Weird Circle

The Weird Circle radio show was an anthology of classic thrillers from the pens of the world's best-known and respected fiction authors of the nineteenth century. The focus was on stories of horror, suspense, and the supernatural by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mary Shelley, with an occasional drama by the likes of Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. For The Weird Circle, produced in New York by NBC and offered in syndication, the announcer sat in a cave beside a restless sea and instructed a bell keeper to "toll the bell so all may know that we are gathered again in the weird circle for another strange and weird story from out of the past." The casts included New York's steady pool of busy supporting actors, including Lawson Zerbe, Eleanor Audley, Jackson Beck, Mason Adams, Raymond Edward Johnson, and Arnold Moss. This collection of twelve episodes from 1943 includes stories based on works by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Colllins, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Mérimée, and more. "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The House and the Brain," "The Vendetta," "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," "Declared Insane," "A Terribly Strange Bed," "What Was It?," "The Knightsbridge Mystery," "The Horla," "William Wilson," "A Passion in the Desert," "Mateo Falcone".

As they rode along in their carriage beyond them on the road, they see a man hailing them to stop. It is a tall man in a cape and wide brimmed hat and he tells Heir Gerard Dahl that he has been waiting for him to return from Rotterdam. Dahl is the uncle and guardian of Rose Falderkaust and the caped man tells him that he will visit him tonight at seven o'clock at his studio on an urgent matter.

Messier Lehan had been plaguing Messier LeCoque for years to let him write up some of his interesting criminal cases. He considered him the most popular citizen of Paris and certainly the greatest detective of the time. And he finally gave in and agreed to allow him to write up his last case for his paper, The Murder of the Little Pig, alias Henri Coudrai the little hairdresser.

An excellent ghost story; ancient prophesy and the unburied dead.

Andre Germaine has been condemned by the law of the state and freaky circumstance. He has been accused of his own murder and of a crime against his own family. He fought under Boneparte, he served his country, married and fathered a child but all those things come to nothing in the cell of the condemned. He believes it is the working of a curse placed upon his father to last through all the generations of the line for having loved too well a woman who was promised to another man.

A man promises to bury his dying friend, but fails to keep his promise. A strange revenge.

An old story told in modern terms, with the expected wild ending.

The French conquerors impose a strange doom on a noble Spanish family.

A good story about an actor who commits murder and then tries to convince the police that he's insane.

A man's first wife returns from the dead for a horrible revenge.

Esther was lying in bed half asleep when the clock struck midnight and a voice spoke to her. It sounded to her like her bother Tom and it warned her that her husband Charles must not go to the house of Waverley that it would bring death and sorrow. Esther begged her husband not to go to the house tonight even though he was going to find out what had happened to her brother, Tom Hargreaves.

Originally broadcast between 1943 and 1945, these thirty-minute, supernatural episodes featured stories written by popular authors at the time including Robert Lewis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Edgar Alan Poe, and even Charles Dickens.