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 family then ties her in a sleeping bag to the roof of the car, so that in the next town they could report her death. When they reached the station, they all got out of the car and went inside. While in the station, the car was stolen with the grandmother still on the car. Since then, nobody has ever found the car or the body.
             This urban legend does not have too many variations, but sometimes the characters are different. The dead family member in the car may be an aunt or usually an older relative. In the movie National Lampoon's Vacation there was almost the same variation of this urban legend. 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. Clark, the father, wants to just leave her in the desert, but instead the family decides to leave the dead aun...