The Weird Circle, Vol. 1

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”