Browse:Sudden Disappearance (Volume 1, entries 73–74)
Sudden Disappearance
Volume 1, entries 73–74. Source context: SPIRITS → GHOSTLORE. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 73
[My wife and I on my first hoodoo collecting trip stayed at the Atlantic Hotel, Ocean City, Maryland, where I interviewed a few members of the staff. One of these men, native to the locality, acted as my contact man. He told me the following story and later repeated it - as an example of what I wanted - toa second man recently up from North Carolina. What happens when an original story is repeated for the first time?] [Original story:] A man, who was drivihg around the country, had the habit of driving rather late at night. One evening between twelve and one he was on his Way home, and as he was driving along the road - it happened to be rather lonely along this particular road - he saw a woman standing there and she acted like one of these hitch-hikers. And she waved her hand and so he stopped. He asked her where she was going and she told him this particular place. He told her he would take her along. So this lady got in the car and there was one peculiar thing about it, she wanted to sit on the back seat. The man noticed that and that she seemed to be rather nervous. The main thing he couldn't understand was.why she wanted to sit in the back when there was plenty of room up in front. However, he told the lady to get into the car and he would take her to the place she wanted to go. So they drove along and he didn't say anything to her. Finally he arrived at this house that she had spoken of. So this man got out of the car and opened the back door of the car and looked inside and he didn't see anyone there. Naturally he became very upset. So he went to this house and rang the bell. A man came down. So he told the man what had happened and the man didn't seem to be at all disturbed about it. And he said, "That was my wife who died sometime ago and quite a number of motorists have been annoyed by having her get in the car and when they arrive at my house she is not there. In that particular place where you picked her up she had been in an accident and was killed there." [Ocean City, Md., (13), Ed. My notation reads, [happened] "Last winter, February 1936, between Washington and Baltimore near a place called Dead Man's Curve."]
[Repetition of original story:]
The death is reported in a participant's speech within the story, not independently verified.
Entry 74
I am just now thinking of the most wierd ghost story that I have heard in recent years. There was a man enroute from Washington to Baltimore and on the Way he overtook an old lady who was walking and carrying a basket. When he saw the old lady, the man stopped the car and asked the old lady her destination. She gave him a certain address in Baltimore. The man drove along with his pass- enger and just as he was reaching Baltimore he looked back and saw that there was no one on the rear seat. Where the old lady had been sitting there was nothing. The man of course was very astonished and wondered where the lady had disappeared because he had not stopped at all after he had stopped to pick the lady up. He hardly knew what to do. Finally, he decided to go to the address that the woman had given him to take her. When he reached the address the occupants of the house told him there was a woman who had once lived there by that name but that she had been dead three years. Of course the man did not explain what he had seen that day. [Ocean City, Md., (18), Ed.; supposed to have happened in 1932, four years earlier. The vanishing passenger or stranger who disappears suggests a folk theme.}