Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Brunvand Jan Harold

Author:Brunvand, Jan Harold [Brunvand, Jan Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

From Helen Creighton’s 1957 book Bluenose Ghosts, pp. 185–87. This text shares the “portrait identification” motif with many versions of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker.” A variation of the “Ghost in Search of Help” legend in which the messenger is the spirit of a young girl seeking medical attention for her gravely ill mother has long been associated with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a prominent Philadelphia physician; in fact, the evidence is convincing to suggest that Dr. Mitchell himself had told the story as a personal experience, although whether intended as a hoax or to be taken seriously is not perfectly clear. The Mitchell version has been frequently embellished and often reprinted, including in the Reverend Billy Graham’s 1975 bestseller Angels: God’s Secret Agents. In my 1999 book The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story, I devote a chapter to “The Folklorists’ Search for the Ghost in Search of Help for a Dying Person.”

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