IT'S NEARING sundown and a traveling salesman is driving along an old, two-lane highway south of here, looking for a cheap motel to stay the night. Approaching an intersection, he spies a young woman in a lavender gown standing to the side of the rode. He stops and asks her if she needs a ride.

The girl is very grateful and tells him she's been abandoned by her date for the senior prom and just wants to go home.

It's a chilly night, so the salesman lets her wear his sweater.

He drives her to the address she has given him, drops her off at the front door of the house, and heads back out onto the highway. A short while later, remembering his sweater, he returns to the house and rings the bell. The girl's mother answers and tearfully informs the driver that her daughter was killed in an automobile accident -- at the very place where he'd picked the apparition up -- exactly one year before, on the night of her senior prom.

He makes his way to the graveyard and finds her grave; his sweater is lying atop it, neatly folded.