OTR Halloween Day 30: The Witch's Tale

The Witch's Tale is pivotal to old-time radio history - one of the first radio horror anthologies. Many of the conventions established on the Witch's Tale would be carried on by later programs and even into other mediums; the show's host "Old Nancy" founded the horror host type which would later profit everyone from Inner Sanctum Mysteries's Mr. Raymond to the Mysterious Traveler and, of course, the Old Witch, Crypt-Keeper and Vault-Keeper of EC's horror comics.

However, the Witch's Tale is not (how to put it) good. You have to be very forgiving to this program because it did come very early in the history of radio drama. It aired on WOR Mutual from May 1931 to June 1938 under the supervision of Alonzo Dean Cole. We don't have very much of the Witch's Tale today - many are Australian recreations - and what we do have often has terrible audio quality. Those few Mutual broadcasts with good quality are often undermined by the script, lack of sound effects and/or acting.

If it sounds like I'm being unkind, I'm simply trying to counter a lot of the narratives I've seen other OTR fans put forth. I've seen those who claim this show "still holds up" or even that it's "still the greatest radio horror program." It's not. I think you really have to love radio horror shows to get through an episode.

All of that said, I respect the place the Witch's Tale holds in radio horror history and I definitely don't want to exclude the series. So on this, the eve before All Hallow's Eve, let's check out "The Bronze Venus" from July 2 and 5, 1931 (in two parts), adapted from Prosper Mérimée's short story, "La Vénus d'Ille." A Frenchman unearths a bronze statue of the goddess Venus. He thinks this bodes well for his daughter's impending wedding - forgetting that those Greek gods aren't nice to mere mortals.

You can hear "The Bronze Venus" on the Internet Archive!