Everybody’s Ghost Stories by Saundra Mitchell

By: Saundra Mitchell (felt I might need to reiterate that!)
Okay, so this is a totally true ghost story, are you ready? My cousin used to work third shift up on the north side, and one night it was pouring down rain when was driving home, right? And he sees this girl in a long, white dress walking on the side of the road, so of course he stops to pick her up. And she’s like, she wants to sit in the back, and he’s okay with that, because you know, she’s soaking wet and it probably makes her feel safer or whatever.

So he gives her his coat, because she’s shivering and freezing, right? She’s real quiet for most of the ride, except for giving him directions to her house. And he keeps looking in the rear view at her, and she looks like she might be crying, but when he asks her about it, she doesn’t say anything. He figures maybe she got in a fight with her boyfriend at the prom or something. Anyway, he follows the directions he gave her, but when he pulls up, it’s a graveyard, right?

He turns around to ask her what the deal is, and she’s *gone*. Just gone, right? But the cemetery gate is ajar, so he goes in to see if he can find her, figuring she’s all wound up from whatever happened. Only instead of finding a girl in a white party dress, he finds his coat. It’s folded on top of this gravestone. It has a girl’s name on it, and what’s weird is that the death date on the stone is exactly one year ago to the day.

You’ve probably heard this ghost story- maybe it happened to *your* cousin, or a friend of a friend, or somebody your best friend knows. It’s an example of one of the oldest urban legends we have. Urban legends are common stories, passed from storyteller to storyteller. They touch on universal themes, and they mutate to match their environment.

Sometimes the young woman was a murder victim, sometimes the victim of a drunk driving accident. But always, she hitches a ride and disappears. And she has done, for almost four hundred years. The earliest vanishing hitchhiker story was recorded in Sweden in 1602! In Chicago, the vanishing hitchhiker story is called Resurrection Mary- for the famous Resurrection Cemetery where the ghost allegedly walks. There are variations around the world, including Brazil’s Midnight Beauty and Switzerland’s White Woman of Belchen Tunnel.

But tunnels aren’t too scary- have you heard of Cry Woman Bridge? It’s right outside town, you know the one. Back in the fifties, this lady got in a fight with her husband, and took the baby to go calm down at her parents’ house, right? And after a while, she felt kind of silly over their little fight, and she decided to head home. But it was storming, and dark, and there was all kinds of fog. She couldn’t even see. She lost control of the car on top of the bridge and blew right off of it. In the morning, the police found the wreckage. The woman’s body was in the car, but all they ever found of the baby was its little blue blanket, floating in the water.

Now if you go out there at night, you can hear the woman screaming, and sometimes you can see her wandering the bridge, looking for her baby. You better not park out there, though. My best friend’s brother parked out there with his girlfriend one night just to scare her, and something jumped on the back of the car. They peeled out like WHOA, and when they got home, they found gouges in the paint, like somebody had dug their fingernails in.

Of course, Cry Woman Bridge is the version I heard growing up in central Indiana. One state over, it’s called Crybaby Bridge, and instead of a terrible crash claiming the baby’s life, an unwed teenage mother threw her baby off the bridge, and then killed herself in despair over it. In one version, you can stand on the bridge and chant “I HAVE YOUR BABY!” three times, and the mother’s ghost will appear and scream, “WHERE IS MY BABY?!”

Which reminds me of this slumber party favorite, but I swear it’s completely true. Okay, but you have to wait until midnight, right? And then you light a candle and turn out all the lights. Then you look into a mirror and you chant Bloody Mary over and over. And when you get to a hundred times, she appears in the mirror! I swear, this totally happened to me and my friends this one time in junior high! She reached right out of the mirror and tried to grab us! We had to blow out the candle to make her disappear.

Your version of Bloody Mary might be nicer than mine- some Marys show you your future husband. Or darkly, some show you how you’re going to die. The number of times you have to repeat her name changes- some say three, some say a hundred, but the result is always the same: the conjuration of an angry, trapped spirit. (Some versions even claim that if you summon Mary, she’ll rip your face off! That’s incentive to play, isn’t it?)

Even though I love haunted fiction, brand new ghosts written on brand new pages, I love urban legends, too. I love how universal they are. I love that they go on and on, for hundreds of years, across seas, in different nations. And I love how they change just enough so that every story becomes your personal ghost story. I wish you a happy halloween, and I hope you’ll do your part to keep folklore alive.

Because I’m your friend, and I swear to you- all these stories happened to me. Or maybe my cousin. Or maybe this guy I know…

Or maybe to you.

You can find out more about Saundra and her book Shadowed Summer at SaundraMitchell.com.

You can also find my review of Shadowed Summer here!