Radio: New Live Ghost

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The girl watching the dancers was beautiful but pale. Two young men introduced themselves, danced with her. found her hands cold and clammy. They gave her wine, but she spilled it on her white frock. After the dance they started to drive her to an address she gave. At a cemetery she asked to be let out of the car. One of the boys threw his coat over her shoulders, followed her into the graveyard. She vanished, he fell dead. Panic-stricken, the other-boy drove to the address she had given, there learned that the girl had died several months before. On the dead girl's grave, they found the dead boy's coat. When they exhumed her, they found a wine stain on her white burial dress.

Manhattan Radio Station WMCA by last week had received over 100 excited, fearful, incredulous letters and countless telephone calls asking for more details of this spectral dancer, whose mysterious resurrection they all said had been dramatized grippingly on WMCA's true-story Five Star Final program. To WMCA and Five Star Final, the flood of letters was more a mystery than the spook tale. The station had never broadcast the story.

Old stuff to newspapers as well as to students of mass psychology, the phenomenon of erroneously attributed wildfire tales like last week's is fairly new stuff to radio. Re-examination of WMCA's letters revealed that no correspondent claimed to have heard the broadcast himself. Likeliest solution to the mystery lurked, not on the air waves, but in the files of the Amsterdam News in Harlem, whence thousands of Negroes go daily to gossipy jobs all over the metropolitan area. Not long ago the Amsterdam News reported a similar wraith operating in the neighborhood of Kansas City.