Word: brunvand
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...VANISHING HITCHHIKER by Jan Harold Brunvand Norton; 208 pages...
Just off old Highway 81 near McPherson, Kans., writes Jan Harold Brunvand, there is an unmarked lane known to young couples as Hookman's Road. One night, a teen-age boy and girl were parked there when they heard over the car radio that a killer with a hook for a hand was on the loose. The girl became frightened and demanded that her companion drive her home. Angry, and perhaps a bit uneasy himself, he roared off abruptly. When they arrived at her house, he went around the car to open her door. Dangling from the handle...
Tellers of the story swear it is true even though there are many tellers and many datelines. Brunvand, 48, professor of English at the University of Utah, says reports of the bloody hook have surfaced in Maryland, Wisconsin, Indiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oregon and parts of Canada. The hook has been hung up on so many door handles in recent years that either Detroit has begun issuing it as optional equipment or the story has become nothing less than an American folk tale...
...Brunvand has catalogued dozens of local happenings that somehow seemed to happen in different localities all over the country, yarns that are probably untrue but widely retold. There is, for instance, the story of the old woman who, whenever her dog or cat got wet, would dry it off in the oven. Then her children bought her a microwave, with gruesome consequences. Perhaps the most popular American folk yarn, the "vanishing hitchhiker," has been around for decades (centuries, if you count the version in Acts 8: 26-39). It has been updated for the automobile age. A driver picks...
Some folk tales are based at least partly on fact. What New Yorker has not heard of the giant alligators that prowl the city's sewer system, descendants of smaller ones brought home from Florida vacations and flushed down the toilet? Brunvand cites evidence that a few underground gators may have existed. Yet a modern legend's staying power seems to have little to do with its veracity. Since the late 1960s, there have been reports from around the country of shoppers in discount stores being bitten by poisonous snakes or insects hidden in some piece of imported...