The Blue Bell Hill Phantom Hitchhiker: Maurice Goodenough's Report to Rochester Police

Blue Bell Hill rises between Chatham and Maidstone in Kent, and the A229 climbs over it. On 19 November 1965, in rain, a Ford Cortina carrying four young women collided with an oncoming Jaguar on that road. It was the eve of a wedding. Patricia Ferguson, 22, died at the scene. The bride-to-be, Susan Browne, 22, was returning from her hen night and was due to marry Brian Wetton the next day. She died days later. Accounts disagree on when her bridesmaid, Judith Lingham, died.

A legend followed. The earliest printed reference appeared in the Kent Messenger on 8 December 1967. In 1968 the journalist Tom Harber wrote in the Maidstone Gazette of "a mysterious girl who was seen on a number of occasions hitching a lift outside the Lower Bell pub".

Saturday 13 July 1974. Maurice Goodenough, a 35-year-old bricklayer from Rochester, was driving up Blue Bell Hill in the early hours. His headlight picked out a girl. "The girl just walked out in front of me from the edge of the road," he said. "My car hit her with a hell of a bang."

She was about ten years old, with shoulder length brown hair. She wore a lacy white blouse, white ankle socks and a skirt. She had a cut to her forehead and grazes on her knees. Goodenough covered her with a blanket and carried her to the roadside. He tried to wave down passing cars. None stopped. So he drove to Rochester Police Station.

Officers drove back to the scene with him. They found the blanket. Nothing else. The search resumed at dawn with tracker dogs, which found no scent, no tracks and no blood. Police checked hospital admissions and appealed through the newspapers for the missing child. Nobody came forward. His car was undamaged.

That Saturday he spoke to the News of the World. "I'm not going mad. But where did she vanish? I'm still shaking."

Goodenough was not the last. Sean Tudor's research is credited with more than fifty recorded sightings, dating back to as early as the 1930s. In November 1992 Ian Sharpe, a coach driver from Maidstone, said a young woman appeared in front of him near the Aylesford turn-off. She stared right into his eyes. Then the body went under the bonnet. "I honestly thought I had killed her," he said. He too reported it at Rochester police station. Officers searched the scene with him and found nothing.

No hoax finding has been made against Goodenough. Brian Haughton places Blue Bell Hill within the worldwide motif of the returning ghost, and others call it a classic vanishing hitchhiker legend. Commentators note the gaps. Goodenough described a child, not a 22-year-old bride. Some claimed sightings predate the 1965 crash. Harber at first found no witnesses, and later would not name the dozen he said he had traced. Other identities have been proposed, among them Emily Maria Trigg, 20, killed near Chatham in 1916.

The case runs through Sean Tudor's The Ghosts of Blue Bell Hill and Other Road Ghosts and Neil Arnold's Haunted Maidstone. Sonya Roseman shot her film The Ghost of Blue Bell Hill at the Lower Bell. In October 2025 Time Out named Blue Bell Hill the most haunted place in the UK. The blanket was real. The girl was never found.