Episode Details

A drifter set to die in the gas chamber for a murder he didn't commit offers one last gift to the man who framed him — never imagining what that gift might carry.

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CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Second Sight” (February 27, 1978) ***WD
00:46:14.838 = Origin of Superstition, “Three On A Match” (December 16, 1932) ***WD
01:00:44.894 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Don’t Tell Hilda” (February 27, 1949)
01:29:14.739 = Peril, “Darkness Within” (1953) ***WD (LQ)
01:58:15.099 = Mystery Playhouse, “Death is a Joker” (May 25, 1941) ***WD
02:28:27.475 = Price of Fear, “Meeting In Athens” (July 07, 1973) ***WD
02:55:48.036 = Ellery Queen, “Number Thirty-One” (September 07, 1947) ***WD
03:24:14.186 = Quiet Please, “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (February 27, 1949)
03:53:27.551 = Radio City Playhouse, “The Wind” (October 30, 1949) ***WD
04:22:21.175 = Sam Spade, “Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper” (August 09, 1946) ***WD
04:51:19.818 = 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.

This episode of #RetroRadio — Old Time Radio in the Dark, hosted by Darren Marlar at WeirdDarkness.com, runs ten classic mystery, crime, and horror broadcasts back to back, from a condemned man who donates his eyes to the very person who framed him to Ray Bradbury's tale of a living, intelligent wind that hunts a man across the globe.

• CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "Second Sight," a February 27, 1978 drama hosted by E.G. Marshall in which drifter Larry Millard, condemned to die in the gas chamber for the shotgun murder of farmer Jason Hadley, volunteers his own eyes for an anonymous corneal transplant — handing his sight to Glen Plaxton, the businessman who actually pulled the trigger and framed him to protect a secret reservoir land-grab. After the surgery, Plaxton and his partner Tip Foster begin to suspect that the dead man's eyes may have carried more than vision.
• Next, Origin of Superstition traces the famous taboo against lighting three cigarettes from a single flame in "Three On A Match," a December 16, 1932 sketch that carries listeners back to 1899 and the Boer War in South Africa, where British officer Captain Frank Mattox laughs off the fire-reading warning of a Zulu medicine man named Grumbo, who reads ruin in the ashes and cautions of "danger in three."
• In "Don't Tell Hilda," the hard-boiled Pat Novak For Hire (February 27, 1949, starring Jack Webb) finds the San Francisco waterfront boat-for-hire man tangled in murder when a beautiful blonde claiming amnesia collapses dead in a coffee joint after a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Hounded by Inspector Hellman and helped by boozy ex-doctor Jocko Madigan, Novak traces her to a long-vanished heiress named Marcia Halpern and a fortune up on Pacific Heights.
• Peril offers the 1953 psychological case "Darkness Within," where Mrs. Diana Carson walks into the office of psychiatrist Dr. James Bancroft insisting that her mild-mannered stockbroker husband, Lionel Carson, seized the fireplace tongs and tried to murder her — then woke with no memory of the attack, much like the family cat she found poisoned in the basement. Bancroft must decide whether Lionel suffers a blackout-driven split personality or something far more deliberate.
• Mystery Playh