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Pennsylvania Turnpike - Dark Fantasy | 03/20/1942 (Ep18)

·25 min·1 clip

A driver learns that past, present, and future can become one when revenge outlasts 180 years.

1. Dark Fantasy presents "Pennsylvania Turnpike," a 1942 audio drama set between the modern turnpike and the vanished town of Pine Knob. 2. Scott Bishop created the original tale, while Morris, Fred Wayne, and Muir Height receive the closing cast credits for Ken Miner, Hank, and the filling-station attendant. 3. The central hook is a hitchhiker whose search for Pine Knob leads into a world where "past," "present," and "future" overlap. 4. The stranger pays Joe Davis for coffee with a gold coin bearing an English king's head and a date around 1700. 5. He rejects a sandwich as unfamiliar, smokes King's Choice tobacco discontinued "about a hundred years or so back," and claims to be 220 years old by the dialogue's arithmetic. 6. Ken Miner asks about Pine Knob near Pittsburgh, but a local driver says he has lived in the area for 40 years without hearing of the town. 7. A road with wagon tracks and stagecoach marks replaces the turnpike, taking Miner toward a town named for a mound with three pine trees. 8. The guide says men were hanged beneath those trees and describes a revenge that has lasted "nine score years." 9. The stagecoach carries gold toward Kelby, while two men appear as uncanny counterparts to Miner and the guide. 10. Listeners drawn to vintage supernatural audio dramas and time-bending revenge narratives may prefer this episode.

As heard by us

A roadside coffee stop points a tired hitchhiker toward a road that should not exist.

A tired hitchhiker pauses on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for coffee, pays with a gold coin, and asks how to reach Pine Knob. What begins as a plain roadside exchange tilts into darker territory when an old man offers directions, then gestures toward a road that was not there a…

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Why you'd press play

You get coffee, a gold coin, and a road to Pine Knob that has never seen a car.

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