The Black Mass
1963-1970
Known Episodes: 34
KPFA (Pacifica radio) studios in Berkeley produced this show that adapted classic horror literature for radio back in the 1960s. Producer Erik Bauersfeld read many of the narratives.
Sources:
KPFA History
Digital Deli
Radio Horror Hosts
Wikipedia
OTRR Log
Jerry Haendig’s Log
All Hallows
A man is accidentally locked in a cathedral after closing and is taken for a back-stairs tour by the caretaker. He hints at ancient things that can move cyclopean masonry. Vague. [Adapted from Walter De La Mere]
An Evening’s Entertainment
In a fireside tale, children are warned away from a hill where voices are heard from inside and the bodies of a man and his ward were once discovered mutilated. [Adapted from M.R. James]Ash Tree, The
A witch curses a house as she is hanged. Thereafter, people who sleep in the bedroom near the ash tree in that house die painful deaths… from the spiders with long, gray hair that crawl out of it! A cat dies. When the tree is burned, guess who’s mummified body they find inside? [Adapted from M.R. James]Atrophy
A man sequentially loses the ability to move his extremities. The doctor says its atrophy, too much TV, but it keeps moving upward. His wife is so nonchalant it’s funny. [“George” Adapted from J. Anthony West]Bartleby, The Scrivener
A lawyer hires a man to copy legal text, but the employee refuses to do the least bit of extra work, politely declining with “I’d prefer not to.” Despite the law firm’s lenience, he eventually decides he’d rather not copy. Then, terminated, he refuses to leave! In the end, they move the office to be rid of him! [Adapted from Herman Melville]Boarded Window, The
A settler loses his wife and prepares her body for burial, then the corpse is attacked by a panther! [Adapted from Ambrose Bierce]Candaules, Commissioner
A pompous colonizer in a fictional Lydia during a war that has been ongoing for seventeen years talks at his servant and bodyguard Gyges, telling him patronizingly how his children will have a better life with a future promise of paved roads. Then he gets all creepy asking if the bodyguard wants to see his wife naked! His wife Nyssia catches on, and gives Gyges an ultimatum: to kill either the king or himself. She asks questions about torture and seems obsessively masochistic. Turns out she is aiding the insurgency. They are overthrown from within. The story cannot properly be adapted to such a short running time, missing much of the subtext of the original, yet also seeming to drag. Based on the Greek Candaules, it is a statement on the Vietnam War. Not standard fare for The Black Mass. Violent and sexual. Rated R. [Adapted from Daniel C. Gerould.]Country Doctor, A
A surreal but atmospheric account of a house-call where the doctor follows his prescribed role to his own detriment. I dubbed him Unforgiven. [Adapted from Franz Kafka]Death of Halpin Fraser, The
A man in a dreamless sleep happens across his mother’s tomb… and boy is she ticked that he left her behind when he moved out West! One of the first “living dead” stories, from back in 1891.
[Adapted from Ambrose Bierce, see also CBS Radio Mystery Theater‘s version]
Diary of A Madman
An underachiever, jealous of others’ success, overhears two dogs talking– one being that of his boss’ daughter, Sofi whom he is obsessed with. He decides to get some juice from the pen-pal of Sofi’s dog and follows it home. The letters indicate that the young woman finds him an object of ridicule. We then continue to follow the man, Poprishchin, into madness as his focus on status increasingly frustrates him given his insurmountable inadequacy. When he reads in the news that Spain is without a king, it makes perfect sense that he is, of course, the long lost heir to their throne. Soon, the “Spanish deputies” arrive to take him away. [Adapted from Nikolai Gogol]
Disillusionment
A man tells the narrator how, ever since he was a child, he has always been disappointed in his expectations. No matter the thrill or wonder, no experience has ever surpassed his hopes. He is mired in an inescapable depression of perhaps what Sartre called Nausea. He blames the glittering idealism of philosophers and poets. [Adapted from Thomas Mann ]Esme
Two women are saddled with an escaped hyena that proceeds to kill a gypsy child. A societal parody. [Adapted from Saki]Evening Primrose
A poet decides to live stealthily inside a department store, but discovers a whole underground of people already there! They even have their own form of protection: The Dark Men (who live secretly in funeral homes.)He falls in love with a woman, but she has eyes for another. It’s the night watchman. That would be a very dangerous liaison for the store dwellers…[Adapted from John Collier]Feeder, The
A person on life support Is impatient to ‘come alive’ again. Would he be dead if it wasn’t for the machines? The overbearing sound effect of the breathing apparatus’ noise distracts from the narrative. The immobile patient watches the dust. He complains. He imagines things. He listens to sneakers. [Adapted from Carl Linder.]Flies, The
In modern day, a vagabond breaks into a house and finds a feast… but the owner is in the next room, in a coffin, covered with flies that swarm. Down the road outside comes a man with a cart crying, “Bring out your dead!” What year is it out the back door? The owner, the flies… Is he dead from the plague? [Adapted from Anthony Vercoe]Haunted House, A
Gothic Romance. A couple, now ghosts, search for treasure within a family’s home. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). They find the treasure they lost in the bed of the living couple: the light in the heart. [Adapted from Virginia Woolf]Imp of The Perverse, The
A condemned man tells the story of how he came to be in fetters. Have you ever been tempted to do some mischief just to see what would happen? On a whim, the narrator takes it upon himself to kill a man with a poisoned candle. No evidence. Untraceable. He gets away with it… until, along Poe’s common theme of guilt and self recrimination, he becomes similarly fixated on the act of confession! Overacted! My God! …overacted. [Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe.]
