Throughout the region and perhaps the country the staple ghost story is the story of a ghostly hitchhiker. “Endless variations on the “vanishing hitchhiker” story are some of the most frequently shared of all community tales across the United States. Whoever started the hitchhiker story in our own region simply proves its persistence in American lore as one of the more widespread… (Thacker 38)”. In Mountain Mysteries by Larry Thacker the hitchhiker is known as “Gabriel’s Messenger”. There are three encounters with the messenger in Mountain Mysteries, each of them picked the man up on the Middleborough side of the Cumberland Tunnel and before they reached the other side the passenger has vanished, always leaving them with a message.
In Tragedy at …show more content…
I’ve never been a skeptic, but I’ve never believed every ghost story either. The false ghosts stories and superstitions are what cause others to question the validity. “Belief in the supernatural is closely akin to belief in religion. Both involve an intensely personal relationship with a preternatural being or design (Henson viii).” It is through careful reading, research, and instinct that one has to weed out the false from the true, but even then it may be difficult to discern. Do spirits walk among us? Are “ghosts” merely a figment of an overactive imagination. These are the questions I ask myself and according to Larry Thacker in an email correspondence with him:
“The more I research and the more I deal with people the less I believe over time. You get a feel for who is telling the truth and who is mistaken over time, and the frequencies of mistaken explanations, in my opinion, are legion. On the other hand, it was my fascination in the beginning with experiences and family stories that started me on the journey. I've had plenty of these run-ins that sustain my belief that we are dealing with more than we can see or understand at the
In Tragedy at …show more content…
I’ve never been a skeptic, but I’ve never believed every ghost story either. The false ghosts stories and superstitions are what cause others to question the validity. “Belief in the supernatural is closely akin to belief in religion. Both involve an intensely personal relationship with a preternatural being or design (Henson viii).” It is through careful reading, research, and instinct that one has to weed out the false from the true, but even then it may be difficult to discern. Do spirits walk among us? Are “ghosts” merely a figment of an overactive imagination. These are the questions I ask myself and according to Larry Thacker in an email correspondence with him:
“The more I research and the more I deal with people the less I believe over time. You get a feel for who is telling the truth and who is mistaken over time, and the frequencies of mistaken explanations, in my opinion, are legion. On the other hand, it was my fascination in the beginning with experiences and family stories that started me on the journey. I've had plenty of these run-ins that sustain my belief that we are dealing with more than we can see or understand at the