Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: “Paranormal Pajama Party” is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode mentions sexual assault and violence against women. Please be advised.
[Sounds of thunder, rain on a windscreen throughout]
Steph: “I've never been able to understand this,” he said slowly. “It happened to a friend of mine, a guy who went to college with me. He can't explain it either.”
This guy and a friend were driving home from a party. It was an awful, rainy night – just pouring down – so driving was difficult.
They were coming up to a stoplight on Main Street, and they could sort of see a woman standing on the corner, all by herself, like she was waiting for someone. She wasn’t wearing a coat or carrying an umbrella. She was just standing there, in the rain, in this thin, white dress.
She’d obviously been in some kind of trouble, and it was after midnight – they knew the buses had stopped running for the night. So when they got to the light, my friend pulled over, rolled down the window, and offered to give her a lift home. She accepted right away and got into the back seat of his car.
My buddy’s friend leant her his coat, and she gave them an address a couple miles away, where she said she lived with her mom. They didn’t want to ask, and she didn’t explain what she was doing at the intersection in the pouring rain all by herself.
They started driving towards her house and tried to make some small talk. The girl was nice about it, but she was answering in a way that made it pretty clear she didn’t want to talk.
When they got to her street, my buddy’s friend turned around to ask her a question, but there was no one in the back seat! He leaned over to see if she was on the floor or something, but the only thing back there was his crumpled-up coat. They stopped the car. Sure enough, the girl was gone.
The only thing they could think was that she’d somehow slipped out of the car; but they hadn’t stopped since picking her up, and there was no way she could’ve jumped from the moving car without them noticing.
Freaking out, they decided to go to the address she’d given them. Eventually, they found this old, ramshackle house and knocked. They waited and waited, and finally, the door opened slowly, revealing an old woman clutching her bathrobe around herself.
They apologised for waking her up, of course, and started telling her their story. She just listened, almost like she’d heard it all before.
“Where did you say you picked her up?”, she asked when they’d finished.
My friend told her which intersection.
“That was my daughter,” the old woman said. “She was killed in a car accident at that intersection 20 years ago.”
[Thunder and rain sounds end]
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is “Paranormal Pajama Party”, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales.
Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
So scootch under the covers and get cosy with me. We’re kicking off our first-ever pajama party with a campfire standard – the vanishing hitchhiker.
You know this one, right? There are a few versions. The gist is: On a dark night, on a cold and lonely stretch of road, a young male driver picks up a young female hitchhiker and gives her a lift – only for her to mysteriously disappear out of his backseat.
The twist? When the confused man checks her backstory, life as he knows it is turned on its head: She’s been dead for years.
Another version, and the one I want to focus on today, goes like this:
A man’s been on a long business trip and is finally heading back home to see his family. He’s nearly home, driving slowly through stormy weather and terrible conditions and thinking about all the fun he and the kids will have at the state fair that weekend when he sees an old woman at the side of the road with an enormously heavy shopping bag.
He picks her up and as she settles into the backseat, she asks to be driven to the next town down the road. They make some awkward introductions and a little chit-chat.
And then, out of nowhere, she warns him not to go to the state fair because there will be a horrible accident – the Ferris wheel will collapse and dozens of people will die.
Startled, he looks back at her in the rearview mirror. But the old woman, of course, is no longer there.
He has to stop for gas at the town where the old woman said she had lived, and when he mentions her name to the clerk at the station, the clerk tells him that the woman had lived there, but that she had passed away one year before — to the day.
FREAKY, RIGHT?
But I’ve got some questions.
If you’re a woman, or actually, even a person, you’ve been told how dangerous hitchhiking is.
Actually, in looking into this… it’s not as dangerous as your mom and grandma said it was. It’s still dangerous! I’m not recommending it. There’s a reason an entire 700-kilometre stretch of road in Canada is called the Highway of Tears, where possibly as many as 40 women – many of whom were Indigenous – have gone missing or have been murdered. DON’T HITCHHIKE.
I also learned that the decline in hitchhiking may have been spurred by horror movies like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre”. So. Don’t let any horror media shape your opinion of the… world… ahem. Except for this podcast. Which is still Team Don’t Hitchhike.
The fact remains, the line since the ‘70s has been: Hitchhiking will get you murdered in a big way, especially if you’re a lady.
So the first thing that I want to point out is that in almost every iteration of this story, she isn't asking to be picked up. She’s not hitching. She’s just standing there, minding her business, and a dude drives by and decides to be chivalrous at her.
But the second thing that’s interesting about this story is that it’s kind of a terror role reversal. It’s not coeds trying to hitch a ride and accidentally flagging down a serial killer like Edmund Kemper. This time the male driver – and the driver ALWAYS seems to be a man – is picking up an extremely harmless passenger – either a beautiful young woman in pure, virginal white, or an old lady carrying a heavy burden. But then it turns out they weren’t so harmless after all, and the men are the victims.
