15 Creepiest Hitchhiking Stories

5 – The Murder of Phillip Fraser,

• In 1988, twenty-five-year-old Philip Fraser planned to attend The Evergreen State College in Washington. In mid June, he left Alaska to drive to Evergreen and complete his enrolment. However, he first had to cross the border and pass through Canada. After four days’ travel, he stopped at a British Columbian café where he crossed paths with an unidentified male hitchhiker, who asked Fraser for a ride.
• According to a witness, Fraser initially refused the man’s request and started driving away, but then stopped and had a sudden change of heart. This was the last time Phillip Fraser was seen alive. On July 27, his body was discovered in a remote gravel pit near Stewart.
• Approximately eight hours after Fraser was sighted in the café, a couple from a nearby town pulled over to help a motorist with car trouble. The motorist matched the description of the mysterious café hitchhiker and was driving Fraser’s vehicle. He spent the night at the couple’s home and told a backstory that matched Fraser’s. Clearly, he’d taken over Fraser’s identity. However, sensing this would get him unstuck, he abandoned the car and set it on fire at a Prince George car wash.
• The hitchhiker was never seen again and has still not been identified.

 

4 – The Triangle of Death,

• In the 1980s, France’s Marne region became known as the ‘triangle of death’. Many young army conscripts from the three military garrisons in the area mysteriously disappeared, often while hitchhiking.
• Patrick Dubois, a nineteen-year-old conscript from the Fourth Dragoons regiment, was the first known victim and mysteriously disappeared on January 5, 1980. Over the next seven years, seven more young men vanished in the region. Twenty-year-old Irish hitchhiker Trevor O’Keefe was the only victim recovered, but was found strangled.
• A year later, authorities determined that former commando and senior Fourth Dragoons warrant officer Pierre Chanal was a likely culprit. A police patrol chanced upon Chanal’s camper van parked suspiciously by the side of a country road. They discovered he’d been videotaping the rape and torture of the young Hungarian hitchhiker he’d abducted.
• Chanal was given ten years for the crime, but was released on probation in ’95. He’s since become a suspect in the ‘triangle of death’ disappearances after DNA testing was finally performed on his camper van. Traces of DNA evidence were found that matched Trevor O’Keefe and two of the other missing victims.
• In 2001, Chanal was charged with three murders, though he’s believed to be responsible for the deaths of all eight victims. In October 2003, shortly after the start of his trial, the cowardly Chanal committed suicide in his prison hospital.

3 – The Walhalla Hitchhiker,

• ‘Lydia, the Vanishing Lady’ is one of the spookiest legends in North Carolina. But, not to be outdone, South Carolina has its own famous urban legend about a phantom hitchhiker.
• According to locals, a spectral male wearing a dark, hooded coat has been seen haunting Highway 107 for the past several decades. He is creatively known as the ‘Walhalla Hitchhiker’.
• After he is picked up, this mysterious spirit asks to be dropped off at either Moody Springs or the Piedmont Overlook, depending on which direction the vehicle is travelling. His decision to visit scenic tourist sights seems peculiar given that he usually appears on dark and stormy nights. After he arrives, the hitchhiker exits the vehicle without saying anything and vanishes into the night.
• Some believe the Walhalla Hitchhiker is the ghost of a deceased pilot named Larry Stephens. Because of vision-affecting hailstorm, Stephens crashed his plane into some mountains during a typical sightseeing excursions through Oconee County. The remnants of Stephens’s plane were found near Walhalla but, mysteriously, his body was never recovered.
• According to reports, the Walhalla Hitchhiker greatly resembles Larry Stephens and the two are thought to wear very similar clothing, proving irrefutably that they are the same person (or have the same stylist).

2 – Three Indiscriminate Murders,

• In 2001, convicted bankrobber and all-around bad guy Gary Sampson posed as a hitchhiker to carjack and murder three helpless people. The murders took place over a week, with the first two occurring in Massachusetts and the third in New Hampshire.
• The first victim was Philip McCloskey, aged sixty-nine. After McCloskey stopped and picked him up, Sampson forced him at knifepoint to drive to a secluded area, where he tied him up with his belt and stabbed him twenty-four times. Jonathan Rizzo was the youngest victim at nineteen. Sampson also forced young Rizzo to a secluded area, where he tied him to a tree, then gagged and killed him. The third victim, Robert Whitney, was fifty-eight.
• Sampson turned himself in for his crimes in Vermont. He’s since tried to exploit a bipolar personality disorder and plea ill mental health, but this was rejected. Sampson was sentenced to death in 2003, but Massachusetts had abolished capital punishment in 1984, so actioning the sentence has been a drawn-out process marred by controversy.

 

1 – The Murder Of The Prendergast Family,

• In November 1958, Californian Thomas Prendergast picked up a sixteen-year-old runaway hitchhiker named Carl Alfred Eder from New York. Eder evoked Prendergast’s sympathies when he explained that he was homeless. Prendergast showed Eder charity by allowing him to stay at his family home until Eder got back on his feet.
• However, Prendergast would come to regret that decision. After returning from work on December 12, Prendergast noticed Eder was waiting outside wanting a ride to San Diego. Prendergast dropped him off at a service station. When Prendergast returned home he made a horrifying discovery: his wife, Lois, had been shot to death, and the couple’s four young kids – aged nine, six, four and two – had been murdered with a hunting knife.
• Two days later, Eder was detained by authorities. He explained that he’d snapped and had thrown their youngest daughter to the floor because she was making too much noise. He then shot Mrs Prendergast and murdered the two youngest children. When the other kids returned home from school, Eder killed them, too. He was subsequently given two life sentences.
• In October 1974, Eder escaped from prison and was never recaptured. He left a note which read: ‘I’ve done enough time and I’m leaving.’
• In the years that followed, Eder has been seen hanging out with biker gangs and radical anti-government groups. Some believe one of these groups murdered him. If alive, Carl Alfred Eder would be in his seventies today. There is a $20,000 reward for his capture.

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