Vanishing Hitchhiker
According to Jan Harold Brunvard's glossary in The Vanishing Hitchhiker, legends are "folk narratives that deal with the realistic incidents set in the past." Brunvard gives the reader an analysis of each of the most well known urban legends. These stories are told in order to frighten, shock, or amuse the audience. Urban Legends are also passed down orally or communicated through written documents, such as E-mail, fax, or through books like The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Many people believe that all urban legends are false, but in fact some of them are true. Sometimes people twist these legends around in order to shock or interest the audience more, but the morals of the legends usually remain the same (all urban legends include morals). The story I have chosen to discuss from The Vanishing Hitchhiker is The Runaway Grandmother. This urban legend is about a family who goes on vacation across the Mexican border by car. After they cross the border, the child in the backseat notices that the grandmother is not moving, so the family realizes that she has died. With this, the
It is a coincidence that someone stole a car with a dead body on it, and the story is made to shock the reader or the listener. It also makes people cherish and respect their loved ones more than the family that left the aunt at the porch of the cousin's house. Unlike all the scary urban legends about killers and ghosts, the story of The Runaway Grandmother is not told to frighten the audience. It has a way to make people chuckle at this silly story. While in the station, the car was stolen with the grandmother still on the car. Let's face it, no one is going to really tie a relative to the roof of their car. When they reached the station, they all got out of the car and went inside. Since then, nobody has ever found the car or the body. In the movie National Lampoon's Vacation there was almost the same variation of this urban legend. Someone told me that there was one of a family who was on vacation in North Dakota, and the grandmother died in the backseat. One girl laughed and said, "How is that possible?" Then another girl was shocked because she had never heard of that story before, but she also laughed because she found the legend amusing. The family is driving down a desert in the United States, and the kids notice that the aunt is not moving, so they tell their parents. The family decided to place the grandmother in a big black suitcase, and put her in the trunk of the car until they got back home in a small town in Alabama. This urban legend does not have too many variations, but sometimes the characters are different.
Common topics in this essay:
Runaway Grandmother,
North Dakota,
Lampoon's Vacation,
Vanishing Hitchhiker,
Urban Legends,
urban legends,
urban legend,
Harold Brunvard's,
runaway grandmother,
vanishing hitchhiker,
roof car,
urban legend family,
station car,
car stolen,
told frighten,
amuse audience,
dead relative,
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Acceptance Essays
