Legends

By Donald Morrison

THE VANISHING HITCHHIKER by Jan Harold Brunvand Norton; 208 pages; $14.95

Just off old Highway 81 near McPherson, Kans., writes Jan Harold Brunvand, there is an unmarked lane known to young couples as Hookman's Road. One night, a teen-age boy and girl were parked there when they heard over the car radio that a killer with a hook for a hand was on the loose. The girl became frightened and demanded that her companion drive her home. Angry, and perhaps a bit uneasy himself, he roared off abruptly. When they arrived at her house, he went around the car to open her door. Dangling from the handle was a bloody hook.

Tellers of the story swear it is true even though there are many tellers and many datelines. Brunvand, 48, professor of English at the University of Utah, says reports of the bloody hook have surfaced in Maryland, Wisconsin, Indiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oregon and parts of Canada. The hook has been hung up on so many door handles in recent years that either Detroit has begun issuing it as optional equipment or the story has become nothing less than an American folk tale.

Brunvand has catalogued dozens of local happenings that somehow seemed to happen in different localities all over the country, yarns that are probably untrue but widely retold. There is, for instance, the story of the old woman who, whenever her dog or cat got wet, would dry it off in the oven. Then her children bought her a microwave, with gruesome consequences. Perhaps the most popular American folk yarn, the "vanishing hitchhiker," has been around for decades (centuries, if you count the version in Acts 8: 26-39). It has been updated for the automobile age. A driver picks up a hitchhiker, usually a young woman, who sits in the back seat and says little. When the driver arrives at her destination, he turns around and finds she has vanished. Inquiring at the address she had given him, he learns that the woman died several years earlier.

Some folk tales are based at least partly on fact. What New Yorker has not heard of the giant alligators that prowl the city's sewer system, descendants of smaller ones brought home from Florida vacations and flushed down the toilet? Brunvand cites evidence that a few underground gators may have existed. Yet a modern legend's staying power seems to have little to do with its veracity. Since the late 1960s, there have been reports from around the country of shoppers in discount stores being bitten by poisonous snakes or insects hidden in some piece of imported merchandise or other. None of the incidents has been verified. Nor has anyone ever documented the "Kentucky fried rat" that allegedly fell into the batter at a fast-food restaurant.

Why do such stories survive, even flourish, in an age of science and cynicism? Many of them, says Brunvand, serve as cautionary tales, sermonettes on the evils of, say, parking in deserted lanes or buying cheap imported goods. Others are inspired by suspicion of change--of microwave ovens or fast-food restaurants. Writes Brunvand: "Whatever is new and puzzling or scary, but which eventually becomes familiar, may turn up in modern folklore."

There may be more to it than that. Perhaps folk tales are so enduring because now, as in the days of outlaw heroes and headless horsemen, legends endow life with the mystery, awe and romance that make it endurable. Or perhaps folk tales, old and new, urban and rural, are so full of life themselves that they will not lie still in their graves. Consider the modern classic about the woman in Ohio (or was it Oregon? or Maine?) who is doing the laundry in her basement when she impulsively decides to remove her soiled dress and add it to the load. Her hair is in rollers and the pipes overhead are leaking. She spots her son's football helmet and dons it. There she stands, naked except for the helmet, when she hears a cough. The woman turns to face the meter reader. Says he, as he heads for the door: "I hope your team wins, lady."

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