Cinematic Haunts: Hitchhiking Ghosts of the U.S.
Hitchhiking Ghosts of the U.S.
Being a military brat, I had a somewhat transient childhood, constantly being uprooted and transplanted whenever my father was reassigned. As a result, I grew up in the Southwest, New England, and Washington DC. By the time I was seven, my family had more or less made the Northern California Bay Area our permanent home, jumping around from Pleasanton to Fremont before finally settling in Hayward, the “Heart of the Bay.” It was here that I finished up my grammar school education starting in the autumn of 1979. With September underway and Halloween on the horizon, my classmates eagerly attempted to scare the shit out of the New Girl by regaling me with stories of the Niles Canyon Ghost, a vicious female spirit who could run your car off the road and kill you if she felt like it. Rumor had it that, if you drove out onto Niles Canyon Road at midnight, you would see her, standing by the side of the road. If you offered her a ride, you would be okay, but she’d disappear from your backseat before you reached your destination. If you tried to make a pass at her or failed to pick her up at all, you suffered the consequences. Some kids said she appeared every night, some said only on Halloween night. But as we were all 9 and 10 years old at the time, none of us could actually test this theory or verify its validity. We could only repeat the story, which grew bloodier and more fantastic with each telling.
However, I was already an established ghost story addict and die-hard horror movie fan and didn’t scare easily, even at that early age, and the story of the Niles Canyon Ghost was much more interesting than learning to write my name in cursive or figuring out how to do fractions. In 1979, there was no internet, no Google, no nothing. If you wanted to learn something, you went to the library. I spent more time at the library than I did at home, and not in the babyish kids section either, with its obnoxious plastic chairs in primary colors. I hid in the basement with the reference material, reading Grown-Up books about American hauntings, urban myths, and local ghosts. By the time I was 10, I knew more about the Niles Canyon Ghost than anyone else in my class…and I’d also made some more interesting discoveries: Missus Niles Canyon, it seemed, had sisters all over the US.
Niles Canyon, California: The ghost who lingers on the rocky roads between Pleasanton and Sunol is said to be the first automobile fatality in northern California history. The legend goes that the young lady, whose surname was Lowerey, was en route to a wedding in a horse drawn carriage, when a new motorcar startled the animals. Lowerey was thrown from the carriage and into the path of an oncoming car, which killed her instantly. Legend has it that she either waits for a ride at the end of one of the many bridges that dot the area, disappearing once driven across, or that she asks for a ride to a bridge; however, research into the area’s history has uncovered no account of a fatal aut omobile accident ever having taken place in this area in the time reported. It stands then to reason that the Niles Canyon Ghost may have been influenced by a more popular hitcher girl – Resurrection Mary.
Justice, Illinois: The reports began in the 1930s in the Chicago suburb. A beautiful young woman, blond, blue-eyed and wearing a formal white dress, was seen walking along Archer Avenue. When asked if she needed a ride, the pale girl would accept and sit silently in the back seat, a clutch purse in her lap and a thin shawl around her shoulders. Once the car reached the gates of the Resurrection Cemetery, the girl would ask the driver to stop. He would do so, and find that the girl had disappeared from his back seat. Other reports state that the girl was seen at the Willowbrook Ballroom (formerly the Oh Henry Ballroom), wearing a white party dress and matching shoes. A young man who asked her to dance was startled to discover that her hands were ice cold. Upon offering her a ride home, he too was asked to stop outside the Resurrection Cemetery, where his mystery date just as mysteriously disappeared. Research into the legend has uncovered two very real possibilities: Mary Bregovy, who died in an auto accident in 1934, and Anna Marija Norkus, who died in 1927 in an auto accident on her way home from the Oh Henry Ballroom. The latter seems the more likely, although the former holds the correct name. The passage of time seems to have melded the two unfortunate girls into one. In February of 1994, the hit TV show Unsolved Mysteries ran an episode about the legend of Resurrection Mary which included dramatic reenactments of recent sightings, including one by a carload of thrill seekers who are horrified to spot a glowing white woman walking along the side of the road, her facial features eerily blacked out. In 2005, the story of Resurrection Mary was made into a feature length film of the same name. The direct-to-video cheapie fared poorly, twisting the tale into a teen love triangle and maudlin story of revenge beyond the grave. The film did Mary no justice, but also did nothing to dampen the rumors of her continuing haunt. However, Mary has some East Coast competition, who forsook the traditional white ballgown for a distinct lavender dress.
