Perhaps the best known Vanishing Hitchhiker story from the U.K. is that from Blue Bell Hill, a steep stretch of road between Maidstone and Chatham in Kent.Research by investigator Sean Tudor has shown that the earliest printed reference for this complicated case is from the Kent Messenger for December 8, 1967. A further article in The Maidstone Gazette from September 10, 1968 was based on investigations by local paranormal researcher Tom Harber. This article described the apparition of a mysterious girl who was seen on a number of occasions hitching a lift outside the Lower Bell pub. Motorists who gave her a lift into the center of Maidstone described a young girl who chatted happily throughout the journey before vanishing completely from the moving car.

However, although Harber had a number of second hand accounts of the Blue Bell Hill ghost, he was unable to find a single witness to the hitchhiker even after several months of research. Some years later however, Harber told author and researcher Michael Goss that he had in fact traced and interviewed no less than a dozen first-hand witnesses to the phantom girl, but that he was unfortunately unable to reveal their identities.

One person who claimed that he did actually see the Blue Bell Hill Hitchhiker ghost firsthand was a local bricklayer named Maurice Goodenough. Early in the morning of July 13, 1974, Goodenough, then 35-years-old ran into Rochester Police Station claiming that he had just knocked down a young girl with his car on Blue Bell Hill. He informed the police that the girl had appeared suddenly in the middle of the road and he was unable to brake hard enough to avoid running into her. He immediately stopped the car and jumped out to find the young girl lying in the road with cuts to her forehead and knees.

Goodenough wrapped the girl in a blanket (or rug in some versions), carried her to the roadside and drove off to get help. When he returned to the scene of the accident with the police all they found was the blanket lying on the ground, the girl had disappeared. There were no traces of blood either on the car or on the road and despite an extensive police search of the area using tracker dogs the young girl was never found. Goodenough described the girl as about ten years of age, with shoulder length brown hair and wearing a lacy white blouse, white ankle socks and a skirt. Despite the difference in age between this girl and the Hitcher described in The Maidstone Gazette local tradition considers the two ghosts of Blue Bell Hill as the same.

Crash on Blue Bell Hill

The explanation put forward for the appearance of this tragic phantom is a crash that occurred on Friday November 19, 1965, when three of four women travelling in a car were killed when it crashed on Blue Bell Hill. One of the fatally injured women was due to be married next day, though it is believed locally that the Hitchhiking ghost actually represents the bridesmaid rather than the bride. According to local newspapers, in November 1992 there were further incidents involving the ghostly hitchhiker reported by motorists who believed they had run over a young woman on Blue Bell Hill, only to find no trace of the supposed victim when they looked on the road. As in the previous sightings, searches of the surrounding area by the police proved fruitless, a common outcome in such folkloric tales.

Although the Vanishing Hitchhiker is believed by folklorists to be nothing more than an urban legend, some researchers, Michael Goss for example, believe that there may be something more to the tale than mere fiction. Nevertheless, as Jan Harold Brunvand notes in The Vanishing Hitchhiker: Urban Legends and their Meanings (1981), the majority of people are not aware of the large amount of variants on the Hitchhiker story. And, as all folklorists know, and as Brunvand states “multiple, varying texts in oral tradition are good evidence against credibility”.

With this in mind perhaps the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend is best understood in the context of ghost lore as a whole, where it fits in well with the tradition of the ghost who returns briefly to the land of the living in order to settle unfinished business, to continue an activity they were known to pursue during their lifetime, or, most relevantly in terms of Vanishing or phantom Hitchhiker stories, to escape from their in between, liminal state and find rest. Whatever its true origin, the fact that the Vanishing Hitchhiker is still discussed and reported today indicates the motif still has meaning and relevance in the ghost folklore and urban legend of modern 21st century society.