Retro Radio: Old Time Radio in the Dark

All songs are eventually released to major streaming platforms and music apps such as Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, and most other services worldwide. Songs always appear here first before distribution elsewhere.

Eight flawless pearls, six native divers, and a captain willing to do the math — the sea keeps better books than he does.

ABOUT THE SONG: "Ghosts of the Nancy Hale" — Southern Gothic blues with Chicago and Bayou influence. Inspired by the Weird Darkness Retro Radio episode "Ghosts of The Nancy Hale: The Six Who Did Not Die" featuring the story from Creeps by Night — "The Six Who Did Not Die," originally broadcast July 11, 1944. Eight flawless pearls, six native divers, and a captain willing to do the math — the sea keeps better books than he does.Every track is inspired by the strange, the haunted, the historical, and the occasionally unspeakable stories covered on the Weird Darkness podcast — murder ballads, cursed places, restless spirits, and the kind of folklore that keeps front porch lights burning all night.

ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE: "The Six Who Did Not Die" aired on Creeps by Night on July 11, 1944, on the Blue Network, and was rebroadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service program Mystery Playhouse hosted by Peter Lorre. The story is set aboard the sloop Nancy Hale, anchored off the atoll of Mandariva in the Gambier Islands, and follows the captain's decision to murder his six native pearl divers rather than split the take from an unusually rich bed. When he returns for more, the sea is waiting with its own verdict.

“The Six Who Did Not Die”: Eight flawless pearls, six native divers, and a captain willing to do the math — the sea keeps better books than he does. | #RetroRadio EP0637

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Waiting Room” (September 05, 1977)
00:45:54.440 = Creeps By Night, “Six Who Did Not Die” (July 11, 1944) ***WD
01:13:28.398 = The Crime Club, “Cowhide” (October 02, 1947)
01:42:49.458 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Sam hardy Makes a Bet With Death” (December 15, 1946)
02:07:46.457 = CBC Deep Night, “Bonehouse” (August 12, 2005)
02:40:56.361 = The Devil And Mr. O, “Big Mr. Little” (November 12, 1971) ***WD
03:09:13.902 = Diary of Fate, “Peter Drake” (February 23, 1948) ***WD
03:38:40.669 = Dimension X, “The Man In The Moon” (July 14, 1950) ***WD
04:08:22.837 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Man Who Talked With Death” (December 12, 1944) ***WD
04:20:55.067 = The Eleventh Hour, “Actor”
04:47:27.492 = Escape, “Confidential Agent” (April 02, 1949)
05:16:54.125 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0637

All songs are eventually released to major streaming platforms and music apps such as Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, and most other services worldwide. Songs always appear here first before distribution elsewhere.

Based on the story, “Interface To Terror” from the April 21, 2026 Weird Darkness #RetroRadio marathon, “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook: The Crucifix Was Just a Warning!” https://weirddarkness.com/wdrr0636/

A quiet inventor, a bullying brother, and a homemade computer helmet that reaches a little deeper into the skull than advertised."The Lobometer" is a bluegrass murder ballad inspired by "Interface To Terror," an episode of Chet Chedder's Tales From The Morgue. A quiet inventor, a bullying brother, and a homemade computer helmet that reaches a little deeper into the skull than advertised. Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. Two brothers. One helmet. One second-story window.

ABOUT THE SONG: "The Lobometer" sits in the fratricide branch of the American murder ballad tradition, a lineage that runs from "Banks of the Ohio" through "Pretty Polly" and on into the dark-comic corners of bluegrass storytelling. Clawhammer banjo leads, upright bass walks, mandolin chops the off-beats, and a lone fiddle takes the break. The narrator reports the grisly particulars the way bluegrass narrators always have — plainly, with a slight grin, letting the listener decide how horrified to be. The final verse pulls back into minor key as the quiet brother closes the door on the loan shark's men.

ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE: "Interface To Terror" is a Chet Chedder's Tales From The Morgue installment in which an amateur inventor perfects the Lobometer — a helmet wired to a computer that transmits floppy-disk information directly into the human brain. His mob-adjacent brother sees the invention for what it is worth on the black market, and the two begin working their way through credit bureaus and card numbers. The partnership does not last.

ABOUT CHET CHEDDER'S TALES FROM THE MORGUE: Chet Chedder's Tales From The Morgue was a syndicated horror anthology produced by M&J Audio Theatre in the early 1990s, hosted by a morgue attendant whose stories were pulled from the case files of his more unusual residents. Each episode dropped a listener into a self-contained tale of the strange, the violent, and the darkly comic, delivered with the classic host-narrator framing device that reaches back through Vincent Price, The Mysterious Traveler, and Lights Out.

ABOUT STATIC WAX: Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. Each release is paired with its source episode on the Weird Darkness RetroRadio podcast and explored further on the Static Wax podcast and blog. All Static Wax releases eventually reach streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and most other major services under Weird Darkness Records.

Inspired by the title story of the April 21, 2026 Weird Darkness #RetroRadio marathon, “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook: The Crucifix Was Just a Warning!” https://weirddarkness.com/wdrr0636/

A scholar pays pocket change for a priceless medieval scrapbook a terrified French sacristan was desperate to sell — and finds out that night what he actually bought.

ABOUT THE SONG: "Two Hundred Fifty Francs" places the bargain and its consequences in the musical language of 1883, the year the story itself unfolds. The arrangement leans into the late-Victorian parlor ballad tradition — piano-driven, minor-key, measured, the kind of gaslit narrative song that might have sat on a music stand in any middle-class drawing room of the period. The form was tailor-made for tragic storytelling with a supernatural edge, and the song treats that form without irony or pastiche. No winks, no modern gloss — a straight gothic parlor ballad carrying a straight gothic parlor story. The chorus pivots on the absurdity of the price and the thing that came bound up with the pages. The tempo stays slow and mournful rather than frantic, letting the horror settle in the same way it would have on the quiet carriage ride away from St. Bertrand.

ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE: An English archaeologist arrives at the cathedral town of St. Bertrand de Comminges in the French Pyrenees in 1883, intending to spend a day photographing and cataloging the ancient church. The sacristan who guides him is a small, wizened man who flinches at every sound, glances constantly over his shoulder, and weeps before a painting of a saint delivering a man from strangulation by the devil. When the tour ends, the sacristan hesitantly offers the scholar a folio he keeps at home — a priceless seventeenth-century scrapbook assembled by one Canon Albrecht de Maulion, full of illuminated manuscript leaves spanning nearly a thousand years of ecclesiastical art. At the very back of the book, two later sheets of paper bear a drawing of King Solomon enthroned, four soldiers frozen in terror, a fifth dead at their feet with his neck wrenched out of shape, and crouched among them a matted, skeletal creature with burning yellow eyes and a hate that is not human. The sacristan names a price that would shame a junk dealer. The scholar pays. The sacristan's daughter presses a silver crucifix into his hand as he leaves. That night, alone in his hotel room with his purchase, the scholar learns exactly what the sacristan was so desperate to be rid of — and why the silver cross around his neck is the only thing standing between him and the creature that has haunted Canon Albrecht's book, and every owner since, for almost two hundred years.

ABOUT THE RADIO SHOW: Ghost Story was a BBC Radio strand devoted to single-voice readings of classic supernatural fiction, drawing heavily from the great British ghost-story tradition — M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, and their literary heirs. Produced in the understated, atmospheric style that became a BBC hallmark, the series favored close-miked narration, spare sound design, and the kind of measured pacing that lets a well-told ghost story breathe. These broadcasts aired on BBC Radio 4 and were later repeated on BBC Radio 7, the network's spoken-word archive channel, where they continued to find new audiences long after their original transmission. The "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" installment referenced here aired on December 29, 1997, in keeping with the longstanding British tradition — championed by M.R. James himself — of saving the very best ghost stories for the Christmas season.

