The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society Ghoulish Delights

This episode was recorded live at the Bryant-Lake Bowl in Minneapolis with special guest, Shanan Custer! We’re listening to “The Wailing Wall” from Inner Sanctum Mystery, starring Boris Karloff! The story features a murderous husband who can’t seem to escape his crimes! What is the source of the keening sound that haunts him? Is he truly being plagued by a ghost? Is that really how the police investigate unidentified corpses? Listen for yourself and find out! 

A violent series of robberies have Joe Friday and the entire L.A. police force on high alert in this episode of Dragnet, “The Red Light Bandit”! According to his victims, the assailant approached them pretending to be a policeman. Even as a city-wide manhunt fails to stop him, his crimes grow more brutal by the day! How will the police track him down? Is the story you about to hear actually true? Would Dragnet be improved with more pigeon-related content? Listen for yourself and find out!

Philo Vance returns to the podcast! S.S. Van Dine’s classic detective pits his wits against a gang of robbers targeting upper class house parties in “The Cipher Murder Case.” When one of these robbers kills his own partner, a cipher is found on the dead man’s body that could unmask the mastermind behind the crimes! What key did Vance use to decrypt the cipher? Will this story adhere to Van Dine’s Twenty Rules of Mysteries? Are we doing this swingers’ party correctly? Listen for yourself and find out!

This week, we’re presenting one of our B Sides of the Mysterious Old Radio, an example of the sort of bonus content we make available to our supporters on Patreon! Each B Side is a companion piece to an episode presented as part of our usual podcast. In this case we’re listening to “A Night to Forget” from Quiet Please as a supplement to our previous installment, “The Coffin in Studio B,” from Lights Out! Wyllis Cooper wrote this script roughly 15 years after its predecessor on Lights Out. The story features the star of a popular radio series who suffers from surreal nightmarish experiences that he fears might lead to his own death. Where is the boundry between his reality and his dreams? How does this differ from Cooper’s version of this ideas created for Lights Out? What if a version of this story were produced for The Flintstones? Listen for yourself and find out!

It’s not just any episode of Lights Out this week, it’s a recreation of one of Wyllis Cooper’s scripts from the earliest days of the classic series! “The Coffin in Studio B” features the story of actors and a director struggling to get a production of Lights Out ready in time for its broadcast, but creative differences and an uninvited salesman threaten to derail the show. Can the actors and the director agree on what constitutes a menacing tone? What is the actual plot of the episode of Lights Out being depicted in this episode of Lights Out? Does Eric speak Russian? Listen for yourself and find out!

This week we meet The Man Called X! Herbert Marsall starred as the title character in this series of espionage thrillers. During this episode, “Storm Over the Alps,” X’s investigation into a counterfeiting ring brings him to the Swiss Alps, specifically an area of the mountains with peculiar weather conditions. But instead of answers, he finds himself framed for murder! Will X learn which way the wind is blowing? What is the secret of the Rhinemaiden? Is it okay to watch season 5 of Fargo without having seen any earlier seasons?