Here are more Old Time Radio Ghost Stories for your Yuletide pleasure. This time I stuck to actual radio performance (no readings). The stars are out, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, to entertain you with chills and thrills. I selected classic ghost stories by familiar authors, most from the Victorians, though I have a few Pulp masterpieces too from the pages of Weird Tales. These are the tales that fill most anthologies. It is fun to hear them rather than read them. Plenty of spooky sounds and anxious narrators.
Among these are some of favorites: “The Old Nurse’s Story” is creepy because it inverts the act of love and makes it homicidal. “The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant was a good attempt at modernizing the ghost story. (Fritz Leiber would finish the process.) “Back For Christmas” by John Collier and “The Birds” by DuMaurier are good monster story.
“Christmas Story” (1937) from Lights Out is not based on a famous tale, but is so germane I have to include it. Arch Obeler will get you in the mood for more.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (starring Lionel Barrymore, 1939) Well, you expect this one. If you have to do Scrooge, who better than Barrymore?
“Back For Christmas” by John Collier (starring Peter Lorre, 1943)
“A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (The Weird Circle, 1943)
“The House and the Brain” by Lord Bulwer-Lytton (The Weird Circle, 1943)
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell (The Weird Circle, 1944)
“The Canterville Ghost” by Oscar Wilde (starring Charles Laughton, 1945)
“The Dunwich Horror” by H. P. Lovecraft (Starring Ronald Colman, 1945)
“The Oblong Box” by Edgar Allan Poe (The Weird Circle, 1945)
“August Heat” by W. F. Harvey (starring Ronald Colman, 1945)
“The Red Hand” by Arthur Machen (The Weird Circle, 1945)
“The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens (Lights Out, 1946)
“The Ring of Thoth” by A. Conan Doyle (starring William Conrad, 1947)
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe (Escape, 1947)
“The Horla” by Guy de Maupassant (starring Peter Lorre, 1947)
“The Grove of Astaroth” by John Buchan (starring William Conrad, 1948)
“Ancient Sorceries by Algernon Blackwood (starring Paul Frees, 1948)
“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” by Robert Hichens (starring Luis Van Rooten, 1948)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (starring Agnes Moorhead, 1948)
“The Phantom Rickshaw” by Rudyard Kipling (starring Ronald Colman, 1948)
“Ghost Hunt” by H. Russell Wakefield (Suspense, 1949)
“Pollock and the Porroh Man” by H. G. Wells (starring Vincent Price, 1949)
“The Crowd” by Ray Bradbury (Suspense, 1950)
“The Birds” by Daphne Du Maurier (Escape, 1954)
“The Waxwork” by A. M. Burrage (starring William Conrad, 1959)
“The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs (1968)
“The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford (1968)
“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce (1974)
“Castle Kerfol” by Edith Wharton (starring Mercedes McCambridge, 1976)
Conclusion
I hope these audio versions of Old Time Radio Ghost Stories have made your Christmas holidays better. (And if you are listening to this in August, that’s okay too.) Radio offers certain conventions that TV never had to worry about. Despite characters describing the horrors, the sound effects and music can be quite effective. There is nothing scarier than the monster you imagine for yourself. (A problem TV and movies do have to deal with.) Ray Bradbury quite accurately explained that when you imagine a ten foot monster then see it, your brain goes but I thought it would twenty feet tall. Radio never has disappoints by revealing too much.
