The Hitchhiker

“The Hitchhiker” is a short radio play by acclaimed screenwriter Lucille Fletcher, first presented in 1941 on the Orson Welles Show. Welles and his Mercury Theater performed the suspenseful story of Ronald Adams, a man who is haunted by a mysterious hitchhiker during a cross-country road trip. Fletcher’s unconventional take on a ghost story subverts familiar tropes as it explores the nature of humans’ relationship to death. The play proved so popular that Welles performed it four times in total. In 1960, it was adapted into an episode of the iconic horror anthology television series The Twilight Zone.

After a brief introduction from Welles, “The Hitchhiker” begins in a trailer camp in Gallup, New Mexico, where narrator Ronald Adams describes the strange events of the past week. Adams asserts that he is sane, but “something else—something utterly beyond [his] control” has gone mad. He is in distress because at any moment “the link with [his] life may break” (2).

In a scene set six days earlier, Adams departs Brooklyn, New York on a rainy morning, beginning an eight-day road trip to Hollywood. His mother, Mrs. Adams, wishes him a tearful goodbye and warns him not to pick up strangers. Adams reassures her that everything will be fine.

As he drives across the Brooklyn Bridge, Adams spots a thin man with a cap pulled down over his eyes. The man has fresh rain spatter on his clothes and appears to be soliciting a ride. He steps onto the road so that Adams has to swerve to avoid hitting him. Adams thinks nothing of the incident until the hitchhiker appears again an hour later on the Pulaski skyway. Adams is baffled at how the man could have beaten him to New Jersey on foot, but he reasons that he may have been picked up and then dropped off by a faster vehicle.

Later that same night, Adams is driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when he sees the hitchhiker again, still with fresh rain on his clothing. This time, the man calls out a hello to Adams in a ghostly voice. Unnerved, Adams drives rapidly to the nearest gas station, where a station attendant tells him that it hasn’t rained all week. Adams asks about hitchhikers, and the attendant replies that he’s never seen one, asserting that “a guy’d be a fool” to hitch a ride in this area (3).

The next day, Adams resumes his drive after a good night’s sleep. He begins to dismiss the hitchhiker saga as sheer coincidence until, stopping at a detour in Zanesville, Ohio, he spots the man by the side of the road. He notes that there is nothing menacing about the hitchhiker’s outward appearance—indeed, he is “drab as a mud fence” and looks worn out (4), as if he’s been waiting around for hours. The hitchhiker approaches Adams, asking if he’s going to California. Spooked, Adams replies that he is headed to New York and quickly gets back onto the road, feeling “unspeakably alone” (4). The thought of picking up the hitchhiker is intolerable, but he soon finds himself subconsciously looking for the man, anticipating their next meeting.

Driving through the night, Adams spots the hitchhiker loitering by the side of a roadside store. He wakes up the store’s owner and attempts to warn him of the menacing presence, but the shopkeeper can’t see the hitchhiker and angrily dismisses Adams.

The next day, Adams drives through Oklahoma. Stopping at a set of tracks to let a train pass, he sees the hitchhiker across the tracks. Despite the day’s dry heat, the man’s clothes are wet with fresh rain. Furious, Adams decides to run him over. His car stalls halfway across the tracks. As the train bears down on him, Adams realizes the hitchhiker’s goal: to lure Adams to his death. He manages to back the car off the tracks and when the train passes, the hitchhiker is gone.

Panicked and unwilling to be alone “for one [more] moment” (6), Adams picks up a woman in Oklahoma with the intent of taking her to Texas. He asks her whether she thinks a lucky hitchhiker could theoretically beat a car from town to town, but she bemusedly dismisses him. Their conversation is interrupted when Adams spots the hitchhiker again near a barbed-wire fence. Adams abruptly veers the car toward the fence, frightening his passenger, who denies seeing the “thin gray” man anywhere (7). She advises him to get some sleep, but when Adams confesses that he intended to run the man over, she panics and runs from his car “as if [he] were some kind of monster” (8).

Adams is alone on the open road through Texas. He resolves to find a safe place to sleep and gather himself, but before he can do so, he spots the hitchhiker emerging from a herd of steer. The man again calls out to Adams an ethereal voice. In hindsight, Adams wishes he had stopped to talk to him then, because after this encounter the hitchhiker is everywhere, materializing every time Adams stops. As Adams drives with increasing hysteria through New Mexico, the hitchhiker appears again and again along the road, his “shadowless” form “flitting…over the cold, lifeless ground” (8).

The next morning, Adams stops at a nearly deserted trailer park in Gallup, the location from which he delivered his opening monologue. He accesses a payphone and calls his mother’s house, but instead of Mrs. Adams, a woman named Mrs. Whitney answers the phone. Mrs. Whitney explains that Mrs. Adams is in the hospital recovering from a nervous breakdown triggered by the death of her oldest son, Ronald Adams, in a car accident on the Brooklyn bridge six days prior. Shocked, Adams lets the call drop as the operator repeats “your three minutes are up, sir…” (9).

Adams resumes his narration from the trailer park. It’s a “vast, soulless night” (9) and he knows that somewhere in that empty landscape, the hitchhiker is waiting for him. In a “strange voice” (9), Adams admits that soon “I will know who he is—and who I am” (9).