Hudson Valley, New York: In the late 1940s, two young college students on their way out for a night of carousing, happened to spot a pretty blond girl on the side of the road, practicing some dancing steps in a long, sparkling lavender dress. When offered a ride, the girl accepted and asked the boys to call her by her nickname “Lavender”, after her favorite color. The girl accompanied the boys to a dance and left with them hours later, at which point one of the young men offered her his coat, for the girl was ice cold to the touch. As they drove the girl home on dark and twisting country backroads, Lavender suddenly asked them to stop just beside a ramshackle house that looked as though it had been abandoned for years. The girl made her departure and the boys drove away, realizing too late that the girl still had the boys coat. When they returned to the shack in the morning to get the coat back, they were told by the ancient woman who lived there that Lavender, whose real name was Lily, had died ten years previously on the exact spot where the boys had seen her dancing. The girl had frozen to death and had been buried in her favorite lavender dress. A trip to the nearby cemetery confirmed this, but nothing could have prepared the boys for the sight of the borrowed jacket, neatly draped over Lavender’s headstone. Lavender may not be as popular as her sister Mary, but fans of the Phantasm movies might remember a slightly more sinister Lavender Girl, who hangs out at a bar, waiting to be offered a ride home by a man she later seduces and kills. Coincidence or inspiration? Who knows? The History Channel adapted the story for their documentary series “Haunted History”, and the video clip is readily available online.
If there is a genesis for these tales of hitchhiking ghost girls – a mother figure, per se – it might very well have begun in Hawaii with the bad tempered volcano goddess, Pele. Native Hawaiians have a healthy respect for the violent deity, who is said to reside at the summit of Mount Kilauea. It has been reported by natives and tourists alike that Pele can and will appear alongside the road leading from the volcano, sometimes appearing as a beautiful young girl, but more often disguised as an old woman. If you are respectful to her and offer her a ride, some food and water or whatever else she asks for, you will be blessed for your generosity. But if you fail to pick her up, or are rude to her, you will be cursed, your house destroyed by lava, or the souvenirs you’ve unwisely taken home bringing you nothing but bad luck. Every year, employees of Kilauea National Park report receiving hundreds of packages containing stolen pieces of lava rock with a note from the guilty thief, begging forgiveness from Pele and reporting that, ever since returning to their homes with their ill-gotten gain, their lives have been nothing but turmoil and despair. Pele is not a girl you want to fuck with, and she seems to embody the old saying: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
The hitchhiking ghost girl is not limited to the United States, either. On the East African Coast, cross country truckers have reported run-ins with “djinni’s”, who appear as pretty young female hitchers. Once the trucker picks them up and heads on his way, he realizes, to his horror, that the girl has the legs of a goat. As the djinni laughs at her clever joke, she disappears, sometimes causing the shocked driver to crash his vehicle.
Although reports of a vanishing female hitchhiker seems like a predominately modern phenomena, there are reports that go back as far as 1602, in which three male travelers in a sleigh stopped to pick up a young girl, whom they took with them to a nearby inn. One of the men – a vicar – observed that jugs of beer offered to the girl would change into acorns, malt, and blood, at which point the girl made a prophecy for good crops, a good harvest, and much plague and war before vanishing from sight. Nor are all the hitchers female, as recorded in an English Ballad dating back to 1723, which chronicles the appearance of a recently deceased young man appearing on horseback to give his grief-stricken lover a ride home.
In any case, both the act of hitchhiking and of picking up hitchers is a really bad idea these days. Serial killers have taken the fun out of sticking out one’s thumb for a free ride. But if the hitcher in question is glowing white, lacking a face, dressed in lavender, hanging around a c emetery or a bridge, or is met outside of Kilauea National Park in Hawaii, it might be in your best interest to slow down and at least make the offer. Better safe than sorry, after all.
