The Vanishing Hitchhiker in Pakistan
During my search for stories, I met a sophomore, nineteen year old male student who is majoring in Chemistry and Math. His parents are from Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. Currently, he lives in Maryland. His father is a cardiologist and his mother is a housewife. His parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970's.
The source says this story is known by almost three quarters of the people living in Pakistan. His uncle initially told him the story when he went back to Pakistan for the first time. The story takes place in the mountainous regions of Pakistan that are fairly remote from civilization. However, other versions take place in a middle of small towns.
One day, a man is driving along a road that is often surrounded by repetitive landscape, such as continuous mountains and plains. Upon driving for quite some time, he spots a silhouette of a woman a kilometer down the road. As he gets closer, he realizes that it is a young woman wearing a slender white dress, and from her expression, he deduces that she has lost her way and needs to get home. From a quick glimpse at her face, he realizes that she is very beautiful. Confused, but being the caring gentleman that he is, he offers her a ride back to her home. She meekly nods as she slowly enters the car and sits in the passenger seat. He begins talking to her, and the subject matter often varies in different variations, but the consensus is that it is small talk. From the moment she speaks, he is astonished by her beautiful voice. Before long, the man actually becomes attracted to her. They continue talking as he continues driving. At one point in their conversation, he reaches to the right to get his drink by his sid...
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...s of society will not recognize one in an encounter either. This reflects the fear that one cannot distinguish the real world from the supernatural world.
Works Cited
Bennett, Gillian. The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Forty-Five. Long Beach: Western States Folklore Society, 1998.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
Littlejohn, Carol. "Urban Legends and Other Scary Stories." Unknown journal.15.2 (1996): 27-31.
Okonowicz, Ed. Baltimore Ghosts: History, Mystery, Legends, and Lore. Elkton: Myst and Lace Publishing, 2004.
Turetsky, Rita. Ghosts and Evil Spirits. Publication information unknown.
Wilson, Michael. "The Point of Horror: The Relationship Between Teenage Popular Horror Fiction and the Oral Repertoire." Children's Literature in Education 31.1 (2000): 31-40.
“The Hitchhiker,” by Lucille Fletcher, narrates the unusual happenings Ronald Adams, the protagonist, experiences, while driving along the deserted and densely populated roads of the United States. Adams continually observes a hitchhiker, whom he first saw, having almost hit him, on the Brooklyn Bridge, and apprehends traveling on the highways, for fear this phantasmal man shall reappear. Struggling to grasp reality once receiving news of his mother’s breakdown after the death of her son, Ronald Adams, he reverts his attention to the hitchhiker, the realization of never having been who he thought he was, and being alone without protection from the traveler, both wrench his mind in two. Lucille Fletcher uses suspense to build the plot of, “The
Morgan, J. The biology of horror: gothic literature and film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.
In short, this is a story of a random meeting of two strangers, and an attraction or feeling that is overlooked and ignored. A man describes a lady such that you could only envision in your dreams, of stunning beauty and overwhelming confidence of which encounters of the opposite sex occur not so very often. The mans attraction is met by a possible interest by the lady, but only a couple flirtatious gestures are exchanged as the two cross paths for the first time and very possible the last.
Tibbetts, John C. The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
The article Why We Crave Horror Movies by Stephen King distinguishes why we truly do crave horror movies. Stephen King goes into depth on the many reasons on why we, as humans, find horror movies intriguing and how we all have some sort of insanity within us. He does this by using different rhetorical techniques and appealing to the audience through ways such as experience, emotion and logic. Apart from that he also relates a numerous amount of aspects on why we crave horror movies to our lives. Throughout this essay I will be evaluating the authors arguments and points on why society finds horror movies so desirable and captivating.
Film scholars around the world agree that all genres of film are part of the “genre cycle”. This cycle contains four different stages that a specific genre goes through. These stages are: primitive, classic, revisionist, and parody. Each stage that the genre goes through brings something different to that genre’s meaning and what the audience expects. I believe that looking at the horror genre will be the most beneficial since it has clearly gone through each stage.
