Legend: A menacing dream prevents a woman from being killed in a crash.
Example: [de Vos, 1996]
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A young woman on her way to town broke her journey by staying with friends at an old manor house. Her bedroom looked out to the carriage sweep at the front door. It was a moonlit night, and she found it difficult to sleep. As the clock outside her bedroom door struck 12, she heard the noise of horses' hooves on the gravel outside, and the sound of wheels.
She got up and went over to the window to see who could be arriving at that time of night. The moonlight was very bright, and she saw a hearse drive up to the door. It hadn't a coffin in it; instead it was crowded with people. The coachman sat high up on the box: as he came opposite the window he drew up and turned his head. His face terrified her, and he said in a distinct voice, "There's room for one more."
She drew the curtain, ran back to bed, and covered her head with the bedclothes. In the morning she was not quite sure whether it had been a dream, or whether she had really got out of bed and seen the hearse, but she was glad to go up to town and leave the old house behind her.
She was shopping in a big store which had an elevator in it — an up-to-date thing at that time. She was on the top floor, and went to the elevator to go down. It was rather crowded, but as she came up to it, the elevator operator turned his head and said, "There's room for one more."
It was the face of the coachman of the hearse. "No, thank you," said the girl. "I'll walk down." She turned away, the elevator doors clanged, there was a terrible rush and screaming and shouting, and then a great clatter and thud. The elevator had fallen and every soul in it was killed.
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Origins: The "coachman's warning" legend has been kicking around since 1906, when it was told in
Pall Mall Magazine as the
E.F. Benson short story
The Bus-Conductor. In that long ago version, a man has the presaging encounter that saves his life through a disturbing late-night exchange with the driver of a hearse that pulls up to the home where he is staying as a houseguest. The hearse driver (who is puzzlingly dressed as a bus conductor) locks eyes with the man, gestures at his empty conveyance, and announces "Just room for one inside, sir." A month later that same unsettling man attempts to gesture the former houseguest into a bus he'd been planning to take, once again with "Just room for one inside, sir." The terrified man backs away then runs off. Moments later, the bus is struck from the side by a car traveling too fast, the automobile "burrowing into it as a gimlet burrows into a board, making matchwood and — other things of it."
More modern tellings present the narrowly-avoided fatal accident as the falling of an elevator car and the person so warned (and thus saved) as a woman. A well-known version of the yarn surfaces in Bennett Cerf's 1944
Famous Ghost Stories.
No matter the mode whereby others perish or the sex of the person spared, the eerie coachman remains a constant element of the tale. Sometimes the forewarned recognizes the vehicle the midnight coachman shows up in as a hearse, but sometimes sees only an unremarkable coach and is left puzzled by why the driver's appearance and invitation are so unsettling.
On 10 February 1961, the television series
The Twilight Zone aired "Twenty-Two," an episode inspired by this legend. A dancer is hospitalized due to fatigue. She endures recurring visions of following a nurse to
Room 22, which turns out to be the hospital's morgue. When they get there, the nurse always says, "Room for one more, honey."
Everyone dismisses her visions as nothing more than bad dreams brought about by her condition. Upon discharge from the hospital, she's about to board
Flight 22 to Miami when the flight attendant on duty at the door to the plane — a dead ringer for the nurse in her visions — greets her with "Room for one more, honey." The overwrought dancer runs screaming back into the airport lounge, as if madness has finally overtaken her. Meanwhile, the plane explodes just after takeoff.
Barbara "the coachman always wrings twice" Mikkelson
Sightings: Look for this legend in the 1945 film
Dead of Night: A man has the coachman dream while in the hospital. Upon discharge he refuses to board a bus the coachman-conductor is beckoning him into, and seconds later the bus collides with a truck and plunges over a parapet and onto a railway line.
Last updated: 10 October 2008
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Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2009 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson.
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Sources:
- Benson, E.F. "The Bus-Conductor."
- Pall Mall Magazine. July-December 1906 (pp. 721-726).
- Briggs, Katherine & Ruth Tongue. Folktales of England.
- London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. (pp. 67-68).
- Brunvand, Jan Harold. Too Good To Be True.
- New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. ISBN 0-393-04734-2 (pp. 229-231).
- de Vos, Gail. Tales, Rumors and Gossip.
- Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 1996. ISBN 1-56308-190-3 (pp. 317-318).
Also told in:
- Schwartz, Alvin. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
- New York: HarperCollins, 1981. ISBN 0-397-31927-4 (pp. 47-48).
