, went digging. The pair searched for records of any car accident that could have inspired the version they’d heard. They came up empty—but they did discover similar yet distinctly local tales throughout the state. One of the people they interviewed, a businessman based in San Francisco, mentioned hearing of other versions in Chicago and Salt Lake City.
Beardsley and Hankey reached out to contacts nationwide, and within two months they had a collection of nearly 80 distinct tales, from New York to Hawaii. They never found a clear Ur-story, the version from which all others evolved. But their research, published in 1942 in the inaugural issue of the journal California Folklore Quarterly, uncovered several curious aspects of the legend—and coined the term “the vanishing hitchhiker.”