The story concerns Ronald Adams, a man driving cross-country from Brooklyn to California. On the morning he leaves for his destination, in the rain, Adams sees a man on the Brooklyn Bridge. He seems to be waiting for a lift. Adams sees the man again an hour later, hitchhiking at the Pulaski Skyway. At several points along his journey, Adams repeatedly sees the same hitch-hiker, despite the fact that, logically, there is no possible way the mysterious man could always somehow get ahead of him. Adams is increasingly terrified by the unexplained appearances of the hitch-hiker. His narration conveys his determination to intentionally run the mysterious man down the next time he sees him. This ruins Adams's chance for companionship with another hitch-hiker, a girl who needs a lift to Amarillo. She lightly flirts with him but is soon spooked by his obsession with the mysterious man he sees at the side of the road. After Adams sees the hitch-hiker yet again, he almost crashes into a barbed-wire fence. The girl extricates herself from his car and flees, insisting that she was unable to see the man Adams fears. She is picked up by a passing truck, and Adams is alone on the Texas prairie. He wants desperately to sleep but then he hears the "hall-ooo" of the hitch-hiker and sees him approach. Adams drives on toward New Mexico. Finally, Adams feels he is going mad and reaches out for help. He finds a payphone at a gas station in the middle of the New Mexico desert. He calls his mother in Brooklyn, feeling that he can pull himself together if he can hear a familiar voice. The long-distance operator puts his call through, but Adams is confused when a woman he doesn't know answers the telephone. She states that Mrs. Adams is in the hospital due to a nervous breakdown, brought on by the death of her oldest son, Ronald, six days before. Adams learns that he has died in a car accident on the Brooklyn Bridge, where he first spotted the hitch-hiker. Adams realizes he was not a malevolent figure, but rather a friendly angel of death sent to guide Adams to the other side. As the radio play ends, Adams expresses both his determination to find the hitch-hiker again and his concern that he has been unable to do so, ever since his call home.
Background
Immediately after their marriage in October 1939, Lucille Fletcher and Bernard Herrmann left New York for Hollywood, where Herrmann was to begin work on the score of Orson Welles's first feature film, Citizen Kane. They traveled cross-country several times by air and by train; but their most memorable trip was made in 1940, with Herrmann driving their Packard convertible. Fletcher saw "an odd-looking man, first on the Brooklyn Bridge and then on the Pulaski Skyway. We never saw him again. However, I didn't quite know what to do with the idea until a year later, when … I conceived the idea of doing it as a ghost story." "The Hitch-Hiker was written for Orson Welles in the days when he was one of the master producers and actors in radio," Fletcher wrote in her preface to the published version of the radio play, which adapts it for the stage. "It was designed to provide a vehicle not only for his famous voice but for the original techniques of sound which became associated with his radio presentations. … Orson Welles and his group of Mercury Players made of this script a haunting study of the supernatural, which can still raise hackles along my own spine." The music for The Hitch-Hiker — called "one of Herrmann's most chilling scores" by biographer Steven C. Smith — was used in all four radio presentations. It was also re-recorded as stock music that can be heard on the soundtracks of several CBS television series, including the 1960 Twilight Zone adaptation of The Hitch-Hiker. Herrmann's score is in the UCLA Music Library Special Collections. "We really shared that story together," Fletcher said in a 1988 interview about Bernard Herrmann. "He was very interested in that story so he had to write the music for it."
Presentations
The Hitch-Hiker was first performed by Orson Welles on the November 17, 1941, broadcast of The Orson Welles Show on CBS Radio. Welles also performed the radio play on Suspense, The Philip Morris Playhouse, and The Mercury Summer Theatre of the Air.
Adaptations
adapted The Hitch-Hiker for the first season of his television anthology seriesThe Twilight Zone. Broadcast January 22, 1960, Serling's version makes notable changes to the story, most notably changing the gender of the driver to a female named Nan Adams, portrayed by Inger Stevens. When the teleplay was adapted for radio on The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas in 2002, the role of Nan Adams was played by Kate Jackson. In 2004, Mind City Productions adapted the Mercury Theater version of the radio play into an animated short film, adding animation directed by Michael Anthony Jackson to the original recording of the Mercury radio production. This was intended to be the first in a series of animated adaptations of Mercury radio productions, although to date, this remains the only entry in the series. In 2011, a short film adaptation of "Hitchhiker" was produced and directed by Lawrence Anthony.
