Radio Sound effects for ghosts

The Milwaukee Journal – May 25, 1941

BILL HOFFMAN has the strangest job in radio. His task is to create sound effects giving life to Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there, and to various assorted ghosts, goblins and ghouls on Mutual’s “Who Knows,” a dramatization of psychic phenomena.

Radio has many sound effect men, but none with a job like Bill’s. People can disagree with authenticity of the noises he uses to identify sundry spooks, but no one can prove he’s wrong. And that’s an attractive novelty in the business of broadcasting.

“After all, who really knows what a spook sounds like?” Hoffman says “When you think up sound effects for ordinary everyday things, you have something to go by. If you have to imitate the sound of horses’ hoofs, you know what a real horse’s hoofs sound like. But ghosts and goblins? You just have to have a lot of imagination, and then some.”

One of Hoffman’s most frequent assignments is to get the sound of a “voice from the dead.” At first, Hoffman had the actors in the cast of “Who Knows?” talk into a filter mike. But the effect gained in this manner didn’t suit Jack Johnstone, the author of the program, or Dr. Hereward Carrington, the authority on the supernatural who furnished the case history material for the series.

Finally, Hoffman solved the problem by opening up a grand piano, holding a microphone over the holes in the sounding board, and having an actor talk over the strings. Said one of the stage hands, “It sound so unearthly, it’s enough to scare the bejabers out of you.”

One of his toughest problems occurred in a show that called for the sound of sunning “little men” (the kind who aren’t there). The answer was found by accident when Hoffman, looking for a solution during rehearsal, idly drummed with his fingers on a studio desk, while he pondered the problem before a open mike. Producer-Writer Johnstone noted the sound and said that was just what he wanted.

Hoffman makes the sound of ghost dogs the same way by drumming with his fingers on a board. “The trick though,” Hoffman explains, “is to get the exact rythmn, so that it sounds like the pitter-patter of a dog’s paws.”

Once, Hoffman had to show a supernatural dog running on gravel! He achieved this by tapping his fingers on a piece of blocked sandpaper. “I nearly wore my fingers down,” Hoffman says, “but it registered.”