On a rainy night on Arkansas Highway 365, the story goes, a young woman stands by the road and asks for a ride home to Redfield. She never gets there.
The tale: The Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls it one of the state’s most famous “migratory” legends, the vanishing hitchhiker. The story is told across the country, and in Arkansas one version is set near Redfield in Jefferson County. In the usual telling, a driver picks up a soaked young woman, sometimes in a torn white dress, who gives an address in Redfield. When he arrives, the seat is empty. A parent at the door explains that the daughter died in a car wreck years before, on that same night, and that she tries to get home every year.
Retellings shared by the Pine Bluff Commercial in 2017 add details that differ from person to person. Sometimes a mother answers the door and sometimes a father. Sometimes the girl disappears before the car arrives. In one version, the driver later finds the coat she borrowed hanging on her headstone. Some readers said she appears only on stormy spring nights. Others said a relative swore he had seen her.
The history: Folklorists have collected the vanishing hitchhiker in many states, with each town adding its own road and its own landmarks. Along 365, readers have told it about the stretch between the Woodson area and Redfield, and one reader said the story was featured in a 1973 film, Encounter with the Unknown.
The real lesson of the legend is a good one for Halloween weekend: drive carefully on dark, wet two-lane roads, and remember that strangers on the shoulder are best helped by calling 911.
Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas — Ghost Legends; Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette / Pine Bluff Commercial — Arkansas 365 hitchhiker legend lives on (Oct. 30, 2017).
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