ABOUT STATIC WAX: Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. Each release is paired with the original source episode, discussed on the Weird Darkness RetroRadio podcast, and archived on the WeirdDarkness.com blog so listeners can follow the thread from vintage broadcast to new recording. All Static Wax releases eventually reach streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and most other major services under Weird Darkness Records. Learn more and follow the series at https://weirddarkness.com/staticwax.

An English archaeologist talks a terrified French sacristan out of a priceless medieval scrapbook for pocket change — and finds out that night why the old man was so eager to sell. | #RetroRadio EP0636

Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Olive Darling and Morton Dear” (September 02, 1977) ***WD
00:46:14.207 = Appointment With Fear, “The Pit And The Pendulum” (September 18, 1943) ***WD
01:13:21.641 = BBC Radio 4/7 Ghost Story, “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (December 29, 1997)
01:27:31.568 = Beyond The Green Door, “Edward Morse, Deep Sea Fishing, and Rats” (1966)
01:31:14.101 = The Black Book, “My Favorite Corpse” (February 24, 1952) ***WD
01:45:41.440 = The Avenger, “The Ghost Murder” (January 13, 1946)
02:15:40.001 = Box 13, “Damsel In Distress” (November 14, 1948)
02:42:26.663 = CBC Mystery Theater, “Champagne Safari” (April 28, 1967)
03:51:55.215 = Chet Chetter’s Tales From The Morgue, “Interface To Terror” (1990-1992) ***WD
04:19:42.714 = The Clock, “Aunt Emmy” (November 15, 1955)
04:46:39.145 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0636

“Physician Of The Dead”: A scientist in revolutionary Paris believed the severed head keeps thinking after the blade falls, and the night he finally proved it was the night he learned whose voice was waiting in the sack. | #RetroRadio #WeirdDarkness | EP0635

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Reunion” (August 31, 1977)
00:45:50.285 = The Unexpected, “Masterpiece” (September 26, 1948)
00:57:56.320 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Indian Fakir” (February 17, 1944) ***WD
01:11:34.960 = Nick Carter, “Death After Dark” (February 19, 1944) ***WD
01:40:50.656 = Dark Venture, “Eclipse” (August 07, 1945)
02:10:36.663 = The Weird Circle, “Pistol Shot” (March 18, 1945)
02:38:01.228 = The Whistler, “Murder Has a Signature” (January 15, 1945) ***WD
03:09:43.726 = Witch’s Tale, “Physician Of The Dead” (November 08, 1934) ***WD
03:38:45.995 = X-Minus One, “Soldier Boy” (October 17, 1956)
04:06:38.672 = Zero Hour, “The Housecall” (May 09, 1974) ***WD
04:23:53.977 = ABC Mystery Time, “Success Story” (1957) ***WD (LQ)
04:47:55.048 = Strange Adventure, “South Of The Border” (1945) ***WD
04:51:10.640 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0635

She placed the ads, she made them rich, and she watched them starve to death in the morning papers — now she's singing about it, and she isn't sorry.

ABOUT THE SONG
"Come Home Rich" is a 1953 crime-jazz and orchestral noir fusion, sung in the voice of a femme fatale physicist calling men across time into the trap she built for them. The verses move in smoky street-level crime-jazz — walking upright bass, brushed drums, muted trumpet, minor-key piano — while the choruses lift into cinematic orchestral noir as the strings swell and the scale of her offer widens. The bridge destabilizes briefly, harp and bowed vibraphone threading through a harmonic dislocation, before the verse groove returns. The vocal reference points are Julie London and Peggy Lee in her Black Coffee era — cold, unhurried, conversational, the voice of a woman who doesn't need to raise it to get what she wants. The song was written in the style of its source year because the story lives in 1953, not in the future its villain peers into, and because a torch song is the one genre that can make a woman luring strangers to their deaths sound like the most reasonable proposition a man has ever been offered.


ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE
The Old Die Rich aired in 1953 as an episode of Tales of Tomorrow, adapted from H.L. Gold's story in Galaxymagazine. Private investigator Mark Weldon has been chasing a pattern that refuses to make sense — elderly men turning up dead of starvation across the city, each with thousands of dollars sewn into their coat linings, each carrying a bank book whose entries date back decades but whose ink is only months old. When one victim survives just long enough to whisper a single name, the trail leads to May Roberts, a brilliant red-haired physicist living alone in a five-story brownstone on Eldridge Avenue. Her want-ads seek men with no social security numbers, no references, no families — men who will not be missed. Weldon infiltrates in disguise, is caught at gunpoint, and is forced into the truth behind her operation: a working time machine in her laboratory, a scheme that sends the desperate back twenty-two years with envelopes of cash, stock instructions, and rigged prize-fight bets. The old men come home rich. Then they die. When May asks Weldon to travel forward instead — seventy years into 2023 to retrieve the technical details of a revolutionary power device — she promises him love, partnership, and wealth on his return. What waits for him in the future is a mayor who knows his name, and private papers that reveal what she has really been doing, and what she has planned for the world once the device is in her hands. By the time Weldon understands the trap, he is the only man who can close it.

ABOUT THE RADIO SHOW
Tales of Tomorrow was an anthology series that ran on ABC Radio and ABC Television in the early 1950s, bringing science fiction stories from the pages of Galaxy magazine and other sources into the homes of American listeners and viewers. The radio incarnation drew on the same talent pool as its television counterpart, adapting sharp, strange, occasionally unsettling tales of the future with full sound design and orchestral scoring. Hosted by "Omentor" — Raymond Edward Johnson, familiar to listeners from Inner Sanctum Mysteries — the program leaned into the darker, more paranoid corners of science fiction, where wonder and horror wore the same face.

ABOUT STATIC WAX
Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. Each track is paired with the original episode that inspired it, bringing old time radio drama into conversation with the music of its own moment. All Static Wax releases eventually reach streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and most other major services under Weird Darkness Records.

“The Old Die Rich”: They found him in an alley, dead of hunger, with seventeen thousand dollars sewn into the lining of his coat. He wasn't the first. He wouldn't be the last. Every one of them old. Every one of them starved. Every one of them carrying a bank book whose entries went back fifty years — in ink only months old. Private investigator Mark Weldon has chased the pattern across the city, and the pattern keeps leading back to a brownstone on Eldridge Avenue, and a beautiful red-haired physicist with ice-blue eyes and a want-ad that only hires men nobody will miss. Her name is May Roberts. Her laboratory hums behind a locked door. And the old men who walk through it come home rich — just in time to die. | #RetroRadio #WeirdDarkness | EP0634

Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “To Be a Rose” (August 29, 1977)
00:46:54.231 = BBC Spinechillers, “Inner Critic” (April 2006)
01:00:50.698 = Stay Tuned For Terror, “Lizzie Borden Took An Axe” (July 23, 1945) ***WD
01:13:48.186 = Strange Wills, “Lady And The Pirate” (June 29, 1946) ***WD
01:43:28.483 = Suspense, “Sisters” (February 03, 1944)
02:13:20.326 = Tales of the Frightened, “Deadly Dress” (1957)
02:17:58.583 = Tales of Tomorrow, “The Old Die Rich” (March 26, 1953) ***WD
02:49:45.547 = The Creaking Door, ‘Face To Face Music of the Spheres” (June 01, 1964) ***WD
03:14:16.802 = The Saint, “Peter Great” (June 24, 1951)
03:43:54.405 = Theater Five, “Nameless Day” (November 09, 1964)
04:05:20.075 = Theater 1030, “Trespassers Will Be Experimented Upon” (1968-1971) ***WD
04:34:07.590 = Tales From The Tomb, “The Raven” (1960s)
04:43:33.852 = Two Thousand Plus, “The Brooklyn Brain” (June 21, 1950) ***WD
05:12:14.545 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0634

A watchmaker spends six weeks secretly building a bomb to kill his wife — but on the day he sets it to blow, two burglars tie him up in the very basement where the clock is ticking.

