The Hitch-Hiker

The Columbia Network takes pleasure in bringing you... Suspense. Columbia's parade of outstanding thrillers produced and directed by William Spear and scored by Bernard Herman.

The notable melodramas from stage and screen, fiction and radio, presented each week to bring you to the edge of your chair. To keep you in... Pshhh! Suspense. This is Orson Welles. I am to be back in the United States and back on the Columbia Network.

Even for so short a visit is this one. Back with old friends like Johnny Deats, who was tonight's director and Bernard Herman. The Mercury Theater presented tonight's radio play for the first time last year. They came right out then and hailed it as a classic of the medium. Nobody argued the point. A lot

of people asked us to do it again so it's gratifying to get the chance now and to find a favorite of ours in this distinguished anthology of spook shows. Personally, I've never met anybody who didn't like a good ghost story. But I know a lot of people who think there are a lot of people who don't like a good ghost story. For the benefit of these, at least

I go on record at the outset of this evening's entertainment with a sober assurance that although blood may be curdled on this program, none will be spilled. There's no shooting, knifing, throttling, axing, or poisoning here. No clanking chains, no cobwebs, no bony and or hairy hands appearing from secret panels or better yet bedroom curtains. If

it's any part of that dear old phosphorescent foolishness that people who don't like ghost stories don't like then again I promise you we haven't got it. Not tonight. What we do have is a thriller. Half as good as we think it is you can call it a shocker. It's already been called a real Orson Well story. Now frankly I don't know what this means. I've been on