If you are in Willow Springs near Chicago and see a woman in white by the side of the road, she may get in the car with you, but then ask to be let out at a cemetery. Then she vanishes. That's Resurrection Mary. But the same story is told in many other locations around the US, with different names. Sometimes the requested stop is a cemetery, or the site of a plane crash, or the hitchhiker just vanishes while still riding. Berkeley students Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey found 80 such tales from all over, that mostly originated in the 1930s, a time that many folks were hitchhiking the highways of America looking for work. This appears to be a relatively modern legend, arising spontaneously in different places.
But it may go back much further. Automobiles and even America itself are recent in the grand scheme of things, but roads and lone travelers go back thousands of years. The setting is classic for a scary tale: traveling at night is already scary, and a stranger on the road can be someone in need or someone very dangerous. And with the vanishing hitchhiker, it's easy to localize the story. Read about the evolution of the vanishing hitchhiker story at Atlas Obscura. Then if you don't have such a legend in your local area, you can start one.
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