I’m using “victims” loosely. That Edmund Kemper example wasn’t a cutesy namedrop – women in real-life hitchhiking-gone-wrong stories get sexually assaulted and murdered. The men in the vanishing hitchhiker stories just get… kind of confused, pretty spooked, and maybe a little bit wet.
So why the reversal? Why are well-meaning, gentlemanly drivers always picking up these sneaky, deceptive female spirits?
The vanishing hitchhiker story is an actual classic. As in, variations of it have been told in “the classics”. There’s even a little version in the New Testament: A chariot driver picks up the Apostle Phillip, who baptises him and then disappears. See? Again – the drivers are always getting a little wet.
The version of the hitchhiker story that we know is pretty modern. One big hint is: cars. But also, before the 20th century, we liked the ghosts in our stories to announce their ghostliness. Think the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. in “Hamlet”. He basically walks on stage and says, “Hey, buddy. It’s me! Your dead dad! And have I got portentous news for you.”
That “...and he was dead the whole time!” twist really gained popularity in the 20th century, and I’m gonna say it peaked in 1999 with Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis. Now I just assume that everyone is a ghost in everything I watch, and I am often right. Even “Barbie” did it.
But let’s go back to the second version of the story, where the old lady hitchhiker pulls a real Mothman and warns the driver of impending doom.
Female prophetesses – young and old – predate Haley Joel and cars and even the Apostle Phillip.
Time travel with me for a second.
The ancient Egyptian goddess Wadjet is sometimes depicted as a woman with a snake head, and sometimes as a cobra with wings, which is, like… the last thing I want cobras to have.
She was said to be the matron and protector of Lower Egypt, and then I guess it unified with Upper Egypt and she became co-protector and co-patron of all of Egypt. She had a temple in the city of Per-Wadjet, and it had an oracle.
Oracles are wise priests or priestesses who can prophesy the future thanks to their otherworldly connection to the divine.
It’s very impressive. So impressive, in fact, that Bronze Age people got a look at Wadjet’s oracle, and were like, “We gotta have one of those. Or possibly, eventually, up to 10 of those.”
So we know that as early as 1400-ish BC, there was at least one oracle doing her prophecy thing in Ancient Greece, specifically at Delphi. You’ve almost definitely heard of her if you’ve looked into any Greek or Roman history. We’ll get to her in a minute.
In Ancient Greece, these prophetesses were known as Sibyls.
Sometime around 500 BC, the philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.”
These were women “from whose lips the god speaks”, and they were considered demigoddesses – the daughters of a god and a human.
They were an Extremely Big Deal in the religious practices of their day, but also, like… if you needed the gods to weigh in on whether or not you should go to war, or whether you should break up with your boyfriend, or where to take your friend from out of town for the best tzatziki. (Maybe not that one.)
To clarify, there weren’t just… several women named Sibyl all with a direct line to Mount Olympus. The Sibyl-slash-oracle title was held by the head priestess (or a few priestesses at the same time) at various temples scattered across the ancient world, and then that woman would pass the title on to the next head priestess. But for clarity, I’m going to keep calling each Sibyl or Oracle “she” even though “she” might be a number of women over a long period of time, or even a number of women at the same time.
There are a couple of very famous Sibyls. If you’ve seen a picture of, or have even been inside the Sistine Chapel, you may have seen them in some of the little cubby holes painted on the ceiling. They’re notable because they are ripped. Like… wowza, Michelangelo.
These five ladies are painted alongside seven male prophets to represent both the prophecies that foretold the coming of Jesus, and, according to michelangelo.net, because he wanted the fresco to be as inclusive as possible.
Just a side note: Incredible that Michelangelo has his own website. Painter, sculptor, webmaster, nunchuck expert. Truly a Renaissance turtle.
The Sistine Chapel Sibyl that you would least like to arm-wrestle is the Cumean Sibyl. I don’t know what it is, but something about her really speaks to me.
She lived in a cave near Naples, where she apparently spent her time lifting weights.
[Laughter]
Steph: But she was also the bridge between the world of the living and the dead, and she’d tell the future by writing on oak leaves arranged outside the front of her cave. But if the wind blew the leaves away and messed up the order of the prophecy, tough luck, buttercup! She was NOT going to help you clean that shit up or put the prophecy back in order.
I just love the idea of a goth, grumpy, jacked prophetess living in a cave. I love it.
In the Aenid, the Cumean Sibyl foretells the coming of a Saviour. If you sort of squint and don’t look at that prophecy too hard, that saviour could be Jesus Christ, hence her seat on a ceiling in the Vatican.
