Halloween Week, Day 5: "Behind the Locked Door"

"Behind the Locked Door" is one of the best-known old-time radio horror episodes among fandom, yet I've never featured it in any of my previous Halloween blog posts. Let's repair that now! It was an episode of the Mysterious Traveler written by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan, who wrote most of the episodes of the series.

In "Behind the Locked Door," Cathy Evans confronts her boyfriend Martin, an archaeologist who just returned from an expedition but gone into hiding. Disheveled, Martin tells Cathy what he and his professor found on their expedition - an underground civilization of humans who adapted to life without sunlight and the hideous result of their changes. This episode is famous primarily for how it ends - when the titular locked door is opened!

"Behind the Locked Door" was originally aired on the Mysterious Traveler on May 24, 1949 but the surviving version we have was aired November 6, 1951. You can download this episode from the Internet Archive here.

Tomorrow: "Don't worry. Everything's okay."