Weird Circle — 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.