A baby cries somewhere inside a Hollywood mansion.
There is only one problem.
No baby lives there.
And when the crying begins, something terrible seems to follow.
In this Chesterton Radio Deep Dive, we enter the strange world of Carlton E. Morse’s legendary radio adventure I Love a Mystery and one of its most unsettling stories: The Thing That Cries in the Night.
Jack Packard, Doc Long and Reggie York arrive at a troubled household where family secrets, violence and an inexplicable sound begin to suggest that something impossible may be lurking in the darkness.
But this is more than a look at a classic radio mystery.
We explore the remarkable history of I Love a Mystery, Carlton E. Morse’s combination of detective fiction, pulp adventure, horror and the supernatural; the story’s journey from an earlier 1939 production to the surviving 1949 Mutual serial; and a remarkable cast that includes Russell Thorson, Jim Boles, a young Tony Randall, and Mercedes McCambridge.
Most of all, we ask why the story still works.
Radio gives us no monster to see. It gives us a sound.
A baby crying somewhere in the darkness.
And our imagination does the rest.
There is also a distinctly Chestertonian question hiding inside the mystery. Father Brown understood that believing in the supernatural does not require us to blame every strange occurrence on the supernatural. Sometimes our fear of monsters prevents us from noticing the very human secrets hiding in plain sight.
No spoilers. We won’t reveal the culprit or the solution. This Deep Dive is an invitation to experience the mystery for yourself.
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Because sometimes the most frightening thing on the radio is the thing you cannot see.
