ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT [GHOST STORIES]
[RADIO APPEARANCES]
Actress Helen Gahagan (memorable as She in the 1935 movie version of the Haggard novel) called
Alexander Woollcott “the best ghost story teller in the world…he can make your hair stand on
end.” As radio’s Town Crier Woollcott re-channeled a number of his favorite yarns of vanishing
ladies, phantom hitchhikers and hideous premonitions into a kind of mass-media folklore.
[John Mason Brown, “Introduction,” The Portable Woollcott] “At CBS in New York City they
still show you with proper pride the sizable hand-bell which announced the Town Crier on the air.
This bell is all the introduction Alexander Woollcott needed or now needs. …Woollcott was a
storyteller who could himself ring the bell again and again.”
“ ‘He talks brilliantly, doesn’t he?’ said Mrs. [Otis] Skinner… ‘No wonder he writes so well, he’s
such a good listener.’
“He listened out of hunger not politeness. Once his curiosity was aroused, no fictional sleuth in
pursuing his quarry could be as undeviating as Woollcott in tracking down a story. He tapped
other minds to fill his own. What he had heard he did not forget. He had the memory of a
pachyderm, and a pianola’s loyalty to the same tunes.
“He seldom told one story at a time. His anecdotes came not singly but in dynasties. He
approached his main story through a labyrinth of lesser ones.
“In spite of its many attempts, the radio has produced no one who could touch Woollcott; no
one who had his sense of melodrama and suspense; no one who could bite the language with his