The A38 Hitchhiker Between Taunton and Wellington
Since the 1950s drivers on the A38 west of Taunton have told of a man in a long grey coat who asks for a lift and is gone at the next look. The story is real folklore with a named lorry driver, but no contemporary record backs it.
A middle-aged man in a long coat stands by the A38 between Taunton and Wellington, sometimes with a torch pointed at the ground, and waves down passing traffic. A lorry driver gives him a lift, drops him off, and then sees him again at the roadside miles further on. That is the core of one of Somerset’s best-known road ghost stories. It is a genuine piece of local folklore, but almost every detail comes from retellings rather than from any record made at the time.
What the record actually shows
The Paranormal Database has two linked entries. The first, placed on the A38 near Taunton, describes a man in a long grey coat who stands by the roadside and disappears whether or not a car stops for him. It gives the dates 1970 and 2016 and adds that a female version, dressed in white, has also been reported in the area. The second entry places a man in a raincoat on the A38 near the Heatherton Grange Hotel outside Wellington in the 1970s. He uses a torch to flag down cars. One woman who would not stop nearly hit him, and a truck driver is said to have given him a lift before realising what he was. The database suggests the two may be the same figure.
The story most often told names a lorry driver called Unsworth, given as Harry or Harold. In the version summarised on Wikipedia’s list of haunted highways, he gave a lift to a hitchhiker in 1958 and later saw the same man waiting at the roadside miles further on. The Mystical Times blog gives a fuller version. It says Mr Unsworth drove the A38 in the early hours, picked the man up around 3am in wet weather, and heard him talk with odd relish about accidents at a bridge about four miles away. The blog says the account reached a local Somerset newspaper in the early 1970s, about encounters from the 1950s. It does not name the paper, and we have not found the article.
The history behind the legend
Before the M5 opened through Somerset in the 1970s, the A38 was the main road from Bristol to Exeter and the far South West. Long-distance lorry drivers ran it through the night. That is exactly the setting in which a road ghost story spreads, passed between drivers at cafes and depots before anyone writes it down.
The vanishing hitchhiker is also one of the most widespread legends in the world. The American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand made it the title story of his 1981 book on urban legends, and versions are recorded from Sweden and France to Ethiopia and South Africa. The common forms have the passenger give an address, leave a garment behind, or turn out to have died on that road years before. The earlier text of this page used several of those motifs. They belong to the international legend, not to the Somerset story.
How to read it
The A38 tale has more substance than many road ghosts. It has a named driver, a stretch of road and a rough date. But the name and date reach us through retellings that disagree on the coat, the year and how many lifts were given. Researchers such as Michael Goss, who studied phantom hitchhiker reports closely, concluded that most of them are folklore retold in new settings.
Night driving, fatigue and a figure in a dark coat on an unlit road can easily produce a sighting that will not survive a second look. That does not settle the matter. It does mean the A38 hitchhiker is best treated as documented folklore with no verified event behind it. A copy of the 1970s newspaper report would change that, and we would like to find it.
Sources
- The Paranormal Database, Somerset (entry #3757 Hitchhiker, A38 near Taunton) - grey-coated man, dated 1970 and 2016, female variant in white
- The Paranormal Database, Haunted Roads (entry #7177 Man with Torch, A38 near Wellington) - 1970s torch-carrying figure near the Heatherton Grange Hotel
- List of reportedly haunted highways, Wikipedia - A38 hitchhiker reports since the 1950s and the 1958 Unsworth tale
- The Phantom Hitchhiker of Somerset, Mystical Times - fuller Unsworth version, said to have been reported to a local paper in the early 1970s
- Vanishing hitchhiker, Wikipedia - the international legend, Brunvand’s 1981 book and Goss’s sceptical view