The Story of Twilight Zone’s Real-Life Ax Murderer

No matter how disorienting or even frightening a Twilight Zone episode is, we can always comfort ourselves with a simple thought: It’s not real. The stories are all made up.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t encounter some real-life horror stories via the fifth dimension. Take the homicidal wax figures in “The New Exhibit,” all of whom were modeled on actual killers, as I detailed in this blog post last year.

Since then, I’ve had the chance to learn more about one of those killers: Albert W. Hicks. The hatchet-wielding sailor is the subject of a fascinating new book called “The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, A Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation“. If you like a mix of true crime and a good detective story, I think you’ll enjoy this book.

Mind you, it’s a macabre tale — at least the crime itself. Just reading about how Hicks hacked up his crew mates (and all just to rob them) is bad enough. To have actually seen the aftermath must have been truly horrifying.

Fortunately, most of the book focuses on the aftermath of the murders: the discovery of the boat and how a dogged detective methodically tracked Hicks down through the streets of 1860’s New York City. We meet his wife and child. We’re there throughout his trial, sentencing, and execution.

Where WAS Everybody? In Binghamton, NY, for “Serling Fest 2019”

“Serling Fest” could really be held anywhere, couldn’t it? After all, you can find fans of Rod Serling’s work all over the globe. But celebrating the 60^th anniversary of The Twilight Zone in his hometown of Binghamton, New York, on October 4-6, 2019, felt particularly appropriate.

All writers put pieces of themselves in their work, but Serling seemed to include more autobiographical touches than most. And his idyllic, pre-World War II childhood in this city near the northern border of Pennsylvania did much to shape his outlook.

When Gart Williams in “A Stop at Willoughby” feels himself inexorably drawn to a town “where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure,” it’s easy to imagine him thinking of the Binghamton of the 1930s and ‘40s.

The Binghamton of 2019 hasn’t fully recovered from the post-war manufacturing cuts that contributed to its economic decline, but many parts of it retain a certain bigger-than-a-small-city-but-not-quite-a-BIG-city charm. And because so much of its DNA can be found in Rod’s scripts, it was an ideal place to gather with other fans and toast his work.

Preparing for “Serling Fest 2019” as The Twilight Zone Turns 60

Well, let’s enjoy a slice of virtual birthday cake today! Everyone’s favorite passport to the fifth dimension is turning 60.

“The Shelter”

Yes, on October 2, 1959, at 10:00 p.m., CBS aired “Where is Everybody?” It wasn’t an immediate hit, no, but it soon developed a devoted fan base. And once TZ hit syndication a few years later, the answer to that episode’s title was “in front of their television sets, of course”.

It’s hard to believe six decades have elapsed since it premiered. Sure, fashions have changed, cars don’t have fins on them anymore, and special effects have grown by leaps and bounds. But when it comes to the stories themselves, The Twilight Zone feels as fresh today as it did then.

Maybe even more so. Its themes — the pull of nostalgia, the fear of the unknown, the evils of racism, the allure of conformity, among others — seem timeless.

“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”

If anything, it’s more relevant now than it was then. It’s easy to imagine that Rod Serling and his fellow TZ scribes DID have the time-travel devices they sometimes wove into their stories.