Mystery, Crime & Detective · Syndicated (Mutual Broadcasting System, later NBC Red); a Ziv Production recorded at RCA New York
Weird Circle
August 29, 1943 – May 27, 1945 · 78 broadcasts
The Weird Circle (1943-1945) was a syndicated supernatural anthology -- a Ziv production recorded at RCA's New York studios and carried first by the Mutual network and later by NBC's Red network. Its host, an old man gathered with his fellows "in this cave by the restless sea," called the bell keeper to toll the bell and summon "stories strange and weird" out of the past. Across two seasons of 39 broadcasts each -- 78 in all -- the show dramatized the classic horror, gothic and supernatural literature of the 19th century and earlier: Poe, Stevenson, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant, Wilkie Collins, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, the Brontes and more. Longer novels were pared to their weird core; shorter tales were expanded, often with new characters and a romance grafted on -- sometimes rewritten so freely the original is barely recognizable. Production was modest and music sparse, the mood carried instead by an uncredited New York repertory company that included Arnold Moss, Lawson Zerbe, Eleanor Audley, Audrey Totter and Chester Stratton. The result is a half-hour library of the macabre canon, told plainly and close to the bone.
Collection status:
78 of 78 held (100% complete)
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Episode Spine
Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.
1943
The Weird Circle opens with Poe: Roderick Usher, his dying sister Madeline and the crumbling, doom-haunted family mansion that will not outlast them.
A husband and wife, taken with the portrait of a long-dead cutthroat, rent his supposedly haunted London house for a week to meet a real ghost -- from Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters."
A Corsican adaptation of Balzac's "La Vendetta": a father's blood-feud pride destroys his own daughter when she marries into the enemy clan.
Poe's sole novel, condensed -- Arthur Gordon Pym's nightmarish sea voyage of mutiny, shipwreck, starvation and stranger horrors toward the far south.
From Balzac's "L'Interdiction": a scheming wife tries to have her generous, secretive husband declared insane so she can seize his fortune.
A traveler wins big at a Paris gambling house and is offered a bed for the night -- a canopied bed built as a slow, silent machine for murder. After Wilkie Collins.
A boarding house seems merely haunted -- moaning in the attic -- until the lodgers confront an invisible, solid, living thing. From Fitz-James O'Brien's early tale of the unseen.
A period mystery after Charles Reade: a killing in old Knightsbridge and the long unraveling of who was truly responsible.
Maupassant's "Le Horla": a man's journal charts his creeping certainty that an unseen being has entered his house and is feeding on his mind.
Poe's doppelganger tale -- a dissolute man is shadowed and thwarted at every turn by a double bearing his own name, William Wilson, until the fatal confrontation.
Balzac's "A Passion in the Desert": a soldier lost in the Egyptian sands survives in a strange, doomed companionship with a panther.
Merimee's Corsican tale of honor: a boy betrays a fugitive for a silver watch, and his father exacts a terrible, unbending justice.
Edward Everett Hale's parable -- Philip Nolan curses his country in a courtroom and is condemned to spend the rest of his life at sea, never again to hear its name.
Drawn from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: Doctor Manette's smuggled prison manuscript, and the Bastille testimony that condemns the man his daughter loves.
A loose take on Thomas Hood -- a young man eager to learn the streets falls in with two master thieves to rob the richest house in the county, guarded only by an old man and his granddaughter.
After Samuel Johnson: a young heir's expectations, and the moral reckoning that overtakes a life built on waiting for a fortune.
Maupassant's "The Hand": a magistrate recounts an Englishman haunted -- and finally killed -- by a severed, chained hand that would not stay dead.
Charlotte Bronte's novel condensed to its gothic spine -- governess Jane Eyre, brooding Mr. Rochester and the madwoman locked in the attic at Thornfield.
1944
Poe's foundational detective story: the savage, impossible killings in a locked Paris apartment, and Dupin's reasoning toward an answer no one suspected.
George Eliot's tale of second sight -- a man cursed to foresee death and read minds, and a scientist itching to test a serum that briefly revives the poisoned dead.
