“The Runaway Grandmother” is a popular stolen corpse legend loosely in the vein of “The Dead Cat in the Package,” which likely evolved from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European stories dealing with the accidental theft of a cadaver. The plot of the legend sees a family take an elderly grandmother (on rare occasions a grandfather or another older family member) along on a long-distance trip, usually a vacation, only to have her pass away during a secluded leg of the drive. Hoping not to alarm the children who are sitting next to their granny, the parents decide to wrap the corpse in a blanket (or any fabric that can be converted into a shroud) and strap it to the roof of the car with the hopes of appropriately disposing of the body in the nearest town. Along the way, however, the family decides to rest and they leave the car. When they return, the car and the grandmother are gone—stolen. In most versions, the body is never recovered. References to “The Runaway Grandmother” can be found in a variety of popular culture, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and, perhaps most notably, National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983).
“The Runaway Grandmother” is believed to have taken its modern form around the start of World War II and to have quickly spread to the United States, where it has taken on a life of its own. Accordingly, the legend has distinct European and American variations. In most European versions, the focus is on the difficulty of crossing borders where the fear of passing through customs is more pervasive. In the United States, the focus of the story is on getting rid of the body (and often on inheriting the wealth of the deceased). In most American tellings, the family is traveling in Mexico when the grandmother dies, but some place the family in Canada. In versions where the family is traveling in Canada, the corpse is usually placed in a canoe atop the car. Either way, seclusion and isolation are important components of the story as the death most often occurs in a desert. Adding this detail helps explain the placement of the grandmother on the roof of the car. The most common stopping locations for the family include a restaurant, a gas station, and a rest stop. The theft of the car is nearly universal (on rare occasions only the grandmother is stolen). Sometimes the stripped car is recovered, but the grandmother still remains missing. The conclusion of many American adaptations mentions something about the inability of the family to collect the inheritance due to the missing body.
As “The Runaway Grandmother” is very popular among urban legends, various interpretations of the plot have been forwarded. Linda Dégh, in one of the earliest scholarly treatments of the legend, linked the message of the story to “the fear of the return of the dead” and noted that details in the story are a “product of modern life” (Dégh 1968). Along these lines, it is because of modern society’s uneasiness with dead bodies that the corpse must be placed out of sight and out of mind, in this case on the roof of the car. Concern for the children is commonly offered as the rationale for this action. Others have taken a broader interpretative perspective, suggesting that the story dovetails into larger fears of crises unfolding in unfamiliar locales. Here, the remote location at the time of death looms large. Due to the need to cross borders, this detail is more prominent in European variations.
Several peculiarities found in American accounts warrant special consideration. Most notably, dear old Granny is not portrayed as a loved and cherished family member; rather, she is a burden, and her passing is met with crass indifference. With the grandmother tagging along, the family car is described as crowded and uncomfortable. Her presence is sullying the pleasure of her younger kin. The late Alan Dundes saw this as a commentary on an increasingly youth-driven culture where the elderly are pushed to the periphery (Dundes 1971). Similarly, the decision to latch the grandmother to the roof is made rather quickly and without much (if any) protest from other family members. When Granny is placed on the roof, the car suddenly becomes more spacious and comfortable for its occupants—Granny has finally gotten out of the way. Dundes likens this aspect of the plot to wish fulfillment. With Granny no longer in the picture, things are back to normal, at least in terms of contemporary life for nuclear families. Mourning is not at all a part of the story.
After the grandmother’s death, American versions, in contrast to those told in Europe, take a macabre twist. The desire for the elder family member to pass on is granted, but now the concern is what to do with the resulting cadaver. As Jan Harold Brunvand points out, the emphasis shifts to the inconvenience and distress of disposing of a corpse (Brunvand 1981). In other words, as she was in life, the grandmother continues to be a burden in death. Additionally, the presence of a recently deceased body in the car serves as an unpleasant reminder of human mortality that is impossible to ignore. In an ironic twist, the problem of disposal is inadvertently solved by a third party—a car thief. Dundes views this portion of the tale as a “perfect reflection of American attitudes toward burials” insofar as Americans routinely call upon third parties to remove and process dead bodies (Dundes 1971, 35). Dundes argues that there is guilt in the calling upon such professionals and the fact that, through no fault and control of their own, a thief is now in control of the body allows the family to separate from Grandma “with a minimum of guilt.” This solution, however, creates another problem at the end of the tale—how will the family collect their due payoff from the death? According to one telling collected by Linda Dégh, “Well, it wasn’t very funny even though it sounds like it because they have to wait seven years now to prove that Grandma is dead before they can collect any insurance” (Dundes 1971, 35).
Thus, the final peculiarity of American renditions is that the primary concern for locating the body is to collect money. This contrasts with European versions where the major worry is to give the matriarch “a decent burial.” In the United States, nothing is mentioned of finding the body for reasons related to emotional closure or performing appropriate funerary rites. This portion of the story exposes our often cold and distant relationships with elder family members. The focal point of elder relations is too often built on the prospects of inheriting wealth, a fact coyly brought to light in the legend. In this sense Grandma is given some poetic justice in the story on account of her cold-hearted relatives being unable to profit from her demise.
Jan Harold Brunvand aptly sums up the breadth of the tale: “‘The Runaway Grandmother’ is a fully-developed modern legend widely circulated today in many different versions across the United States” (Brunvand 1981, 120). The story, which is still commonly believed to have actually happened somewhere to someone, was even passed on as a legitimate Associated Press news item as recently as 1999. The Runaway Grandmother is not unique to the United States and Europe but is found virtually everywhere around the world. The story’s resiliency and global spread speaks to its ability to capture darker, less talked about elements of family life.
Todd K. Platts
See also European Sources; Kidney Heist, The; Relative’s Cadaver, The; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dégh, Linda. 1968. “The Runaway Grandmother.” Indiana Folklore 1: 68–77.
Dundes, Alan. 1971. “On the Psychology of Legend.” In American Folk Legend: A Symposium, edited by Wayland D. Hand, 21–36. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kvideland, Reimund, and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds. 1988. Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.