A question about hitch-hiking ghosts.

[seanan_mcguire]

Almost everybody's heard the basic hitch-hiking ghost story—dude (usually) gives a girl a ride home, and later finds out that she was actually dead way before she got into the car—but there are some really fascinating regional variants. So here is my question for you:

How does the story go? Is she a victim, a predator, or just a confused kid trying to go home? Is seeing a hitcher like seeing the Bean Nighe—you're just doomed to die now? How does it go?

To be clear, I'm not asking you to make something up; I want to know how, in your part of the country or the world, the story goes. Or, if this is the first time you've encountered the idea (outside Disney's Haunted Mansion), I'd like to know that, too.

Curious cat is curious.

Comments

[baka-kit.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the one I remember from growing up, except the girl's not wearing a party dress. I vaguely remember that she was wearing "old-fashioned" hippyish clothes. And the "jacket" the guy loans and later finds at her grave is her a red hooded sweatshirt. The biggest difference I remember is that one or both of her parents was waiting up because they knew someone would come on that night -- she'd died twenty-some years ago and kept trying to get home on the anniversary of her death. And I think they told him where to find his sweatshirt?

That's what sticks most in my mind -- that she would keep trying and never make it. *sniffles*

I grew up in Southern California in the eighties.