Phantom hitchhiker stories are one of the most widespread categories of urban and rural legend anywhere ghost stories are told, and most versions are impossible to trace back to a specific named witness or date. The Stanbridge case is a genuine exception, and it is one of the best documented examples of this legend type recorded anywhere in Britain. On the evening of 12 October 1979, a 26-year-old carpet fitter named Roy Fulton, from Dunstable, was driving home after a darts match at a pub in Leighton Buzzard when he saw a young man standing alone on an isolated stretch of Station Road on the outskirts of Stanbridge and stopped to offer him a lift.
Fulton later described the hitchhiker as casually dressed in dark trousers and a jumper with a white-collared shirt, and unsettlingly pale, with a face he described as somehow elongated. The young man got in without speaking, and when Fulton asked where he was headed, simply pointed down the road rather than answering. A few minutes into the journey, Fulton turned to offer his silent passenger a cigarette and found the seat empty, the door still closed, with no possibility that anyone could have got out of a moving car unnoticed.
Shaken, Fulton went straight to his local and told the landlord, Bill Stone, and the assembled regulars what had happened, giving the story an unusually early and direct first telling rather than one that had already been reshaped by repetition before being recorded. What makes the case particularly well documented by the standards of this kind of folklore is that Fulton was later formally interviewed by the writer and psychical researcher Michael Goss, who specialised in studying phantom hitchhiker accounts, and in 1985 took part in the respected television documentary series Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, giving his account on record. Fulton himself reportedly found two aspects of the experience most troubling afterwards: the sense that the pale young man might have been connected to some unreported accident nearby, and the fear that the silent figure might somehow follow him home.
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