The Phantom Hitchhiker : Italian Literature, Japanese Lore, and the Transnational Afterlives of a Global Ghost Story (Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief)

The Phantom Hitchhiker offers the first organic study of one of modernity’s most haunting stories: the encounter with a figure—generally a young woman—whose presence unsettles the border between life and death. Focusing on the porous relationship between literature and folklore, the book follows the ‘phantom hitchhiker’ motif as it moves across oral storytelling, fiction, journalism, cinema, television, and the subcultures of the early digital age. Centred on Italy yet resolutely transnational, the book reveals a subtle, longstanding affinity with the Japanese tradition of ghostlore—a long-distance dialogue, grounded not in surface similarity but in deeper patterns of cultural sensibility. What emerges is a story that is anything but static: a motif continuously reinvented, capable of illuminating the shifting borders between life and death, belief and fiction, local memory and global circulation. The author brings to the material a command of multiple languages and literary traditions, combined with an acute sensitivity to the cultural dynamics of modernity, particularly in terms of the metamorphoses and survivals of the supernatural in an age of presumed disenchantment. The volume weaves close reading and literary theory with approaches drawn from folklore studies and media history, offering a genuinely innovative account of how ghost stories travel, transform, and survive across cultures and discursive regimes. It will prove fascinating for scholars and students in folklore, literary studies, Italian studies and the humanities, as well as for readers drawn to the spectral textures of modern culture and to the afterlives of the stories we continue to tell in the dark.