Phantom 309 (song)

Phantom 309 is a country song, done in spoken word recitation, by Red Sovine. Though it would only climb to #9 on the country charts, the song (along with "Teddy Bear") would become one of Sovine's two most well-known hits.

The song plays on an urban legend known as "the vanishing hitchhiker" (the legend tells of a driver picking up a hitchhiker, then after dropping him/her off tells of what happened, only to learn that s/he was not the first person to see the hitchhiker, and what s/he saw was an apparition of a person who had met a tragic fate, often at the location where the encounter first took place).

While returning from the West Coast, on the third day of the trip, a hitchhiker is picked up at an intersection (during a rainstorm) by "Big Joe", a truck driver who owns his own tractor-trailer which he has named "Phantom 309". He drives the hitchhiker to a truck stop and gives him a dime for a cup of coffee.

When the hitchhiker tells the patrons what happened, the waiter tells him that he was the beneficiary of a "ghost driver" (in this case, the hitchhiker tells the story, while the driver was the apparition, a reversal of how the legend is often told). At that same intersection where he was picked up, ten years earlier, Big Joe swerved to avoid hitting a school bus full of children, sacrificing his own life in the process. The waiter returns his dime and gives the hitchhiker a second cup of coffee "on the house".