Episode Details

A man who has feared death every day of his life wakes among strangers who cannot die — and finds that to them, he is something called an “atavus” — drawn by lot into what they have waited five hundred years to do.

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CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Wise Child” (March 24, 1978) ***WD
00:45:57.515 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Immortal Gentleman” (June 17, 1939) ***WD
01:14:01.420 = Barry Craig, “Corpse On Delivery” (November 31, 1951)
01:41:53.419 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)
02:26:10.177 = Night Beat, “Lost Souls” (November 16, 1951) ***WD
02:55:47.576 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mk. Arkady Bradian, Bolder and TNT” (1966)
02:58:57.644 = Man In Black (The Black Book), “The Price of the Head” (February 02, 1952) ***WD
03:13:42.390 = Blackstone The Magic Detective, “The Ghost That Wasn’t” (November 28, 1948) ***WD
03:26:24.838 = Box 13, “The Professor And The Puzzle” (January 09, 1949)
03:52:53.344 = Calling All Cars, “The Human Bomb” (December 20, 1933) ***WD
04:22:42.424 = Casey Crime Photographer, “A Tooth For a Tooth” (July 15, 1946) ***WD
04:48:33.183 = 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/WDRR0713

Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio: Old Time Radio in the Dark, a collection of vintage broadcasts spanning psychological horror, hard-boiled detective work, ghost stories, and the strange corners where the two overlap.

• It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and E.G. Marshall's presentation of "Wise Child," written by Sam Dann and starring Ralph Bell. Joyce and Calvin Spurlock argue their way off a turnpike into a storm near a place called Kiowa Flats, sleep the night in their stalled car, and wake to find a newborn baby lying naked on a hillside — alive, unharmed, and abandoned. Joyce insists the child is a miracle and claims him as her own, inventing a birth story to secure a certificate. Calvin Junior never grows, not an ounce, not a fraction of an inch, while doctors find him perfectly healthy. Then a newspaper report reveals that the wilderness north of Kiowa Flats had been used as a secret dumping ground for atomic waste — and Calvin begins to sense something in the air, a force, a light, a power that lets him read the minds of his boss, his sister, and his customers, reshaping his entire life around whatever entered that child during the storm.
• From there, Arch Oboler's "Immortal Gentleman" arrives with Edmund O'Brien and Anne Shepherd, in which a man terrified of death his entire life screams aloud in a crowded auditorium and then explains why to the woman beside him. Sitting through a political speech, he found himself displaced into a future where science has abolished death entirely — a world of young people conditioned for fifty years, filled with all human knowledge, living two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years with nothing to do because "the old ones" never die and never surrender their positions. They call him an atavus, a throwback that surfaces once in every two thousand embryos. Twenty-four of them draw lots in a darkened room, and he is handed a black box and told to throw it at a woman who ha