Weird Circle — 1944
39 episodes broadcast in 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.
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