Mystery AtlasJan Harold Brunvand
American folklorist whose 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings established modern urban legend studies as a field, using the story as its title case.
This is a knowledge-graph entry: what our data records about Jan Harold Brunvand and how it connects to the rest of the atlas. It does not have a full article of its own yet.
Connected to
How this topic links to the people, places, and ideas around it — drawn from our knowledge graph.
People
Jan Harold Brunvand influenced Véronique Campion-Vincent — Brunvand's 1980s urban-legend framework shaped subsequent scholarly treatment of the organ-theft narrative Campion-Vincent studied from 1987 onward.
Documents & Sources
Jan Harold Brunvand authored The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings.
Creatures & Figures
Jan Harold Brunvand popularised Vanishing Hitchhiker.
Jan Harold Brunvand was used to analyse Organ Theft Legend.
Explored on these pages
Is the Organ Theft Urban Legend Based on Any Real Cases?
The 'wake up missing a kidney' organ theft legend has no confirmed case behind it, but real, differently structured organ trafficking does exist.
What Is the Vanishing Hitchhiker Legend?
What the vanishing hitchhiker legend is: its 1942 folklore study, the Resurrection Mary case, and why the same ghost story recurs worldwide.