As part of integrating my annual Kolchak adventures with the movies and series, I’ve tried to put together a timeline of when relevant episodes actually took place. This allows me to, for example, give whoever is playing Dr. Leslie Dwyer the background that the events of “Mr. R.I.N.G.” took place four years ago, in 1972.

The timeline for the Kolchak movies is reasonable enough, if slightly confused—they happen a year or two apart. Add in the television series and things start to get very crowded very quickly, and occasionally even directly contradictory. If you go by the evidence in the television series, some of the Chicago episodes happened before the Seattle events in The Night Strangler! And while Kolchak had worked in Chicago before Las Vegas (at about 28 minutes in he and Gail Foster start listing the number of times he was fired in every major city in the United States) it wouldn’t likely have been for INS and it definitely would not have been for Vincenzo.

Because I’ve been running a game with Kolchak and his guest stars for four years now at the North Texas RPG Convention, I’ve had to make some assumptions about what experience they already have with the horrors Kolchak attracts, and when they had them. This has highlighted for me that Kolchak’s adventures are far too dense using the assumed timeline, that the movies happened in 1971 and either 1972 or 1973, and the series episodes in 1974 or 1975.

While none of the episodes mention a year, if you remember Kolchak’s iconic voiceovers from the movies, you probably remember that they took the form of “Weekday, Month Date”. That makes them relatively easy to place in a year. But much of it doesn’t make sense. When I looked at it closely, it turns out that there are timeline contradictions already in the second movie!

I wrote in The Wrong Goodbye,

As a side note, Mr. R.I.N.G. was datable to 1972 because it was one of the few episodes that mentioned a weekday along with a month and day of month. Sunday, April 2, pretty much has to be in 1972. This pushes the two movies back to 1965 and 1967 respectively, instead of 1971 and 1972 (or 1973—The Night Strangler is odd) as is generally assumed.

Pushing the movies earlier makes a lot of sense to me. Having the movies in the seventies always seemed extremely dense. At the end of The Night Strangler the group was headed to New York City. Presumably, at some point between then and when the series started, the New York office (which Vincenzo was always talking to on the phone) sent him to run INS Chicago. Leaving four to ten years after the movies for the various episodes to have occurred seems a much more reasonable time frame than to have them jumbled on top of each other.

That is, by moving the movies back to the end of the sixties, I can space the series episodes, which are clearly not in chronological order anyway, over at least four years (1972 through 1975) and potentially even longer. It greatly reduces the “monster of the week” flavor of the series.

Even when the television series does mention weekdays and dates, dating the episodes is difficult. The weekdays and dates in The Night Strangler place it in 1972 or 1967, except for one: Thursday, April 15, doesn’t match the rest of the dates. Nor do any of the dates given match 1973, which is when the “every 21 years” places it: the previous murders happened in 1952, and eventually they figure out that there have been murders every 21 years since 1889: 1910, 1931, 1952, 1973.

Setting the events in April, 1973, was a strange choice to begin with. The movie aired in January of 1973, putting the events in the future! Most likely it was initially created using 1972 and then hastily embroidered to be 1973 for reasons known only to studio executives.

In a roleplaying game, however, where the events really happened, the role of studio executive is played by Carl Kolchak himself. My assumption is that Kolchak tried to disguise his adventures by lying about the year. But going through every tape and reference to fix the combinations of weekdays and dates is far more work than he was willing to do. Therefore, if Kolchak wanted, for whatever reason, to obscure his accounts, one of the easiest would have been to change the year to another year that already matched the existing dates.

Since putting Strangler in 1967 works better for me anyway, I’m going with that. The reason it works better is that some of the episodes clearly take place in 1972, which, regardless of whether Strangler takes place in 1972 or 1973 place those episodes before Kolchak and Vincenzo went to Chicago.

Editing was never a strong point on The Night Stalker, and it got worse into the series. The series was aired from autumn 1974 and into 1975, which puts an upper limit on when the events of those episodes took place—I’m assuming that an episode’s events happen before the episode aired, which puts them no later than 1974 or 1975. I set my convention adventures starting in 1976 just to separate the adventures from the episodes long enough for Kolchak to have decided to start calling in experts he’s met previously. It’s the guest stars, after all, that are the main difference between the Kolchak of these adventures and the Kolchak of the television series: this Kolchak works with people. Whether he works well with people, of course, depends entirely on how the player chooses to play him.

