Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
THE TAXI DRIVER, THEY SUGGEST, WAS DRIVING, BECAME DROWSY AND THEN ENTERED AN REM STATE.
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
I’ve referred previously in this column to the possibility that driving can induce a trance-like state. Could ‘highway hypnotism’ also be responsible for one of the hoariest of urban legends, the phantom hitchhiker? The hitchhiker comes in several versions, but in its simplest form a driver lets a hitchhiker into the car and, then, a few minutes later, they turn around to see that the hitchhiker has disappeared.
In 2012 Akhiro Watanabe and Hirokazu Furuya, two Japanese neurologists, tried to explain away the hitchhiker in their fascinating article “Pathogenic Mechanisms of Sleep Hallucinations and their Relationship to Ghost Tales”. They were interested in a series of hitchhiker accounts from the 1960s about taxi drivers picking up vanishing passengers from Hirakata bypass between Osaka and Kyoto Prefectures. A local newspaper was, in 1968, able to find one taxi driver (no name given) who said that it had happened to him: we are not just relying, then, on tales from distant friends of friends here. Watanabe and Furuya explain this event as follows. The taxi driver, they suggest, was driving, became drowsy and then entered an REM state. In this state, he imagined stopping for a person on the roadside. However, he ultimately snapped out of the REM state: perhaps a bump on the road woke him. Crucially, he was not aware that he had been in a trance and so was shocked to find that his passenger was absent. In the words of a 1968 news report: “After driving [for] several minutes, he felt an abnormal sensation and turned back to the rear seat to find no one there.” This is interesting, but can it really explain other lived cases of the vanishing hitchhiker? Surely, the key element here is that this was a taxi driver. It was quite natural for a taxi driver in a trance to imagine picking someone up because that is what taxi drivers do. Most drivers do not make a habit of picking up total strangers and so any driving-induced vision along these lines would be rather out of the ordinary. There is also the awkward fact – how often this mars psychological or neurological explanations for forteana! – that sometimes there is more than one person in the car. In 1981 in Montpellier, France, four travellers picked up a mature lady. She squeezed between two women in the back seat. At a certain point, she screamed “Mind the bend! You are risking your life!” The car slowed down on a dangerous turn and then the passengers realised that their passenger had vanished. This case is particularly interesting because it was documented by the Montpellier police. What would Dr Furuya and Watanabe make of this, I wonder?