CBS Radio Mystery Theater CBS · 1940s

The Intermediary

· GHOST OF RADIO ·
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When spiritualist Madame Celeste promises grieving widow Margaret a chance to contact her late husband beyond the veil, the séance begins innocuously enough—candlelight flickering across anxious faces, the medium's fingers dancing across a Ouija board, whispered invocations to the other side. But as the evening deepens, something profoundly wrong emerges from the darkness. The entity communicating is not the departed husband Margaret hoped to reach, but something far older, far hungrier, with knowledge no ghost should possess. In this masterfully crafted episode, the boundary between genuine contact and elaborate con collapses entirely, leaving listeners uncertain which possibility is more terrifying: that the supernatural is real, or that human cruelty can perfectly mimic it.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater stands as one of the most ambitious achievements in late-period radio drama, reviving the golden age of suspenseful storytelling during the 1970s and early 1980s when television had seemingly conquered home entertainment. "The Intermediary" exemplifies what made the series legendary—a commitment to psychological depth matched with atmospheric sound design that transforms the listener's living room into a claustrophobic séance chamber. With scripts that rejected easy answers and performances of remarkable subtlety, the show proved that radio drama hadn't died; it had merely been sleeping, waiting for the right moment to haunt audiences once more.

Don't miss your appointment with the supernatural. Tune in to "The Intermediary" and discover why millions of listeners in the 1970s couldn't resist turning off their television sets to gather around the radio once more. Some mysteries, after all, are best experienced in darkness where only your imagination can see them.