ABOUT THE SONG
"Three O'Clock" is an original Static Wax composition written in the style of a 1940s/50s pop crooner ballad — smooth, intimate, and deceptively dark. The song follows watchmaker Stapp through his meticulous six-week murder plot, his helpless terror as the clock ticks toward three, and the devastating irony waiting for him on the other side of consciousness. The vintage crooner style was chosen to mirror the era in which the source story was both written and broadcast, placing the listener inside the same cultural moment as the original audience.

ABOUT THE SOURCE EPISODE
Sleep No More — "Three O'Clock" — broadcast December 12, 1956 on NBC Radio Network.  A watchmaker named Stapp has spent six weeks secretly constructing a homemade bomb in his basement, convinced his wife is having an affair. Methodically smuggling in small amounts of explosive material and copper wire from his shop, he assembles the device inside a repurposed soapbox, wires it to an alarm clock set to detonate at 3:00 p.m., and plans to be safely at work when the blast obliterates his house — and his wife — inside it.On the day he completes the final connection, two burglars break in, catch him in the hallway, beat him unconscious, and tie him up with rope in the very basement where the bomb is ticking. Gagged and helpless, Stapp watches the minutes drain away, unable to warn anyone of the device just feet from him. A child briefly spots him through the basement transom window, but the mother dismisses it as impolite curiosity and pulls the child away.As the clock strikes three, Stapp loses consciousness — not to an explosion, but to sheer terror. He wakes hours later to his wife and a police officer standing over him. His wife casually mentions that she emptied the box that morning, using its contents as fertilizer in her backyard garden.The bomb was never a bomb at all. His meticulous instrument of murder had been quietly disarmed by the woman he intended to kill — without her ever knowing it existed.

ABOUT SLEEP NO MORE
Sleep No More was an NBC Radio Network anthology series hosted and narrated by Nelson Olmsted, featuring adaptations of suspense, horror, and mystery stories drawn from classic and contemporary fiction. Each episode opened with Olmsted's signature invitation to turn down the lights and settle into the darkness — a ritual that made the show one of radio's most atmospheric and beloved horror anthologies. Introduced by announcer Ben Grauer, the series brought some of the genre's finest short fiction to life through Olmsted's masterful narration. "Three O'Clock" was based on the short story by William Irish — the pen name of celebrated noir and suspense author Cornell Woolrich — and broadcast on December 12, 1956.

ABOUT STATIC WAX
Static Wax is an original music project from Darren Marlar, the creator and host of Weird Darkness. Each Static Wax song takes a story told on a vintage radio broadcast and reimagines it as an era-appropriate original composition — the way it might have sounded if it had been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. The songs are written and produced to authentically reflect the musical styles of the golden age of radio, from crooner ballads and big band swing to early rock and roll and beyond. Static Wax is part of the Weird Darkness RetroRadio universe, where classic old time radio episodes are presented alongside original music inspired by their stories.

“Three O’Clock”: A watchmaker spends six weeks secretly building a bomb to kill his wife — but on the day he sets it to blow, two burglars tie him up in the very basement where the clock is ticking. | #RetroRadio #WeirdDarkness | EP0633

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Area 13” (August 26, 1977) ***WD
00:44:07.927 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Scarecrow And Snowman” (January 22, 1944) ***WD (LQ)
01:12:50.567 = Quiet Please, “Portrait Of A Character” (January 09, 1949) ***WD
01:42:07.113 = Radio City Playhouse, “Joey Was Different” (August 22, 1949)
02:10:34.531 = Isn’t It Crime, “Speaking of Murder” (December 14, 1945)
02:39:26.724 = Suspense, “Kandy Tooth Caper” (January 10, 1948)
03:40:11.194 = The Sealed Book, “You Only Die Once” (September 09, 1945) ***WD
04:09:41.616 = The Shadow, “The Ghost of Caleb Mackenzie” (January 26, 1941) ***WD
04:39:15.305 = Sleep No More, “Three O’Clock” (December 12, 1956)
05:08:21.289 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0633