Through the years there has been many ideas to what goes bump in the night. Mysterious, unsolved happenings blamed on the so-called supernatural. There are many myths, legends and lore based on these so called mysterious happenings. Through this research paper I am going to help to explain the biggest threats, conspiracies, and misunderstandings of aforementioned legends, myths, and lore.
aranormal activity has been a cause of fear and excitement throughout history. The unknown attracts the curiosity from those who wonder whether the supernatural is real or a figment of the imagination. Ghosts are one of the supernatural beings whose existence is questioned every day. Many want to deny the existence of ghosts because they are terrified of other phantoms who may exist and ignore the evidence that has been brought forth throughout the years. However, ghosts are supernatural pheromones whose existence still impacts today’s society.
King chooses to compare the minds of a child and an adult to see the different resilience levels when exposed to the horror genre. He describes his findings as a paradox, “Children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease” (PP 118). King assumes because the mind of an adult is mature it can handle the horrific depictions within the horror variety yet children seem too be able to withstand the pressure. King backed his theory by analyzing Walt Disney’s movies and their impact on a child’s imagination. Walt Disney’s movie Bambi is what Stephen King pinpointed when comparing the toll of horrific events in children and adult minds. King questioned adults about what was most terrifying about a movie when they were younger and they stated, “Bambi’s father shot by the hunter, or Bambi and his mother running before the forest fire” (PP 119). Another aspect King unveiled was the Doppler Effect and that, “A part of ‘growing up’ is the fact that everything has a scare potential for the child under eight” (PP 119). The cognitive imagination does not stop developing it just suppresses certain mental functions to draw a line between what is real and what is not. Horror novelist mask the tension with comedy yet with one swift motion it, “Knocks the adult props out from under us and tumbles us back down the slide into childhood” (PP
Parker, Sam. Horror Through The Decades. Bauer Consumer Media, 2009. Web. 1 Oct. 2013. .
Zipes, Jack. Fairy tales and the art of subversion the classical genre for children and the process
The sparsely populated towns and countryside of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey have often been the ideal setting of various ghost stories, including the infamous tale of the Jersey Devil, that are told in the more heavily populated Northern New Jersey and Philadelphia metropolitan regions. One of those “Piney” towns is home to a lesser-known, but equally interesting, tale of a street that is haunted by the ghost of a young boy. The story is set in the town of Atco, within Waterford Township, and is located approximately half-way between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, right in the heart of the Wharton State Forest section of the Pine Barrens National Reserve.
A 19-year old female from Harford County, Maryland, narrated the story of Black Aggie, the urban legend of an overnight stay in a cemetery. She grew up Christian, and still lives in one of the more rural areas of Maryland with her younger sister and parents, who own and work at an electrical contracting business. Accustomed to hearing many ghost stories and urban legends, she first heard the story of Black Aggie during a middle school slumber party. Late one Saturday night over pizza in our Hagerstown dorm, she was more than willing to share her favorite urban legend with me.
As a culture, again with religious fundamentalist and perhaps politically-correct feminist exceptions, we pretty much take these literary forms for granted in terms of their violent and seemingly antisocial content. Parents lovingly read their children to sleep with images of forced drudgery, painful mutilations, and vengeful retribution. Teachers and preachers alike use these quasi-historical and metaphorical tales of aggression and hostility to inspire and enlighten. Little thought, if any, is given to the possibility that we are putting dangerous ideas into the heads of our youth that will result in violent displays of antisocial mayhem. And, in fact, there seems to be little evidence that this true. For the most part, our children seem to have a healthy relationship to these stories in which the violence and sexuality does tend to help th...
The Nelly Butler hauntings is referred to as the first recorded ghost story in American history (LiBrizzi 5), and possibly the most exciting hauntings to date as there are still many unsolved mysteries. The apparition appeared on more than 30 separate occasions to over 100 witnesses in Sullivan, Maine, just over fifteen years after the American Revolution (5-6). Although the Nelly Butler apparition is one of the most convincing ghosts of all time, it was subject to suspicions of fraud. These claims turn out to be groundless as the evidence reveals the ghost to be genuine.