Stop me if you've heard this one before. A young man was driving home from work late
one rainy night when he spotted a woman in a white dress and a red sweater walking along
the shoulder of the road. Concerned for her safety, he slowed down and
rolled down the window so he could talk to her. When he asked where she was going, she said
she was walking to her parents' house. The man pulled over and offered her a ride
that she accepted. The woman gave him the address of her home,
hopped in the backseat, and the man drove off. He sensed that she must've been cold from
walking in the rain, so he cranked up the car's heater to help her dry off. Soon she removed her heavy red sweater and
placed it on the seat next to her. The man tried to make friendly conversation
- asking if the woman had a job, what she was studying at school, where she'd been that
day - but she remained quiet, staring out the window. Until they drove past an old graveyard. The woman began pounding on the glass of the
car as if she desperately wanted something. Unsure of what to do, the man pulled over,
but before he could ask her what was happening she had gotten out of the car. He exited the car to try and find her but
the woman was nowhere to be seen. She must have somehow ran off. Confused, the man got back in his car and
drove away. He went on his way and didn’t think of it
again until the next day, when he noticed her sweater was still in the back of his car. He decided to go to the house she had originally
given him the address for and give it back to her. He found the home without any trouble, but
when he knocked on the door the old woman who answered it was confused by his story. She told him that her daughter couldn't have
possibly left her sweater in his car, because she'd died in a car accident 30 years ago. The vanishing hitchhiker is a classic ghost
story, with the details varying from place to place and storyteller to storyteller. In Chicago, she goes by Resurrection Mary,
named after the graveyard she asks for rides to. In Okinawa, Japan, she's known as the Nightwalker
of Nago, and she only appears to taxi drivers. In Kent, England, she's Suzanne, a bride killed
in a car wreck on the way to her bachelorette party. In North Carolina, her name is Lydia, and
in Hawaii she's believed to be the goddess Pele in human form. But as far as our friends at the SCP Foundation
are concerned, the vanishing hitchhiker's name is Mary Talish, also known as SCP-1337. On the 19th of May, 1952, college sophomore
Mary Talish was abducted on her way to class in her hometown of Muncie, Indiana. When police found her body 2 weeks later,
her eyes and heart had been torn from her body in a ritualistic fashion, and she had
scrapes and bruises that suggested she'd been beaten before her murder. Her killers were never caught, and her body
was returned to her family for burial in Tomlinson Cemetery. Starting on the 19th of June that same year,
someone matching Mary's description - a caucasian woman with blonde hair, standing 150 cm tall
and wearing a red sweater - was spotted trying to flag down passing vehicles along Mayflower
Road. Since then, every month, on the 19th, Mary
has been sighted along that stretch of road, and every month, the same scenario plays out. Mary gives anyone who picks her up directions
to her parents' house, then on the way, she instructs the driver to stop at the graveyard
where she was buried. She vanishes from the car, leaving her sweater. The driver of the car tries to return the
sweater to her parents' house, only to be told that Mary Talish was dead. When the SCP foundation was made aware of
Mary Talish's pattern of haunting in the late 50's, they set up a system where agents would
patrol Mayflower Road at hourly intervals with the intention of picking Mary up. Agents were sent on their own in non-Foundation
cars and instructed to stick to the accepted script of the vanishing hitchhiker legend,
without attempting to engage Mary in further conversation. Mary's parents were also given E-class Agent
status to keep them from speaking out about the haunting, and told that the Foundation
was working on a way to set the spirit to rest. Early attempts to study the apparition were
inconclusive - it proved impossible for the Foundation to relocate her or trigger her
manifestation outside of the 19th of every month, and attempts to analyze her sweater
were fruitless, since if the sweater wasn't returned to the Talish family home it would
simply vanish from containment at or around sunset on the next 19th. For 20 years, SCP-1337 events continued to
happen as normal. D-Class personnel under the instruction of
the Foundation would pick Mary up, drive her past the cemetery, and return her sweater
to her parents. It was business as usual, and in fact, it
was one of the more sedate recurring apparitions the Foundation had to deal with. But, as you might have guessed, that peace
wouldn't last forever. Enter Dr. Lawson - who, in 1972, was placed
in charge of all resources regarding SCP-1337. Dr. Lawson was getting sick of all this phantom
hitchhiker business, and while most of the Foundation was happy to keep this routine
going, Lawson thought that the continual picking up and dropping off of Mary Talish and her
red sweater was a waste of the Foundation’s valuable time. After all, it was the early 70's - the price
of oil was at an all-time high, so the expense of sending car after car up and down the same
road for a solid day once a month just to pick up a ghost was more trouble than it was
worth. So, Lawson started developing a plan, one
that he didn't go through the proper Foundation channels to approve. He reasoned that the reason Mary's ghost kept
coming back was because she wanted something. Since always asked for a ride home, then it
must mean that she wanted to return back to her parents. So, logic followed that if she had nothing,
or no one, to go back to then she'd stop appearing. On 18th June, 1973, Lawson went ahead with
his plan without his superiors' knowledge and ordered the execution of Mary Talish's
