''Mystery House'' was a
radio drama
Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine ...
series which began broadcasting on
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...
in 1929. The program was an early effort at bringing thriller and suspense dramas to the airwaves.
''
The Oakland Tribune
The ''Oakland Tribune'' is a weekly newspaper published in Oakland, California, by the Bay Area News Group (BANG), a subsidiary of MediaNews Group.
Founded in 1874, the ''Tribune'' rose to become an influential daily newspaper. With the decli ...
'' offered this description of the program on September 21, 1930:
:''Mystery House'' to Offer More Thrills
:Thrills and spine-chilling happenings framed against a musical background are again promised NBC listeners when another episode of ''Mystery House'' is released this evening between 5:45 and 6:15 o'clock,
P.S.T. The
melodrama serial is to be heard on
KGO.
Cast
Chester Stratton played Lynn Edwards, and Teresa Dale played Mrs. Pendergast.
Formats of fear
A later series with the same title prompted speculation at Radio Archives:
:''Mystery House'' staffers would perform in each half-hour drama, while others would provide sound effects, rewrite scripts and so on. But could this really succeed as a business model? Would people buy a mystery book if they already knew the ending? An interesting question, considering how little information there is available about the firm -- or if, in fact, it even existed. Research into this query turned up an address for "Mystery House" at 70 Park Avenue in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
, where a hotel now stands, and that the publishing firm ceased operation sometime after 1964. As for the broadcast history behind the series, the "shroud of mystery" remains intact. Newspaper archives report a series with that name as having been broadcast in 1929 over
WGN in
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
and apparently still on the air as late as 1951. The show was broadcast in a variety of formats; sometimes as a weekly half-hour, sometimes as a five-day-a-week quarter-hour show. ''Mystery House'' has also been associated with appearances on
WOR in New York; both WOR and WGN were flagship stations of the
Mutual network at that time.
Radio Archives
/ref>
References
{{reflist
1929 radio dramas
American radio dramas
Anthology radio series
1920s American radio programs
NBC radio programs