Nan takes the backroads to avoid this strange man, but when her car runs out of gas in the middle of the night she pulls up to a rest stop where thankfully a sailor (played Adam Williams) offers her help. At another, her car is suck at a railroad crossing while At one point, he slinks up behind her parked car and asks, “heading west?” but Nan simply shrieks and speeds away. Leonard Strong wonderfully captures this haunting yet simple character who stalks and stares at his victim, knowing she cannot escape his lure. With his thumb outstretched, his face delivers an unsettling, blank expression as she passes him along highways, diners, and beside gas stations and in open fields. She continues along the road, but no matter how far she goes, or how fast she drives, she keeps seeing this same strange hitch-hiker standing along the side of the road. He is a shabby, scarecrow of a man but his presence terrifies Nan. Suddenly, she begins seeing a hitch-hiker who seems to stare directly at her. When the bill comes to $29.70, Nan is thankful that it’s cheaper than a funeral. After her tire blows out on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania she receives roadside assistance from a mechanic who chuckles that she must be “on the side of the angels” and that she probably should have called for a “hearse” instead. Nan Adams (played by Swedish-American actress Inger Stevens) is a 27-year old woman, a buyer at a New York department store, presently on a road trip from New York to California. Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania, perhaps to be filed away under ‘accidents you walk away from.’ But from this moment on, Nan Adam’s companion on a trip to California will be terror her route: fear her destination: quite unknown.” Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store, at present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California, from Manhattan…. Rod Serling had initially heard Fletcher’s original story on the radio as a child and he never forgot it. Fletcher and her first husband, the famous composer Bernard Herrmann (creator of the initial Twilight Zone theme as well as numerous other classics) believed they had spotted an odd hitch-hiker on the Brooklyn Bridge and then again later on the Pulaski Skyway. The story was inspired by a cross-country road trip in 1939 with Ms. It first premiered on the radio in 1941 featuring the voice of Orson Welles. A disturbing traveler’s tale and a dark modern ghost story, “The Hitch-Hiker” was adapted from a radio play written by Lucille Fletcher.
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