France

In January 1976 a young woman hitchhiking near Bagneres in France turned out to be a phantom hitchhiker. On the road two young men from the town were putting a new car through its paces, in particular testing its performance at speed. Seeing the hitchhiker, they pulled over to give her a lift. It was a two-door car so the man in the passenger seat had to get out and push the front seat forward to allow the hitchhiker to get into the back of the car before getting back in himself. The door closed, the car pulled away again and they continued their performance test of the vehicle.

While sweeping round various bends in the road the hitchhiker apparently warned the men to be careful as there had been many accidents in that area. Accepting their passenger's reaction, the driver slowed the car down and the two reassured her. Later one of the men remarked over his shoulder to the hitchhiker, 'You see, Madame, other people may kill themselves here, but we got by all right.' There was no reply; when the men looked back they found the backseat was empty, their phantom hitchhiker had gone.

As is so often the case in these archetypal stories the impossibility of the hitchhiker being flesh and blood, if we accept the report at face value, is only underlined by the circumstances of the car itself. She could not get out of the doors without disturbing the front seats, to say nothing of the fact that the car was moving at speed throughout the journey. The original source of this story is the magazine Lumieres dans la Nuit, a copy of which was supplied to me by author Hilary Evans who refers to the case in his book Visions, Apparitions and Alien Visitors. I spoke to Hilary about the case recently and he told me that the road system where the event occurred had since been dramatically altered. Whether this will exorcise the hitchhiker is uncertain and only time will tell whether she is at last at peace.

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