Vanishing Hitchhiker
According to Jan Harold Brunvard's glossary in The Vanishing Hitchhiker, legends are "folk narratives that deal with the realistic incidents set in the past." Brunvard gives the reader an analysis of each of the most well known urban legends. These stories are told in order to frighten, shock, or amuse the audience. Urban Legends are also passed down orally or communicated through written documents, such as E-mail, fax, or through books like The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Many people believe that all urban legends are false, but in fact some of them are true. Sometimes people twist these legends around in order to shock or interest the audience more, but the morals of the legends usually remain the same (all urban legends include morals). The story I have chosen to discuss from The Vanishing Hitchhiker is The Runaway Grandmother. This urban legend is about a family who goes on vacation across the Mexican border by car. After they cross the border, the child in the backseat notices that the grandmother is not moving, so the family realizes that she has died. With this, the
I asked other people if they had heard any other variations of this legend, and I could only get one more story from my interviews. Someone told me that there was one of a family who was on vacation in North Dakota, and the grandmother died in the backseat. The family decided to place the grandmother in a big black suitcase, and put her in the trunk of the car until they got back home in a small town in Alabama. They buried her in the backyard of their house so that no one would find out she had been dead for that long amount of time. The moral of the urban legend The Runaway Grandmother is a simple one. Don't tie a dead relative or any person to the roof of the car because your car might get stolen, and you may lose your dead relative forever. This urban legend does not have too many variations, but sometimes the characters are different. The dead family member in the car may be an aunt or usually an older relative. In the movie National Lampoon's Vacation there was almost the same variation of this urban legend. The family is driving down a desert in the Unite
Some common words found in the essay are:
Runaway Grandmother, North Dakota, Lampoon's Vacation, Vanishing Hitchhiker, Urban Legends, urban legends, urban legend, Harold Brunvard's, runaway grandmother, vanishing hitchhiker, roof car, urban legend family, station car, car stolen, told frighten, amuse audience, dead relative,
Approximate Word count = 727
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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