One last, horrible thing about her – according to the Roman poet Ovid, the Cumean Sibyl was a mortal woman but she lived for a thousand years. “Well, that’s not so bad!” you’re thinking. “You’d see a lot of cool stuff in 1,000 years!”
First of all, for her, that stuff wasn’t really anything cool, like space travel or washing machines. It was like… the Black Plague.
But more importantly, here’s how that happened: She was a high priestess for the god Apollo, and she attained her longevity when he showed up and offered to grant her a wish in exchange for her virginity.
Because she was a clever, grumpy goth, she scooped up a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains of sand she held. And then she didn’t sleep with him! Good job, Sibyl!
Except that gods are assholes, and so as punishment, he allowed her body to wither away because she failed to ask for eternal youth. She eventually grew so small with age that she moved out of the cave and into a tiny jar. Eventually, only her voice was left.
The Oracle of Delphi is also on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and she was a heavyweight. She was integral in major decisions made throughout the ancient world. And what’s really notable is that, although Ancient Greek culture was very male-dominated, she was basically the highest civil and religious authority.
Delphi shares the same root word in Greek as womb, and they believed it was the centre of the Earth.
There are a few origin stories for it, but the one I’m choosing to believe because it starts adorably is that a goat herder discovered the area after one of his goats fell into a crack in the earth, and when he pulled him back out the goat was acting funny. So he went into the chasm himself and was filled with a divine presence and gained the ability to see outside of the present – into the past and future. I assume we can say the same for the goat.
Because this is an Old Timey Story and a podcast about women being treated poorly by society, it gets way less cute after this.
After the chasm began attracting visitors, some of them got really frenzied, and several men died. So the villagers were like, “You know how we’ll solve this tourism problem? We’ll choose one teenage girl to be the mouthpiece for the gods. Good luck, girl.”
Also, because this is an Old Timey Story and a podcast about women being treated poorly by society, she was, of course, an “appropriately clad young virgin,” whatever that means. And she was, of course, kidnapped and “violated” by a military officer.
So after that, the Oracle at Delphi had to be, and I’m quoting, “an elderly woman of 50” who “would be dressed in the costume of a virgin”. I have so many thoughts on that, and all of them are angry.
The weird earth hole at Delphi was initially a place of worship for the Earth goddess, Gaia, who was connected with fertility rituals, and she had a bunch of priestesses working in her temple.
But by the 8th century BC, the temple at Delphi was under new management. The god Apollo defeated Gaia’s guardian serpents – or maybe a giant snake monster? – and took over the temple. And from then on, the Oracle at Delphi was named Pythia, as in python.
Is that another connection to the snake-headed Goddess Wadjet? Or were she and Gaia just two chicks who dig snakes? I don’t know, but I don’t want to go to their slumber parties.
While I am kind of into the idea of hanging out near a weird gassy cavern with a crazy goat, and although she was extremely powerful, I don’t think I’d want to be the Oracle at Delphi. The Delphic priest and philosopher Plutarch wrote that serving Apollo seemed to shorten Pythia’s life. Then again, they kept picking those extremely elderly 50-year-old women for the job, so.
Apollo’s Delphi temple survived until AD 390, when it was destroyed by the Roman emperor Theodosius I, who was trying to remove all traces of paganism. And with that, the Oracle of Delphi was silenced forever. Or was she?
Tradition says that both the Cumean Sibyl and the Delphic Sibyl became wandering voices, whispering prophecies to humans for all eternity… perhaps from the backseats of their cars.
All I’m saying is that once upon a time – in real life – there were some very, very formidable priestesses, who claimed to have a direct connection to the gods. But times changed, power structures shifted, and new institutions took hold. Instead of being the voice of the gods, women took a backseat.
And in the story of the vanishing hitchhiker, I mean that literally.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to draw a direct line from snake-headed Wadjet, to the Sibyls who ultimately the direction of Western Civilisation and a major world religion, to the old woman popping up in the backseat of hapless drivers’ cars, whispering prophecies in their ears and then disappearing back into another world.
When our hitchhiker appears as a beautiful young woman in a white evening gown, she’s dressed virginally, just like the Oracle of Delphi. She may have lost her gift of prophecy, but she’s still powerful enough to turn men’s worlds upside-down... and maybe get them a little bit wet.
[MUSIC]
Steph: OK, ghouls and boys. It’s time for lights out at the “Paranomal Pajama Party”, but I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the Sibyls and various vanishing hitchhiker stories with help from the sources for today’s episode, which I’ll link in the show notes.
Follow ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episodes – assuming they didn’t mysteriously vanish from the feed as soon as I shared them…
If you enjoyed this premier episode or have feedback – the constructive kind only, please – please leave Paranormal Pajama Party a rating and review on your favourite podcast app. Thanks!
And don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
