Mormon Mythellaneous by Michael J. Hunter

Author:Michael J. Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-68047-974-4
Publisher: Covenant Communications, Inc.
Published: 2016-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Vanishing Hitchhikers and Patriarchal Blessings

You’ve almost certainly heard this one: A friend of a friend of a friend is traveling somewhere—anywhere, really. Along the way the driver picks up a hitchhiker who starts talking about approaching calamities. The hitchhiker warns the driver to keep a two-year supply of food—or was it about getting genealogy completed? Then, poof! The hitchhiker mysteriously disappears.

Folklorist William A. Wilson recalled the first time he heard this story:

On a rainy night in early October 1960, a fellow high school teacher and his wife—Ray and Ann Briscoe—were driving me into Salt Lake City. As we dodged through the late-evening traffic, I listened fascinated as Mrs. Briscoe told me that on these very roads in recent months an old hitchhiker had hailed rides with Mormon motorists, had warned them to store food for an impending disaster, and had then disappeared miraculously from the back seats of their cars. This was my first encounter with a story which for at least ten years—from 1955 to 1965—was the most popular and influential story in Mormon folklore and which represented a merging of the most widely ­circulated ghost story in the United States—“The Vanishing Hitchhiker”—with one of the best known cycles of supernatural religious stories—the Mormon legend of the Three Nephites. (Wilson, “‘The Vanishing,’” 79)

You know the story of the Three Nephites; it’s found in the Book of Mormon. Christ granted His three Nephite disciples in America the same wish He had earlier granted to John the Beloved—to “tarry in the flesh” in order to bring souls to Him until His Second Coming (John 21:22; 3 Nephi 28:4–9). Of the Three Nephites, the Book of Mormon account explains, “And they are as the angels of God, and . . . can show themselves unto whatsoever man it seemeth them good. Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day” (3 Nephi 28:30–31).

You may not be as familiar with the “vanishing hitchhiker” story. Wilson traced that to the research of Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, who in 1942 and 1943 analyzed seventy-nine accounts of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” story and came up with four distinct variations:

The ghost of a young lady hitches a ride from passing motorists. After giving them her address, she disappears from the back seat. Checking the address, the motorists learn the mysterious passenger had once lived there, but had long since been dead. In most of the variations, the hitchhiker was killed in an accident at the precise spot where she was picked up. Beardsley and Hankey consider this story the original from which the other stories developed.

A couple driving to the Chicago World’s Fair pick up an old lady. She gives them her address, warns them that a terrible calamity is to occur at the fair, and then vanishes from the back seat. They go to the address she gave them and are told the woman has been dead for some time. Beardsley and Hankey believe this second story was an offshoot of the first, developed in 1933 in connection with the Chicago Centennial Fair.

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