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The Red Headed Hitchhiker: The Birth of A Legend

Sunday, May 4, 2014 17:25

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Experiences with roadside ghosts are a common theme in the Bridgewater Triangle. The most well known these phantom travelers is the Red Headed Hitchhiker of Route 44. The legend was created by Rehoboth historian, Charles Turek Robinson. The story of a redheaded, bearded “man” who terrorized more than a few locals from the 1960s to the 1980s on the stretch of route 44 on the Rehoboth/Seekonk line was just one ghoulish tale of many that Robinson laid down in his folklore cult classic, “The New England Ghost Files: An Authentic Compendium of Frightening Phantoms.” The book was excellently illustrated by “B” Robinson, the author’s own mother.

Robinson,–a Harvard educated anthropologist, archealogist, and writer–was thrown into the world of tracking and recording local ghost stories quite by accident, after running an article one Halloween featuring the work of one of the country’s first ghost hunters, Hans Holtzer. a story about a poltergeist in his hometown of Rehoboth immerged. Soon after the article was published, Robinson’s editor started recieving letters addressed to ” Charles Turek Robinson” from locals, eager to relay their own accounts of supernatural activity. And the father of a legend was born.

In an interview in the May, 2002 edition of “Cyril Magazine,” Robinson revealed: “Many of the accounts that were related to me by readers were silly and contained many of the usual stereotypes….I rejected those. However, there were a few that were very provocative in their originality. They did not contain the usual stereotypes and sensationalism. They contained elements so unusual and so original that if these people hadn’t really had these experiences, they should have been writing or telescripting in Hollywood.”

“Those provoked me and established for me an interest in the supernatural, moreover an interest in the folklore. As an anthropologist I was stunned by how many people responded. I began to wonder why there was such a widespread interest in this phenomenon. Although I’m a proponent of science, as these accounts came in I ran a couple of the more provocative accounts in some more of my columns. These in turn generated more calls and letters from readers, and kind of snowballed the whole thing. As an anthropologist I wondered, why such a widespread interest?”

Out of the dozens of chilling accounts in Robinson’s “New England Ghost Files”, my personal favorite happens to be one about the Red Headed Hitchhiker. The story takes place in 1984…and it goes like this: A local couple’s car breaks down. The man tells his wife to stay in the car, while he attempts to find a pay phone to call AAA road service. The man makes his way down the dark road when he spots what he describes as a “sloppy looking guy with red messy hair” sitting on the side of the road.

The man asks the stranger if he knows where the closest pay phone is. The stranger doesn’t answer. The man asks him again. The messy red-haired man only sits in silence staring at him. So the man asks again. And again. And there is silence. One more time the man asks and now he notices what he describes as an “odd grin” upon the stranger’s face. The man asks the stranger if he is okay. Upon posing the question, the stranger’s face changes. The man described the eerie nighttime encounter with the “hitchhiker” this way: “Suddenly, the man’s face got very strange. He stopped grinning, he twisted his mouth and I noticed that there was something wrong with his eyes. They were all clouded over–no pupils or anything–and all white.”

Artwork by Bridgewater Triangle resident and
artist, Mark Phalen. This piece is just one in a series of
pop art woodcuts inspired by legends
of the Bridgewater Triangle created by ubertalented Phalen.

The man runs back to towards the car only to hear this crazy laughter behind him. He turns and looks and the man with the messy red hair is gone, but the laughing is still really loud.. and it sounds as if it is coming from behind him. The man runs back to car in fright only to find his wife standing outside of it, visibly terrified. She tells her husband that after he left she had turned on the car radio and was listening to a song when to her horror suddenly the song wasn’t coming out of the radio anymore: A very creepy man’s voice came out of the car’s speakers instead. The voice taunted her, called her by name, all the while laughing hysterically.

Perhaps the red headed hitchhiker finally caught a lift, because there have been no legitimate sightings since those stories initially laid out by Robinson in New England Ghost Files. Yet the legend lives on in Bridgewater Triangle history.

Source: http://www.thebridgewatertriangle.com/2014/05/the-red-headed-hitchhiker-birth-of.html

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