Amelia Edwards's railway ghost story: a businessman shares a train compartment with a fellow passenger who, he later learns, had already died.
From Fitz-James O'Brien: a night of mounting dread in which an ordinary room becomes a trap of terror.
Poe's confession of murder -- the killer betrayed by the imagined, relentless beating of his victim's heart beneath the floorboards.
Balzac's "La Grande Breteche": a jealous husband walls up his wife's lover alive behind a bricked doorway while she is forced to watch and deny.
Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand": a lime-burner who left home to seek the Unpardonable Sin returns having found it in his own hardened heart.
Mary Shelley's novel: Victor Frankenstein assembles life from dead matter, then abandons the suffering creature who turns on everything its maker loves.
Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale" from Redgauntlet: a tenant is summoned to a spectral hall to collect a receipt from his landlord's damned, still-carousing ghost.
A detective story after Emile Gaboriau, turning on a small, damning clue and the patient exposure of a hidden murderer.
Barham's Ingoldsby legend of Tappington Hall -- a comic-eerie haunting and the very earthly explanation behind the family specter.
After Balzac (source disputed): a strange judgment falls on the guilty, justice arriving by uncanny rather than lawful means.
Emily Bronte's novel pared to its haunting -- Heathcliff, Catherine and a love so fierce it outlasts death on the Yorkshire moors.
Hawthorne's "Lady Eleanore's Mantle": a proud beauty's embroidered mantle carries the smallpox that humbles her and scourges the colony.
Poe's revenge: Montresor lures the insulting Fortunato into the catacombs and bricks him, living, into the wall behind the Amontillado.
Maupassant's "Apparition": a man asked to fetch papers from a shuttered chateau is met by a silent woman who begs him to comb out her long hair.
After Bulwer-Lytton's Falkland: a doomed romantic entanglement drives toward tragedy.
Dickens and Charles Allston Collins's "The Trial for Murder": a juror is joined in the jury box by the ghost of the very man whose killing they are trying.
Marryat's "White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains": a widower's beautiful new wife is a shape-shifting creature who preys on his children.
Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story": a child is lured toward the snow by the phantom of a little girl wronged long ago in the great house.
Bierce's tale of a duel-by-terror in a haunted, abandoned house -- told, in the radio version, with the ending moved to the front.
Wilkie Collins's "The Dream Woman": a man dreams of a fair woman with a knife, and years later marries her -- and the dream begins to come true.
Irving's "Adventure of the Young Italian": a painter's guilty past returns in the form of a portrait and a face he cannot escape.
Wilkie Collins -- a doctor perfects a drug that renders its subject immune to pain and means to try it on his cousin, but her dead lover objects from beyond the grave.
Melville's "The Bell-Tower": a proud Renaissance architect builds a great clock-tower and an iron automaton to strike its bell, and is destroyed by his own creation.
Gautier's "Jettatura": a man comes to believe his own gaze -- the evil eye -- brings ruin and death to everyone he loves.
Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year dramatized -- London under the 1665 pestilence, the dead-carts and the mark of the plague on a sealed house.
Dickens's "The Queer Client" from Pickwick Papers: a man ruined and imprisoned by his father-in-law lives only to carry out a long, cold revenge.
Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial": a young man leaves his wounded companion to die in the woods, and the buried lie poisons his life for years.
From Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii: a love potion, a jealous rival and the doomed lovers of a city about to burn under Vesuvius.
Wilkie Collins's "Mad Monkton": a young man haunted by his family's curse of insanity searches obsessively for an unburied relative's corpse.
Poe's "Ligeia": a widower's dead first wife asserts her will over death, returning through the failing body of his second.
Balzac's "El Verdugo": a captured nobleman's eldest son is forced to become his own family's executioner to save the line.
Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter": a scientist raises his daughter among poisonous plants until her very touch is deadly to the young man who loves her.
Le Fanu's "Schalken the Painter": a girl is betrothed against her will to a corpse-pale suitor and claimed, at last, by the dead.
Hugo's "Last Day of a Condemned Man": the final hours of a prisoner awaiting the guillotine, told from inside his mounting dread.