Where there is ambiguity—and there’s a lot of it—I choose to assume that an episode could not have occurred after it’s air date. The series aired from September 13, 1974, through March 28, 1975. So that, for example, The Spanish Moss Murders must have happened in 1974. “The long Fourth of July weekend” could have been 1975, as the 4th was on a Friday in 1975 and only a Thursday in 1974. But to get away from a Wednesday or a weekend 4th requires going all the way back to 1969. So I’m assuming that the character in question was getting a four-day weekend in 1974.

That episode highlights the ambiguity of the various dating methods in Kolchak. In the closing narration, Kolchak says:

Well, all I know… is I won’t be around fifty years from now for the millennium. Will you?

He was rounding down; the exact time of the next event was fifty-two years. But what does “the millennium” even mean? The events were clearly not taking place in 1950. Kolchak certainly could have expected to be around in 2000. Assuming he was about the age of Darrin McGavin, McGavin in fact died in 2006. That said, Kolchak himself always preferred a good turn of phrase over accuracy. And it was a reasonable assumption that he wouldn’t be alive in 2026—that would put him, or at least Darrin McGavin, at 106 years old.

The movies provide weekdays along with the dates, and in The Night Strangler these contradict a year of 1973. As long as I’m rewriting the year anyway, why not use 1967, which does fit with the days and dates?

• The Night Stalker: 1965. Thursday, May 20 through Friday, May 28. This is the easiest. Nothing in the movie obviously requires it to be 1971.
• The Night Strangler: 1967. Saturday, April 1 through Saturday, April 15.¹ Of course, the events happen every 21 years, and the last happened in 1952, making this 1973. I’m rewriting it to 1967, 1946, 1925, 1904, and 1883.

Since they were headed for New York City at the end of Strangler, I’m guessing they were then sent out by New York either immediately or after working New York for a while. This puts all of the Chicago-based adventures after 1967.

In the series, Kolchak mostly stopped providing weekdays with the dates. “The Spanish Moss Murders” provides a hint that July 4 is near a weekend, and both “Mr. R.I.N.G.” and “The Trevi Collection” do provide a weekday and date combination. My assumption will be that those two happened in 1972, since that’s when their dates have to be to make sense.

“Legacy of Terror” also provides a weekday and date: Monday, September 22. That puts it in 1969, since the only other nearby Mondays on September 22 are in 1975, well after the show aired, and 1958, well before even the movies.

The “long Fourth of July weekend” in “The Spanish Moss Murders” is best placed in 1974. The show aired December 6, 1974, and so couldn’t have happened in 1975.

“The Devil’s Platform” features “a senatorial race not so long ago right here in Illinois”. While it isn’t specifically said that this election is for the United States Senate rather than the Illinois General Assembly, “right here in Illinois” hints at a statewide election. That further hints at a year of 1968, 1970, 1972, or 1974. The previous election for the Senate was 1966, and the next one would be 1978.² While “The Devil’s Platform” aired on November 15, 1974, “Not so long ago” implies that it wasn’t this year. I chose 1970 because it was recent but far enough in the past to justify that vaguely faerie-tale-like “not so long ago”. Also, 1968 would make Kolchak and Vincenzo’s arrival at the Chicago offices very recent, and it looks like they’re as comfortable in their work environment as any other episode.

“Chopper” likewise doesn’t provide a hard date and weekday. But it does feature a “1956 model BSA motorcycle” that Kolchak later describes as “a twenty-year-old motorcycle”. The episode aired on January 31, 1975. Motorcycles aren’t like cars. A 1956 motorcycle likely was sold in mid-1956 or even 1957. Twenty years would put the year around 1976, obviously too far into the future. Kolchak was likely rounding again. Most likely, the motorcycle was at least 17 years old to get described as twenty years old, putting the episode in 1973 or 1974. With a January air date, it isn’t likely to be 1975.

If “Chopper” were in 1973, that would put 36-year-old Joseph Morton at around 19 or 20 during the events that led to the episode. If “Chopper” were in 1974, that would make Morton 18 or 19. That seems more reasonable for the kind of street gang the show was riffing off.

These episodes don’t have any obvious clues to what year they take place:

• The Sentry: April 20-21.
• The Vampire: May 2-6.
• Demon in Lace: May 10-11.
• The Ripper: May 21-June 2.
• The Zombie: August 14.
• Firefall: September 3-7.
• The Youth Killer: September 30.
• Horror in the Heights: October 14.
• Primal Scream: November 8.
• Bad Medicine: November 12-16.
• They Have Been: December 2.
• The Werewolf: December 11.
• The Energy Eater: no dates provided.
• The Knightly Murders: no dates provided.

They could, of course, be any time between 1967 and 1975, but I’d point out that 1971 and 1973 are wide open.