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Hey…Where'd She
Go?
A man was driving home
from a country-club dance late one Saturday night. Out of the corner
of his eye appeared a lovely young girl, dressed in the sheerest of
evening gowns, beckoning him for a lift. He jammed on his brakes,
and motioned her to climb into the back seat of his sedan. "All
cluttered up with golf clubs and bags up here in front," he
explained. "But what on earth is a youngster like you doing out here
all alone at this time of night?"
"It's too long a story to
tell you now," said the girl. Her voice was sweet and somewhat
shrill -- like the tinkling of sleigh bells. "Please, please take me
home. My car broke down a few miles back and I have been trying to
get help for the longest time. I live up the road about 5 miles. I
do hope it's not too far out of your way."
He drove rapidly to her
destination, and as he pulled up before the house, he said, "Here we
are," and turned around. The back seat was empty.
"What the devil?" he
muttered to himself. The girl couldn't possibly have fallen from the
car. Nor could she simply have vanished. He rang insistently on the
house bell, confused as he had never been before. At long last the
door opened. A gray-haired, very tired-looking man peered out at
him. "I can't tell you what an amazing thing has happened," began
the doctor. "A young girl gave me this address a while back. I drove
her here and . . ."
"Yes, yes, I know," said
the man wearily. "This has happened several other Saturday evenings
in the past month. That young girl, sir, was my daughter. She was
killed in a car accident in the spot where you picked her up two
years ago.
Variations:
Sometimes the ghost
leaves a book or scarf in the car, which the bereaved parents then
identify as belonging to their lost daughter. Sometimes the driver
spies the hitchhiker's photograph on the family piano, wearing the
party dress in which she died (and which she was wearing when he
picked her up).
In versions where the
hitchhiker disappears when the vehicle drives past a graveyard, the
driver discovers the coat he lent his passenger draped over the
tombstone of a girl who'd died in a car accident a few years
earlier.
One submission described
what happens the next day:
After he got home he
remembered that Lavender had borrowed his coat. The next day he went
to her house and knocked on the door. An old woman answered and he
asked her if Lavender Blue was at home. He went on to explain that
she had borrowed his coat and he came to get it back and to talk to
her if she was there.
The woman had a sad look
and asked him if this was some kind of joke. He insisted that it was
no joke. She informed him that Lavender Blue had died 5 years before
after she had been out on a date. Her date left her in the middle of
no-where and she was hit by a truck while walking home on a dark
road.
Tom looked so confused
when she told him this story that she told him that she would show
him Lavender’s grave, as she was buried in their back yard. They
walked around the house and in the back corner of the large property
there was a small cemetery and in the center was Lavender’s
tombstone. Both the woman and Tom were surprised to find Tom’s coat
folded neatly laying on the grave.
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