Jolly Corner, The
A real estate mogul keeps his quaint childhood home that may be haunted. This thick in metaphor Victorian plods along for almost an hour! He faces off with the ghost of the man he could have been had he not chosen to move to Europe in his youth. [Adapted from Henry James]
Judgement, The
Wow, I haven’t got a clue. A guy has a pretend conversation in his head while writing a letter to a friend in St. Petersburg. Then he goes to visit his aging and possibly senile father who then sentences his son to death! The man goes down the street and jumps in the river. If you are unfamiliar with Kafka, you may want to skip this one. [Adapted from Franz Kafka]
Man of the Crowd
A man follows another man through crowded city streets, becoming increasingly curious as to his destination each time he loses his target. The disheveled wanderer never seems to stop. What a perfect way to commit a crime. [Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe]Manuscript Found in a Bottle
A drawn-out story about a man on a seaward journey, who sees nearly the entire crew washed overboard in a storm and his ship careening ever southward, lost. Poe captures the oppressive size of the dark ocean and the helplessness of man in the face of raw nature. Close to the pole, the ship descends into a giant whirlpool. [Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe]Moonlit Road, The
A story told from three points of view. A jealous man kills his wife in an unfounded fit of rage. When he sees her ghost, he is shocked into amnesia from the guilt. His son knows none of what happened, only that his mother was murdered, and his father disappeared. The tragedy is that the wife never knew it was her husband who strangled her in the dark, and only appeared to convey her love. [Adapted from Ambrose Bierce]Nightmare
A paranoid, persecuted, meek man seeks the help of a psychiatrist, who actually cures him. Then he realizes that the suffering had grown to define him. Nightmares begin to hound him, and he blames the doctor for the emptiness he now feels. [Adapted from Alan Wykes]O Mirror, Mirror
Auntie describes to her little adopted girl how the youngster is “different,” an ugly duckling who can never go out into the world. Because Auntie knows what it’s like to be “different.” [Adapted from Nigel Kneale]Oil of Dog
A boy’s family sells snake oil made from dog… until a better solution appears. [Adapted from Ambrose Bierce]Outsider, The
A vague story about a tortured soul living alone in a dark castle. When he climbs a turret, he discovers a land above. Exploring, a mirror reveals the hideous truth. He must always live apart from people, consigned to the darkness, an outsider. [Adapted from H.P. Lovecraft]The Predicament
A rich, racist elderly woman who is too full of herself and her money enters a clock tower with her servant, and stands upon his shoulders to look out a window at the panoramic view. Turns out the window is a service door for the clock tower, with its sharp giant steel hands… and guess what time it is? [Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe]Proof Positive
A man presents himself to the local Psychic Society for a lecture concerning a secret he has discovered: that life after death is possible! But he is sick, and dies right there on the stage… what is that smell? [Adapted from Graham Greene]Rats in the Walls, The
So abridged it’s hard to understand. A retiree restores his ancestral home, built on land “holy” before the Romans, and dreams of a secret underground grotto where a swarm of rats feed upon his ancestors’ cattle farms of fungoid creatures… and humans. [Adapted from H.P. Lovecraft]Shiddah and Kuziba
A demon’s mother describes to her fearful son how the hideous humans cannot hurt him. The day will come when the light from above is snuffed out. [Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer]Squaw, The
A kitten is accidentally killed, driving the mother cat to a crazed vengeance![Adapted from Bram Stoker. On the Native American word: squaw]
Tales by Lord Dunsany
Lobster Salad: A man is pursued op the sheer rock face of the palace of Colquonhombros and encounters a breach he cannot traverse. When he is almost caught by sable-furred, tiger-toothed apes, he remembers the pin he had lain next to his bed in another world… and stabs himself awake.The Workman: A falling scaffold worker carves his name into the wood platform that smashes to bits beneath him as he falls to his death. Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the worker’s ghost appears to the narrator to laugh at the futility of his hard work.
Charm Against Thirst: A man spends a fortune on a magic amulet that will prevent his ever dying by thirst. Is that a rain cloud overhead? The man telling the tale, whom the charm has now come to… likes to drink. Heavily.
How the Enemy Came Upon Thlunrana: It was foretold that doom would come to a dark city filled with wizards that prayed to dark and nameless gods. One night through the South gate a man tread unchallenged to the temples inner mystery itself and laid eyes on it… and drove the magicians out.
The Dream of King Karna-Vootra: A king remembers the stunning and beloved face of his queen and promises a travelogue of places in the Dreamlands that will sing the story of her beauty. He asks her to join him, but she shakes her head… no. For he has forgotten a thing.
Charon: After a long silence, a single shivering wraith is taken across the river by a ferryman who has never smiled and has never cried… until now. [Adapted from Lord Dunsany]
Tell-Tale Heart, The
Poe’s classic. Again. A man dislikes his employer’s lazy eye, and gets a thrill out of sneaking into his room to ill him. But once the body is buried, the constables show up asking about the scream. Well done. [Adapted from: Edgar Allan Poe]
Witch of the Willows
A jaded man discovers a woods is haunted by a witch. When he returns to beg a life of magic she tells him the awful price! [Adapted from Lord Dunsany]
