The Wansdyke & District Forums

weird one. driving back from a cache hunt late on the A4 near the downs, picked nobody up i promise, but i SAW someone, side of the road by the old coach route, dressed wrong, old-fashioned, just standing. gone in the mirror. probably a tired bloke and me driving badly. but then i googled it and theres loads of phantom hitchhiker stories on that road going back years, a woman in grey, a man who asks for a lift to a village thats not there anymore and vanishes from the back seat. anyone know the actual local version? freaked me out a bit ngl.

The vanishing passenger is one of the oldest road-stories in the world, Gary, and every county has its stretch. The A4 was the great coaching road, and a road that old gathers them. The classic shape, which yours has a piece of, is the traveller who asks to be taken home to a place the driver cannot afterwards find, or that proves to have gone years before. I would not lie awake over it. I would only say that long roads remember their traffic, and the people who walked and rode and died along them, more than we comfortable drivers like to think. Be kind to the thought of them, and drive carefully on that bend.

Margaret has the old shape of it right. For the walk I collected three A4 versions: the grey woman near the Beckhampton turn, a coachman with no face on the long straight, and the one Gary half has, a man who asks for a lift to a village and is gone before you can ask which village. That last one is the good one, for my money, because it is so specific and so sad. He just wants to go home, and home is not there, and he cannot stay in the car long enough to be told. I do not put that one on the comedy part of the walk.

ok the man who wants to get home to a village that isnt there anymore has genuinely got me a bit. thanks Mrs A and Mick. driving that road in daylight from now on. lovely and horrible, this thread, in equal measure.