Murder at Midnight, Vol. 1

Produced in New York, Murder at Midnight came to ABC Radio in September of 1946 and featured horror stories with supernatural twists. Raymond Morgan, a former Long Island minister who had left the cloth for the excitement of radio, was the foreboding host who each week uttered the lines: “Midnight, the witching hour when the night is darkest, our fears the strongest, and our strength at its lowest ebb. Midnight, when the graves gape open and death strikes.” Over its six-year run in syndication, Murder at Midnight had a relatively high production budget which helped it pull respectable audience shares. The supporting players were New York’s best, including Lawson Zerbe, Karl Swenson, Berry Kroeger, Lon Clark, Elspeth Eric, and Raymond Edward Johnson. Anton M. Leader directed the series and the scripts were by top writers, including Joe Ruscoll, Max Ehrlich, and Robert Newman. Episodes included are “The Dead Hand,” “The Man Who Was Death,” “The Secret of XR3,” “Wherever I Go,” “Trigger Man,” “Death’s Goblet,” “The Heavy Death,” “Nightmare,” “The Creeper,” “Murder’s a Lonely Business,” “The House Where Death Lived,” and “The Kabbalah.”