Kent

Maurice Goodenough was driving on Blue Bell Hill between Maidstone and Chatham just after midnight in the very early hours of Saturday, 13 July 1974. A girl, about ten years old, wearing a white blouse, socks and a skirt appeared from nowhere in Mr Goodenough's headlights.

Despite braking as hard as possible and skidding, he felt the impact as the car hit the girl. When Mr Goodenough jumped out he found the young girl lying on the road, bruised and bleeding, though not to an excessive degree. Afraid of what injuries she might have, Mr Goodenough carried the child to the side of the road, wrapped her in a blanket and left her while he drove to Rochester police station to seek help. The police joined him to return to the scene where they found only the blanket and no trace of the girl.

A tracker dog was called in to assist in the investigation but was unable to find a scent to follow; no blood stains were found. Inquiries at local hospitals discovered no reports of anybody injured in the way described by Mr Goodenough and Mr Goode-nough's car was undamaged. If Mr Goodenough described the incident accurately, and there is no reason to doubt that he did, then a supernatural explanation is not quite the only one possible, though we are still left with a mystery. If the girl's injuries were not so serious she could have left the scene and gone home - it has even been speculated that she may have been on the run from the social services - but all of this is suspect in view of the fact that no one has been able to trace the girl in the time since. Blue Bell Hill has a high incidence of ghost and phantom hitchhiker legends though the report to the police station probably makes Mr Goodenough's the most reliable report.

The search for the phantom hitchhiker's identity has thrown up a very specific if problematic candidate. On Friday 19 November 1965, around nine years before Mr Goodenough's encounter, a Ford Cortina was in collision with a Jaguar on Blue Bell Hill. The Cortina was occupied by four women, a 22-year-old girl who was to be married in Gillingham, Kent the following day and her three hen-party companions. The bride-to-be died five days after the collision at West Kent Hospital, one of her companions was killed in the accident and a second died on admission to hospital. The fourth was seriously injured. Both the Jaguar's occupants survived. One of the three dead women is held to be the phantom hitchhiker, either the bride-to-be or, more often, one of her friends. Having been thwarted on the very eve of her wedding, perhaps the bride was not ready to die and is constantly trying to finish her journey.

It is obviously difficult to reconcile the figure of an adult woman with that of a ten-year-old girl; the bride-to-be may have been small,dressed in a young style, perhaps wearing white ankle socks, and in the panic of the crash, and in the darkness, may have been mistaken by the witness as being much younger than she was. There are other, frustratingly uncorroborated, reports of sightings of the bride-to-be hitchhiker in the area on the anniversary of her crash.

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