KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - It sounds like a sensationally bad idea, but so might smoking or base-jumping.
This particular sport, so far practised only by disciples of a certain strain of hip-hop music from the American West Coast, involves abandoning the wheel of your car and dancing on the roof while it is moving.
Known as "Ghost riding the whip", it is a fad that apparently is spreading fast across America as young men seek new thrills. Helping to fuel its popularity are scores of home-shot videos of car-roof escapades on the internet, notably on the YouTube website.
But police departments are looking on the new craze with a jaded eye. Two deaths from ghost-riding gone awry have been recorded in the past three months and officials say they are receiving reports of numerous other injuries inflicted both on the riders themselves and bystanders.
"It did not take Einstein to look at this thing and say this was a recipe for disaster," said Pete Smith, a police spokesman in Stockton, California, where ghost riding is said first to have taken hold. "We could see the potential for great injury or death."
Last month an 18-year-old man from Stockton, Davender Gulley, died while performing one of the stunts. He was hanging out of the window of his SUV when his head struck a parked car. In October, a 36-year-old man died in Canada after falling from the roof of his moving vehicle.
The stunt - so named because whip, in street slang, means car, while ghost refers to the absence of anyone in the driving seat - has its roots in a brand of hip-hop called "hyphe" first made popular by artists in cities around San Francisco Bay.
Typically groups of young men gather with their vehicles after dark in places like empty car-parks to indulge in the ritual. Increasingly they find themselves forced to arrange clandestine meets: Stockton police have impounded 400 vehicles driven by ghost riders and issued 1500 driving tickets.
- INDEPENDENT