parents, as well as the immediate demolition of their family home. According to his journals, Lawson had hoped
that his attempt at decommissioning 1337 would significantly cut the Foundation's gas bills,
freeing up valuable funds, at which point he'd surely be promoted in 'recognition of
his brilliance'. But that wasn't what happened. Lawson was demoted from team leader to junior
staff, and only kept on 1337 detail out of the belief that, without a family to return
to, Lawson would become the new focal point of the haunting should Mary Talish ever return. Though Lawson's actions weren't at all above
board, even by SCP Foundation standards, they did seem to have worked. The 19th of June came and went without a single
Mary sighting. And she wasn't seen the next month either. A full year went by without any sign of the
Mayflower Road apparition. Satisfied with this turn of events, the Foundation
made the decision to officially reclassify SCP-1337 from “Safe” to “Safe Decommissioned”
and the gas money that was budgeted for the Mayflower Road patrol was redirected to the
SCP-682 tank acid fund. But even though everything seemed to have
been sorted out, Lawson wasn't entirely satisfied. And just because of his demotion. Whether it was intuition or merely guilt-induced
paranoia is unclear, but he suspected that Mary was still out there somewhere. At first he thought that she might show up
on the anniversary of her parents' deaths, but then that date came and went, as did eight
more anniversaries after it. Finally, on the 19th of June, 1983, Lawson
decided he had to see for himself. Fitted with recording equipment, he drove
alone, in a non-Foundation standard car, down that lonely stretch of road where so many
before him had stopped to pick up that mysterious blonde woman with the red sweater. He had to prove to himself that she wouldn't
show up, that he had really and truly gotten rid of her for good. It was about 5 o'clock in the evening when
he reached Mayflower Road. At first, he didn't experience anything strange. He scanned the roadside, looking for the phantom
hitchhiker walking along it, but there was nobody there. Dr. Lawson breathed a sigh of relief - he
may have orchestrated the deaths of two innocent people, but at least it hadn't been for nothing. He turned on the recorder he'd brought with
him and logged that nothing had happened. SCP-1337 had been permanently neutralized. As he approached the t-intersection and prepared
to turn onto Marsh Avenue, he looked up to adjust his rear view mirror. To his horror, he found that he wasn't alone
in the car - someone was in the seat behind him, someone with blonde hair and a red sweater. His last transmission consisted only of “Wait,
who the hell are yo-“, before the recording abruptly stopped. Lawson's car was found soon after by Foundation
agents. Lawson was dead in the front seat, bruised
and bloody, with his eyes and heart ripped out in a ritualistic fashion. Just the way Mary Talish had been found all
the way back in 1952. It turns out that Mary hadn't been neutralized
after all. She'd just been waiting for a chance to get
revenge on the man who killed her family. And Mary didn't stop with Dr. Lawson. No longer does she appear, walking along the
road waiting for someone to offer her a ride before disappearing without incident. Now, should someone pass by without offering
a ride, she will appear in their backseat before re-enacting the method of her own death
upon the driver. And her physical appearance has changed too. Whereas before she looked like the image of
the pretty young woman before her tragedy, now recordings show that she appears with
the wounds of her death present, her eyes gouged out of their sockets and a massive
hole in her chest where her heart should be. The same wounds she inflicts on her victims. The SCP Foundation has tried closing off and
even destroying the road, but that has only resulted in Mary manifesting at other locations
in and around Muncie. Foundation documents reveal that any back
road in the city can potentially serve as host to a 1337 event, and all attempts to
contain the apparition have failed. The only way someone who has seen Mary can
avoid her wrath is by stopping to pick her up, at which point she will de-materialize
before reappearing on another road. Mobile Task Forces have been unsuccessful,
as Mary only appears to those driving alone, and all agents who have been sent on solo
missions to apprehend her have resulted in the death of the agent. SCP-1337 was reinstated, this time as Euclid
class. Currently, the foundation's method of managing
SCP-1337 is to dispatch a security team on the 19th of every month to monitor all of
the places where a potential sighting could take place. As soon as signs of a manifestation are identified,
a remotely controlled vehicle containing a single D-class is driven to the location. Once Mary appears in the car, the car is piloted
to the empty lot where her home used to stand, and the remains of the D-class are then disposed
of. Like a lot of stories that get passed down
as urban legends, the story of SCP-1337 has a lesson that can be taken away from it. This SCP started off as an ordinary local
haunting, no more deadly than Lydia, Suzanne, Resurrection Mary, or any of the countless
other local versions of the vanishing hitchhiker story. But, thanks to one rogue Foundation doctor
and his desire to rush to what he thought would be an efficient solution, the spirit
not only became harder to control but also much more violent and bloodthirsty than anyone
was prepared to deal with. So, if there's anything we can learn here,
it's that no matter if you're a student, an office worker, or a researcher with the SCP
Foundation, think twice about cutting corners. It might save you a little bit of time and
money in the short term, but in the long term, the results could be fatal. Now go check out “SCP - 087 - The Stairwell”
and “SCP-035 - The Possessive Mask” for more explanations of the creepiest SCP tales.
