"[4] Similar stories have been reported for centuries across the world in places like England, Ethiopia, Korea, France, South Africa, Tsarist Russia and in America among Chinese Americans, Mormons and Ozark mountaineers.
[5] What was probably the first vanishing hitchhiker legend can be found in the 400-year-old manuscript Om the tekn och widunder som föregingo thet liturgiske owäsendet, which translates approximately as "About the signs and wonders that preceded the liturgical event".
A common variation of the above involves the vanishing hitchhiker departing as would a normal passenger, having left some item in the vehicle, or having borrowed a garment for protection against the cold.
[6] In this and other versions of the urban legend, the unsuspecting motorist makes contact with the family of a deceased person using the information the hitchhiker left behind and finds that the family's description of the deceased matches the passenger the motorist picked up and also finds that they were killed in some unexpected way (usually a car accident) and that the driver's encounter with the vanishing hitchhiker occurred on the anniversary of their death.
The first proper study of the story of the vanishing hitchhiker was undertaken in 1942–43 by American folklorists Richard Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, who collected as many accounts as they could and attempted to analyze them.
These are described as: Beardsley and Hankey were particularly interested to note one instance (location: Kingston, New York, 1941) in which the vanishing hitchhiker was subsequently identified as the late Mother Cabrini, founder of the local Sacred Heart Orphanage, who was beatified for her work.
Beardsley and Hankey concluded that Version 'A' was closest to the original form of the story, containing the essential elements of the legend.
Ernest W. Baughman's Type- and Motif-Index of the Folk Tales of England and North America (1966) delineates the basic vanishing hitchhiker as follows: Ghost of young woman asks for ride in automobile, disappears from closed car without the driver's knowledge, after giving him an address to which she wishes to be taken.
The legend of Saint Christopher is considered one of these, and the story of Philip the Evangelist being transported by God after encountering the Ethiopian on the road (Acts 8:26–39) is sometimes similarly interpreted.
Paranormal researcher Michael Goss in his book The Evidence for Phantom Hitch-Hikers discovered that many reports of vanishing hitchhikers turn out be based on folklore and hearsay stories.