R.I.P.: NYC TV Cool Ghoul, Radio Personality John Zacherle

John Zacherle, one of the first of the late-night television horror-movie hosts, who played a crypt-dwelling undertaker with a booming graveyard laugh on stations in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan.

He was 98, according to The NYTimes.

John Karsten Zacherle was born in Philadelphia in September 1918. After graduating from Germantown High School, Mr. Zacherle enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an English degree in 1940. He enlisted in the Army at the start of World War II and served in England, Italy and North Africa with the Quartermaster Corps, rising to the rank of major.

Returning to Philadelphia after the war, he joined the Stagecrafters, a small theater troupe in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Before long he found work doing commercials for local drug companies.

“I guess my first horror gig was posing for before-and-after pictures for some new tranquilizer,” he told The Daily News in New York in 2000. “In the ‘before’ shot, I was chasing my wife with a carving knife. Then, after I took the pill, I was a kind and loving husband.”

In 1953 he began appearing as characters on “Action in the Afternoon,” a live western series shot in a vacant lot behind the studios of WCAU. “The idea was to get somebody in trouble on Monday, and either get him out of trouble, shoot him or hang him by Friday,” he told The Daily News in 1959.

In late 1958, Zacherle moved to New York, “flapping in on leathery wings of fame,” as The Journal of Frankenstein, a monster magazine, put it. He took over “Shock Theater” at WABC, Channel 7, and added a “y” to his name to avoid confusion about how it should be pronounced. After the show tripled its ratings in the first year, it was renamed “Zacherley at Large.”

When WABC had run through its stock of horror films, Mr. Zacherle took his act to Channel 9 and then Channel 11, where he became the host of “Chiller Theater,” “The Mighty Hercules Cartoon Show” and, briefly, “The Three Stooges Show.”

He moved to the New York album-rock radio station WNEW 102.7 FM in 1967 as a morning D.J. and two years later began hosting a program at night. He later worked at another rock station, WPLJ 95.5 FM , and in 1992 joined WXRK, known as K-Rock. That job ended four years later when the station changed its format from classic rock to alternative rock.

 Zacherle was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 2010.

"In his day, he was one of the first superstars of radio and television in the Delaware Valley," said Gene Kolber, a member of the Broadcast Pioneers.