The Girl of the Curve

The Girl of the Curve is the most widespread roadside urban legend in Spain. Its classic setting lies on the western edge of Madrid, on the bend of the road linking Majadahonda with Pozuelo de Alarcón, where the accounts place her from the early nineteen-seventies. The story told there is always the same: a driver travelling at night picks up a young woman hitchhiking, she sits in the back seat and, after a while, warns him to take care with the next bend because it is very dangerous. When the driver asks how she knows, the girl answers that she died precisely there, and when he looks in the mirror the seat is empty. The tale spread by word of mouth among drivers and over the lorry drivers' radios, and by the nineteen-eighties it was already being told of other bends and other Spanish roads, each district with its own. It is not an exclusively Spanish story: it belongs to the international cycle of the vanishing hitchhiker, whose best-known North American version is Resurrection Mary.

The apparition is described consistently: a young woman, dressed in white or in light colours, with long dark hair partly covering her face, standing on the verge of a sharp bend or in the road itself, forcing the driver to brake. She gets in without a word, sits in the back and says nothing until she gives the warning. Testimonies add a sudden cold inside the car and, in some versions, the smell of flowers. Her disappearance is not violent: the driver notices that the seat is empty without having heard the door open. Two branches, often confused, should be distinguished. In the majority branch, which is also the older one, the girl warns and her role is protective: whoever heeds the warning is saved, and whoever ignores it crashes at the announced bend. In a later, minority branch, the apparition itself causes the accident, and she is then credited with a sinister laugh or a bleeding head wound alluding to her own death. The version recorded by the first investigators is the warning, not the punishment.

The Girl of the Curve is today one of the most recognisable frightening tales in Spain, to the point that her name works as a formula for any roadside apparition. Mystery programmes have covered her repeatedly, among them Cuarto Milenio, and in 2011 Carlos Gallego Guzmán shot a short film bearing her title. Outside fiction, the legend has always been read as a warning: it was born with the motorisation of Spain and with rising casualty figures on secondary roads, and its moral, mind the bend, matches point by point the message repeated by the road-safety campaigns of those years. That reading explains why the warning variant has survived better than the punishing one, and why the story is always located on a stretch that local people already consider dangerous. The girl does not come back to take revenge on anyone: she comes back to tell the driver what nobody told her.

The episode that documented the legend was not an event but a television programme. In 1976 Spanish Television broadcast, within the series «Más Allá», directed by the psychiatrist Fernando Jiménez del Oso, an instalment entitled «La chica fantasma» devoted entirely to the Majadahonda case, with contributions from Antonio Biosca, Jesús Soria and the parapsychologist Germán de Argumosa. That broadcast did two things at once: it gathered the testimonies circulating in the district and spread them across the whole country, so that a local legend became common property. It is the reference that allows the tale to be dated and its origin placed in the nineteen-seventies and no earlier, and for that reason it is worth more than any later compilation. For the study of contemporary folklore the case is also exemplary, because it shows how a mass medium does not merely transmit a legend: it fixes its canonical version, and in doing so multiplies its settings across the map.