The Hitchhiker

“The Hitchhiker” is a radio thriller, written to be performed by voice actors and accompanied by atmospheric music and sound effects. It is an unusual take on a ghost story. In traditional ghost narratives, a living protagonist is haunted by the (often malevolent) spirit of a deceased individual. In some stories, the ghost truly exists; In others, it is a figment of the tormented protagonist’s imagination. Fletcher plays with these ideas, introducing a questionably credible protagonist who is haunted by a ghostly figure and then revealing late in the play that he has been dead since the third page. “The Hitchhiker” draws its horror from several elemental human fears: death, isolation, and madness. Fletcher ultimately suggests that death, while terrifying, must be accepted as the natural and inescapable ending to life.

Fletcher creates a tense and suspenseful atmosphere using foreshadowing, repetition, and dialogue delivered by an increasingly fearful protagonist. Sound effects and musical additions enhance the horror of the story: The play opens with a burst of “weird and shuddery” music as Adams introduces himself (94), asserting frantically that he is sane. Fletcher establishes Adams as an everyman by having him list off his own character details—he is a 36-year-old Brooklyn-born single man who drives an American car, someone who would likely have been relatable or sympathetic to much of the listening audience at the play’s 1941 premiere. Yet Adams’s agitated claim of sanity serves the opposite effect, planting doubts about his state of mind. Adams’s fear that “at any moment [his] link with life may break” tells the listener that he is in a transitional state (94). By leaving the nature of his predicament murky, Fletcher creates a sense of suspense that hangs over the rest of the story.

The narrative then jumps back in time by six days, to a point where Adams’s life appears perfectly normal. He has a close relationship with his mother and a laissez-faire attitude toward his upcoming road trip. As he prepares to leave Brooklyn for Hollywood, he anticipates “decent, civilized roads, with a hotdog or a hamburger stand every ten miles” (94). Adams, an ordinary, white, presumably middle-class man, has no reason to suspect violence or danger in his path. Although listeners have been warned that trouble will soon befall him, his lack of worry establishes a tentative feeling of safety. Adams’s mother, however, is worried; her warning against picking up strangers foreshadows her son’s future encounters with the mysterious hitchhiker.

Adams’s first impression of the hitchhiker is innocuous. Although hitchhiking—the practice of soliciting a ride in another person’s vehicle—has fallen out of favor due to safety concerns and a decline in carless households, it was common in the 1940s when Fletcher wrote “The Hitchhiker.” With fewer Americans owning cars and a greater feeling of public safety, it was normal for people to request rides from strangers. For the audience listening to “The Hitchhiker,” there would be nothing alarming about Fletcher’s initial description of a rumpled businessman with an outstretched thumb. Adams himself barely takes note of the encounter except that he has to swerve to avoid hitting the man.

It’s only when the hitchhiker begins to appear again and again along Adams’s route that his character takes on a menacing quality. Fletcher uses repetition to twist familiar, comfortable situations into unsettling mirrors of themselves, which reflect Adams’s growing paranoia. The perpetual raindrops on the hitchhiker’s shoulders, the cap that obscures his face, and his inexplicable ability to beat Adams to every destination hint at a supernatural nature. Fletcher leaves purposeful gaps in his characterization. Because his motives for following Adams are inscrutable, Adams’s growing suspicion that the hitchhiker intends him harm feels reasonable, even though the man has never been violent toward him.

As Adams repeatedly spots the hitchhiker in seemingly impossible locations, his changing mindset is palpable on the page. He uses negative descriptors like “lifeless” and “empty” to characterize the towns and roads that he once considered “decent” and safe places. Stage directions indicate his demeanor becoming panicked, and quickening swells of music accompany each new appearance of the mysterious man. These cues draw the audience into Adams’s deteriorating mental state while creating an atmosphere of high anxiety.

After almost being hit by a train while chasing the hitchhiker across its tracks, Adams concludes that the man is trying to lure him to his death, and Adams resolves to kill him first. The hitchhiker has done nothing to indicate he wants to harm Adams, but his repeated reappearances are so far out of the ordinary that Adams suspects him of evil motivations. Adams’s reliability as a narrator becomes questionable as his obsession grows. No one else can see the hitchhiker, a discrepancy that is highlighted when he picks up the woman in Oklahoma. Although initially charmed by him, she soon flees his car, fearing that he will kill her. This moment suggests that Adams has lost his grip on reality. However, as the story is told solely from Adams’s perspective, it’s impossible to distinguish objective reality from his subjective experiences. The questions of whether Adams’s encounters with the hitchhiker have driven him to madness and whether the hitchhiker even exists remain unanswered because Adams’s version of reality is the only one that listeners are privy to.

Whether or not he is a product of Adams’s slipping sanity, the truth of the hitchhiker’s otherworldly nature seems to be coming to light during the play’s final pages. Adams notes the man flying over riverbeds and speaking in a spectral voice, and these details feed the suspicion that the hitchhiker is a phantom. By encouraging this idea, Fletcher cleverly sets up a red herring that conceals the story’s final twist.

The play’s suspense comes to a head when Adams attempts to call his mother and is informed that Ronald Adams died six days earlier in a car accident. All of Adams’s strange experiences with the hitchhiker are contextualized by this revelation. The hitchhiker is the personification of Death, first appearing at the moment Adams swerves his car on the Brooklyn Bridge, ironically causing the accident that kills him. Because Adams doesn’t know he is dead, Death is following him in the form of the strange traveler trying to collect a ride. The hitchhiker has been able to beat Adams to every destination because he isn’t human. Adams’s great fear that the hitchhiker wants to kill him is a misplaced projection—his death is in the past, and the hitchhiker’s true goal is to collect Adams from the world of the living. His frantic attempts to outrun the hitchhiker are almost humorously pointless. His only remaining choices are to continue fleeing indefinitely or to willingly follow the hitchhiker into the unknown. The ending of “The Hitchhiker” gently suggests that the wisest choice would be to surrender, as it would finally end Adams’s horror trip.

After priming audiences to suspect the hitchhiker of being a ghost, Fletcher upends listeners’ expectations by revealing that the real ghost is her protagonist, Adams. Adams has just unwittingly delivered a ghost story from the perspective of the phantom. The play ends where it began, with Adams in a trailer park in Gallup, but now the cryptic statements he made in his opening lines are contextualized. He is in a transitional state between life and death and knows that sooner or later, his weak grasp on the world of the living will fail. Fletcher concludes the play before Adams takes any further action. By ending “The Hitchhiker” on a cliffhanger, she leaves the listener to ponder lingering questions about sanity, the nature of reality, and the futility of trying to cheat death.