The run
- Network
- Syndicated
- Years active
- 1930–1955
- Surviving broadcasts
- 21
- Genre
- horror
"Turn out your lights!" — the cackling host, the creaking door, and Detroit's contribution to radio terror. Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive, harvested from the Old Time Radio Researchers collections and indexed episode by episode.
Source collection
Internet Archive audio collections
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
6 dated broadcasts across 97 years on the air, with 96 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2026, in original transmission order.
- 1. The Case of the Missing Hour · 17 Mar 2026
- 2. Sign Off · 24 Mar 2026
- 3. Dead Air · 31 Mar 2026
A Room Above the Street
4 Aug 2026 · 1h 2m
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
The Long Silence
28 Jul 2026 · 25 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
Dead Air
21 Jul 2026 · 40 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Sign Off
14 Jul 2026 · 55 min
The one everybody argues about.
The Case of the Missing Hour
7 Jul 2026 · 18 min
Short, complete and unexpectedly devastating.
Night Broadcast
30 Jun 2026 · 33 min
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
The Last Train Out
23 Jun 2026 · 48 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
Signal at Midnight
16 Jun 2026 · 1h 3m
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Also on Syndicated
Syndicated in 1930–1955
Other series the network carried while The Hermit's Cave was on the air.
Same seasons
horror on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
What it became
The anthology of dread
A voice, a creaking door, and a self-contained story designed to frighten you in half an hour. Suspense and Lights Out built the grammar every horror anthology still uses.
Lineage is written by our editors, not inferred from listening data.
Descendants
Working in the tradition of The Hermit's Cave
Modern series carrying this form forward.
If you liked this
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