On the evening before Halloween 1938, Orson Welles broadcasted a radio drama that panicked the nation.

As he read out a realistic, breaking news scenario involving an alien invasion, listeners did not know that this was a fictional event and instead began preparing for the end of the world.

The broadcast went down in history as a legendary moment in popular culture.

In the mining community of Tower City, Pennsylvania and its surrounding villages, the same reaction occurred and was recorded by the town’s newspaper, the West Schuylkill Herald.

Here’s their report:

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The End of the World

There would be plenty of good, interesting writing if all the results of the ‘War of the Worlds’ scare last Sunday could be learned.

One of the local boys who has a special interest in an Orwin lass named Myra, said there were some great carryings-on in that locality for a time.

Families gathered in order that they might ‘all go together,’ people looked to the sky and imagined they saw and heard the end coming. It was a great Halloween thrilled while it lasted.

One person at Shoop’s decided he wouldn’t leave this world with money in his pockets so proceeded to spend all he had with him.

Everyone now can look back upon the incident and laugh at this reactions, but there is no need to feel ashamed – the entire nation was fooled.

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(Image: From the 1953 film adaptation of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds”)

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