A wife wakes screaming from a dream in which her long-lost brother warns against the House of Waverley -- a place neither she nor her husband has ever heard of, until he rides toward it.
Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Wondersmith": a maker of malignant toys animates a troupe of murderous manikins whose evil turns back on their creators.
Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens": a scientist builds the perfect microscope, discovers a beautiful woman in a civilization within a water drop, and loses his mind for love of her.
1945
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: the scholar who sells his soul to Mephistopheles for twenty-four years of power, and the reckoning that comes due.
Dumas's "Zodomirsky's Duel": a matter of love and honor settled by a duel in which one man's calm is more terrible than the other's aim.
After Ainsworth: a bride claimed on her wedding day by a spectral bridegroom out of the family's cursed past.
Poe's "Metzengerstein": a cruel young baron and the fiery, uncanny horse -- risen, it seems, from a burning tapestry -- that carries him to his doom.
"The River Man" -- a weird tale whose literary source is unidentified, likely one of the scripts written directly for the series; a drowning and the thing the river gives back.
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner": the sailor who shot the albatross, cursed to drift among his dead crew and tell his tale forever.
Poe's "The Oblong Box": a passenger's obsession with a fellow traveler's mysterious crate ends in shipwreck and a grief he had misread entirely.
After James Hogg: a wedding-eve apparition -- the mysterious bride whose true nature is revealed too late.
Dickens's "The Signal-Man": a lonely railway signalman is tormented by a spectre at the mouth of the tunnel that foretells each coming disaster.
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone condensed: a cursed Indian diamond vanishes on the night of a birthday, and its theft draws inexorable consequences.
Merimee's "The Shot": insulted, Captain Silvio challenges Count Markoff; the count fires first and misses, and Silvio saves his own shot to claim years later at a time of his choosing.
Gautier's "The Mummy's Foot": a curio bought as a paperweight proves to be the foot of an Egyptian princess who comes to reclaim it.
Tieck's "Der Pokal": a magic goblet, a lost love and a glimpse across the years of what might have been.
Poe's "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar": a dying man is mesmerized at the point of death and held, speaking, in a state between life and decay.
Andersen's "The Shadow": a scholar's own shadow detaches, prospers, and returns to master and finally destroy the man who cast it.
"The Bride of Death" -- credited at Plot Spot to Joseph Howard Krucher and likely an original series script; a marriage that is also a claiming by the grave.
Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: the respectable doctor whose potion frees a murderous second self he can no longer control.
Plot Spot attributes this to Arthur Machen's "The Red Hand" (Wikipedia leaves the source unconfirmed): a primitive flint weapon and a strange sign lead two investigators toward a survival of prehistoric evil beneath modern London.
Wilkie Collins's "The Haunted Hotel": a Venetian palazzo turned hotel harbors the guilt of a murder, and a room that will not keep its secret.
Stevenson's "Markheim": a murderer in a dealer's shop on Christmas is confronted by a mysterious visitor who knows his soul.
"The Black Parchment" -- a weird tale of uncertain literary origin, likely written for the series; a cursed document and the fate of those who read it.
The Story
The Weird Circle (1943-1945) was a syndicated supernatural anthology -- a Ziv production recorded at RCA's New York studios and carried first by the Mutual network and later by NBC's Red network. Its host, an old man gathered with his fellows "in this cave by the restless sea," called the bell keeper to toll the bell and summon "stories strange and weird" out of the past. Across two seasons of 39 broadcasts each -- 78 in all -- the show dramatized the classic horror, gothic and supernatural literature of the 19th century and earlier: Poe, Stevenson, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant, Wilkie Collins, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, the Brontes and more. Longer novels were pared to their weird core; shorter tales were expanded, often with new characters and a romance grafted on -- sometimes rewritten so freely the original is barely recognizable. Production was modest and music sparse, the mood carried instead by an uncredited New York repertory company that included Arnold Moss, Lawson Zerbe, Eleanor Audley, Audrey Totter and Chester Stratton. The result is a half-hour library of the macabre canon, told plainly and close to the bone.
Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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