Monday, January 23, 2012

The CBS Radio Mystery Theater Available Online for Free

When I was growing up, we lived in several towns, and one of those was Wichita Falls. There was a small radio station there that used to air The CBS Radio Mystery Theater after the 10:00 p.m. news.  I would lie awake for the next hour listening to it when I was supposed to be sleeping.  Some nights I would continue to lie awake long after the show ended if it was a scary episode (there were plenty of those).  The show had a consistently high quality and was produced by producer of the old Inner Sanctum show from a few decades earlier.  It even had the same creaking door.  Henry Slesar and Alfred Bester both wrote scripts, although Bester only wrote for a year.  He had gone on to other things by the time I started listening.

Other than some really low quality cassettes I used to record a few episodes of the show, I haven't heard The CBS Radio Mystery Theater since 1980, when we moved to another part of the state.

Now all 1399 episodes are available online for free.  I've already identified several favorites I want to hear again, and I'm trying to figure out the titles for several more.  While I don't recall any sword and sorcery, there were enough horror, suspense, and noir stories that I think some of you might be interested in listening.  You can find them here. And thanks to James Reasoner for posting a notice about this on his blog.

5 comments:

  1. That's some neat stuff, just glancing over the adaptations list alone.

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    1. I hope it's not a trick of memory, but I recall the original stories were pretty good, too.

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  2. I just listened to the episode that creeped me out the most when I was a kid, "Hickory, Dickory, Doom". http://www.cbsrmt.com/download/957-hickory-dickory-doom.html

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  3. I've listened to only a few radio stories like this. Always enjoyed them but I just don't listen very often.

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    1. I will listen to the OTR station on Sirius/XM on road trips. The nice thing about the CBS-RMT shows is you can download them to either an MP3 player or a CD and take them with you. I'll be shopping for a good MP3 player this weekend.

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