The Mysterious Traveler was a suspenseful anthology series. Every week featured a completely different story, running the gamut from straight crime and murder mysteries to supernatural horror and science fiction. The stories were bound together by the show's brilliant framing device: the titular \"Mysterious Traveler,\" an enigmatic, faintly sinister man riding a passenger train. Every episode opened with the lonely, screeching whistle of an approaching locomotive and the rhythmic sound of wheels on the tracks. The Traveler would then introduce himself, inviting the listener to sit beside him and join him on \"another journey into the strange and terrifying.\"
The series debuted on the Mutual Broadcasting System on December 5, 1943, and enjoyed a massive, nearly decade-long run before ending on September 16, 1952. The show was the magnum opus of Robert Arthur Jr. and David Kogan, two writers who met in a Columbia University radio writing class. They wrote, directed, and produced the vast majority of the series themselves.
The Traveler was voiced by Maurice Tarplin, whose smooth, echoing, and menacingly calm delivery became one of the most recognizable voices in radio. Because the characters changed every week, the show utilized a rotating \"stock company\" of elite New York radio actors to bring the stories to life, including prominent names like Agnes Moorehead, Jackson Beck, and Santos Ortega.
The show was highly respected by its peers. It was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Award for \"Best Radio Drama\" in 1949 and 1951, before finally taking home the win in 1953 (awarded shortly after the program had ended). Despite its incredible popularity and an impressive output of approximately 370 episodes, fewer than 80 broadcasts are known to survive today. The vast majority of the series' audio is considered permanently lost to time.
The Mysterious Traveler proved so popular that it branched into print. It spawned a digest-sized pulp magazine in 1951 and a comic book series published by Charlton Comics from 1956 to 1959. The comic is notable for featuring early illustration work by a young Steve Ditko, who would go on to co-create Spider-Man for Marvel. Arthur and Kogan essentially duplicated their own success by launching a sister program called The Strange Dr. Weird. To save time and resources, they took old Mysterious Traveler scripts, condensed them into 15-minute episodes, and hired the exact same host (Maurice Tarplin) to narrate them under a different name. Co-creator Robert Arthur Jr. would later transition to television, working as a writer and story editor for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. However, his most lasting cultural impact came in 1964 when he created the massively successful The Three Investigators young adult mystery book series.
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