The Hook

In many versions of the story, the killer is typically portrayed as a faceless, silhouetted old man wearing a raincoat and rain hat that conceals most of his features, especially his face.

Thinking that his date just imagined it, the man returns to the car only to see that the woman has been brutally murdered with a hook.

Another variation has the woman seeing the man's butchered body suspended upside down from a tree with his fingernails scraping against the roof.

A similar legend recounts that a young couple are heading back from a great date when their car breaks down (either from running out of fuel or a malfunction).

But to the woman's horror, the person raises both of his arms to reveal that they are holding her date's severed head in one hand and the car keys in the other.

[2] The origins of the Hook legend are not entirely known, though, according to folklorist and historian Jan Harold Brunvand, the story began to circulate some time in the 1950s in the United States.

—Jeanette[2][5]Literary scholar Christopher Pittard traces the plot dynamics of the legend to Victorian literature, particularly the 1913 horror novel The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes.

"[9] American folklorist Bill Ellis interpreted the maniac in The Hook as a moral custodian who interrupts the sexual experimentation of the young couple.

The killer-with-a-hook theme has also appeared in comedies; in Meatballs (1979), Bill Murray's character tells the Hook legend to campers around a campfire.

[15] The slasher film Final Exam opens with a scene in which a couple are attacked in a parked car, and later, a student is murdered in a university locker room with a hook.

[16] Campfire Tales (1997), an anthology horror film, opens with a segment retelling the Hook legend, set in the 1950s.

[19] The story has also appeared in various television programs; "The Pest House" (1998), the fourteenth episode of season 2 of the TV series Millennium, opens with a murder similar to that of the urban legend.

A parody of the Hookman is used in SpongeBob SquarePants, season 2, episode 16: "Graveyard Shift", in which Squidward, in an attempt to scare SpongeBob out of his wits while they are working at night, tells a made-up horror story of the "Hash-Slinging Slasher" – a dark, faceless figure donning a raincoat who has a rusty, old spatula in place of a hand.

[21] The story received a resurgence in popularity on the internet following a retelling of it on 4chan that became an internet meme, due to it being written in broken English with several humorous errors, most notably its abrupt ending where the entire twist is rendered simply as the phrase "Man door hand hook car door", which has since become what this version of the story is referred to as.