The Vanishing Hitchhiker

The Vanishing Hitchhiker is perhaps the most widespread ghost story in the world: a driver picks up a young woman on a lonely road at night, she gives an address, and when they arrive she is gone from the back seat, having died at that spot or on that date years before. Folklorists have traced versions back centuries and across continents, always the same shape, always just true enough to repeat.

In the American telling she waits on mountain roads and old highways, forever trying to get home. O Devil, Where Art Thou? gives her a verse among the ten.