Book Recommendation – The Radio Ghost

I was between books recently and the ones I was waiting for were still unavailable. So I searched for something quick to tide me over until my next read. As a radio guy, you know that the cover of this one made me stop and check it out.

I’m not sure how many pages the book is, as I listened to the audio book. It was about and hour or an hour and a half audio book. I had never heard of the author – Otis Adelbert Kline – but apparently he’s written quite a few books and short stories.

Here is the short Goodreads synopsis:

A mysterious inheritance. A haunted mansion. To claim her late uncle’s fortune, Greta Van Loan must survive a year in his eerie Highland Park estate. Skeptical of the supernatural, she turns to two psychic investigators when strange and terrifying events threaten to change everything she believes. Can Greta uncover the truth—or will the house’s secrets claim her first?

To me, this worked like an old radio show. It wasn’t anything that I had to think too hard about. It played out like an episode of Sam Spade or Johnny Dollar. I could see this also working as something on Suspense or Lights Out.

There were simple, likable characters and the mystery of a haunted mansion. For whatever reason, I just pictured Scooby-Doo. Yeah, it could be a Scooby-Doo mystery.

It was a good “pass the time” book that you could probably read in one setting. Was it amazing? No, but as a short story that requires not too much thinking, it was good.

3 out of 5 stars.

Chicken Heart

I was driving home from work this morning and I was listening to some old time radio shows. Suspense has always been a favorite of mine. Around Halloween, Radio Classics on Sirius XM starts playing some classic “spooky” radio shows. One of the shows that almost always gets played is from Arch Obler’s “Lights Out” – Chicken Heart.

I became familiar with the Chicken Heart as a kid, but it wasn’t because of the show. I knew it as a classic comedy bit from Bill Cosby’s 1966 Wonderfulness Album.

This, along with many other Cosby albums, was something that my dad and I used to listen to all the time. In Cosby’s bit, he talks about being left home while his parents went out. He was supposed to stay in his room, but he would leave the room and listen to scary shows on the radio. He used the Chicken Heart as his example.

The original bit from Lights Out is only about 8 minutes long. Honestly, it’s not that scary. It’s actually kind of silly. Cosby, however, takes the bit and makes it hilarious. As someone who was more familiar with the Cosby version, when I heard the original on Sirius XM, I remember thinking, “Wow! That was really the premise for a show!!”

There is some uncertainty as to the date of the original broadcast, some say 1937 and some say 1938. Here for your listening pleasure is Chicken Heart from Lights Out ….

https://youtu.be/XuSzhsuofik

Now, compare it with the much funnier version as presented by Bill Cosby…

As I listened back to this bit before writing this post, it made me think of all the great comedy albums we used to listen to growing up. So many laughs ….

The Scary Classic You’ve Never Heard

Now that it is October, many bloggers (and folks on social media) are posting their favorite scary books or favorite scary movies as a tie in to Halloween. I thought I would offer up something better.

Think about books versus movies for just a second. To me, the book is always going to be scarier than the movie. The reason for this is that the book requires you to use your imagination. You and I can read the same description of a monster or alien an each have a very different picture of them in our minds. Now, with that in mind, I offer you up one of the greatest and scariest things I have ever heard …

Old time radio was full of great shows with wonderful stories. Those shows included The Mysterious Traveler, Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, and Suspense. On December 5, 1946 Suspense aired an episode that is consistently referred to as one of the most terrifying programs broadcast during the “golden age” of radio. The program was entitled “The House in Cypress Canyon.”

The episode was written by Robert L. Richards and produced by William Spear. Wikipedia offers the entire story, but for this blog I will only offer up a tease as to not give it away. I will also present a link so that you can listen to the show in its entirety.

From Wikipedia: The plot is presented as a story within a story framed by a meeting between detective Sam (played by Howard Duff) and a friend who has discovered the manuscript regarding the mysterious house. After a brief introduction, the narrative shifts to the story presented in the manuscript.

The story begins a few days before Christmas. James (Robert Taylor) and Ellen (Cathy Lewis), married seven years and having recently relocated to California for the husband’s engineering job, move into a hastily finished rental house in a development that was started before the war. Dusty furniture and creaky hinges seem to be the only problems with the place at first glance. But the very night they move in, the two hear inhuman cries in the night, and find blood oozing out from under a closet door they can’t open.

My dad introduced us to old radio shows. He would buy them on cassette or rent them from the public library. Before they started airing them on a local radio station at night, we’d grab our cassette layer and listen to them. I remember my dad, my brother and I sitting on the floor with pillows and blankets when we first heard The House in Cypress Canyon. Thankfully, we listened to it one afternoon during a weekend. Of course, the show played over and over in my mind that night at bedtime! It creeped me out!

To this day, it remains the ONE radio show that freaked me out and still does. Set aside a half hour. Grab your headphones, turn down the lights, and enjoy the episode that only aired once, but was enough to rank as one of the scariest shows to ever air on radio.

Here is The House in Cypress Canyon:

Let me know what you thought of the show?