PODCAST · fiction
VintageRadioShows.com
by VintageRadioShows.com
Step back to radio’s golden age—curated classics in comedy, mystery, drama, westerns, and adventure from the 1930s–1950s. Drawn from a library of 40,000+ restored episodes, with new selections added regularly.
Episodes
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "The Boss of the Tarantulas" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger and Tonto have jailed four of the knife-throwing Tarantula gang with help from Texas Jack of the Border City Cafe, and now Jack hands over a dead sheriff's letter naming the last of them: Larkspur, who cheated old Bart Billings out of the Last Chance mine by burying its gold vein...
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "Hold Up Stagecoach" (1940) | Full Episode
Caleb Saxon and his wife Edith ride the stage to Basin City hoping to leave the whispers back East behind them: a court cleared Caleb, but everyone still believes he stole the trust fund he managed for his late friend's son. Then the stranger riding up top pulls a gun, forces the coach down the...
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "The Osage Bank Robbery" (1938) | Full Episode
The Brogan brothers, two of the most wanted killers in the West, rob the bank at Osage and shoot the banker for no reason at all, then vanish without leaving a trail. The sheriff's posse rides out without Sleepy and Missouri, two broke old prospectors who once gave away every dime from their...
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Old Time Radio Mystery — Suspense: "The Lodger" (1940) | Full Episode
London, 1888. A quiet, soft-spoken man takes the upstairs room at the Buntings' boarding house, pays in advance, keeps odd hours, and asks that his landlady never touch the black bag he carries. Out in Whitechapel, a killer the papers call the Avenger is working his way through the fog. Herbert...
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Old Time Radio Adventure — John Steele, Adventurer: "Cargo Unknown" (1949) | Full Episode
Lou Cardone flew 71 fighter missions over Europe and came home too restless to sit still, so he bought a surplus twin-engine ship and called it the Anything, Anywhere Airline. Then a soft-spoken stranger with a file on every quiet cargo Lou ever flew offers him twenty thousand dollars to carry a...
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Old Time Radio Horror — Escape: "Dead of Night" (1947) | Full Episode
Before Escape ever became CBS radio's half hour of high adventure, it was auditioned with this: a chilling half hour adapted from the ventriloquist segment of the 1945 British horror classic Dead of Night. Eric Hickson has clawed his way up from cheap music halls to London's fashionable Kit-Kat...
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Old Time Radio Adventure — Escape: "The Man Who Would Be King" (1947) | Full Episode
Escape was CBS radio's half hour of high adventure, and this is the night it began: the series premiere of July 7, 1947, produced and directed by William N. Robson. Les Crutchfield adapts Rudyard Kipling's tale of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, two loafers who sign a contract to swear off...
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Old Time Radio Adventure — The Green Lama: "Adventure of the Perfect Prisoner" (1949) | Full Episode
Jethro Dumont spent ten years in a Tibetan monastery and came home as the Green Lama, a crime fighter who never carries a gun. In the final broadcast of the 1949 CBS series, starring Paul Frees with Ben Wright as his servant Tulku, a reform-minded warden invites Dumont to see a model prisoner...
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Old Time Radio Adventure — The Green Lama: "The Man Who Never Existed" (1949) | Full Episode
Jethro Dumont spent ten years in a Tibetan monastery and came home as the Green Lama, a crime fighter who refuses to carry a gun. In this audition recording of the CBS series' premiere story, starring Paul Frees with Ben Wright as his loyal servant Tulku, an old friend, archaeologist Harlan...
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Old Time Radio Mystery — Lives of Harry Lime: "Mexican Hat Trick" (1951) | Full Episode
Orson Welles reprises Harry Lime, the charming racketeer of The Third Man, in this 1951 series that tells the con man's adventures before that fatal night in Vienna. In "Mexican Hat Trick," a broke Lime in Mexico City is handed a dying pickpocket's confession to a 17-year-old murder, and sells a...
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Old Time Radio Adventure — Challenge of the Yukon: "The Stolen Pups" (1947) | Full Episode
Challenge of the Yukon follows Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his lead sled dog, Yukon King, as they keep the peace in the Klondike. In "The Stolen Pups," a simple-minded old café handyman longs for a puppy to replace the dog he lost, and two crooked bank clerks use…
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Old Time Radio Adventure — Challenge of the Yukon: "Sam's Gold" (1947) | Full Episode
Challenge of the Yukon follows Sergeant Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his lead sled dog, Yukon King, as they keep the peace in the Klondike. In "Sam's Gold," a kindly prospector once nursed a cantankerous hermit through a winter, and years later the old man's hidden gold…
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "Double For An Outlaw" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger is an iconic masked western hero who fights for justice alongside his Native American companion Tonto. Broadcast throughout the 1930s-1950s, this classic radio serial featured thrilling adventures across the American frontier with the legendary William Tell Overture as its theme.…
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "The Magic Belt" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger is an iconic radio western serial about a masked former Texas Ranger and his Native American companion Tonto who right wrongs in the Old West. In this classic episode, the masked hero and his loyal companion face danger and intrigue in their mission to bring justice to the…
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Old Time Radio Drama — Biography In Sound: "Meet Ernest Hemingway" (1954) | Full Episode
Biography in Sound, a CBS documentary series produced by Norman Corwin, presented biographical profiles of notable American figures through dramatizations, interviews, and narration. A pioneering program that brought the lives of American heroes, artists, and leaders to radio audiences. This...
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Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — Mercury Theater On The Air: "War of the Worlds" (1938) | Full Episode
Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air present H. G. Wells's tale of a Martian invasion, adapted by Howard Koch and told as a live dance-band broadcast that keeps being interrupted by news bulletins. A meteor lands at Grover's Mill, New Jersey; a professor peers at the smoking crater…
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Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "The Diary of Sophronia Winters" (1943) | Full Episode
Suspense presents Lucille Fletcher's first original script for the series, a study in terror told through a diary. Sophronia Winters is forty, freed by her father's death, and on her first holiday in St. Petersburg, Florida when a charming hotel owner from Maine sits down beside her on the beach...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Bouncing Betty Caper" (1948) | Full Episode
A fussy English butler named Carruthers walks into Sam Spade's office, tidies his ashtray, and hires him to go undercover as a chauffeur at Bleakcliff, a clifftop estate near Squid Beach. Someone keeps trying to kill young Kathy McGraw, and the household blames her troubled brother Tony. Kathy...
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Old Time Radio Horror — Lights Out: "It Happened" (1938) | Full Episode
Jean Taylor is a spoiled rich girl from New York on a chaperoned art tour of Paris, and she is bored stiff. She slips away from the Louvre looking for fun and finds a smooth stranger who says he knows her father and offers to show her the real Paris. By nightfall she is locked in an empty house...
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Old Time Radio Western — The Lone Ranger: "Murder Strikes Thrice" (1942) | Full Episode
The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride into Excalibur, a dusty frontier town where somebody is killing men on their birthdays. A year ago, three witnesses swore away the alibi of a young drifter named Paul Zember, and the court sent him to prison for life on his own birthday. Now Cole Rankin has been...
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Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Strange Vendetta" (1958) | Full Episode
The very first radio episode of Have Gun Will Travel, with John Dehner as Paladin, the cultured San Francisco gunman of CBS's "thinking man's Western." San Francisco, 1875: Paladin lends his opera box to a Mexican grandee, Don Miguel Rojas, and his lovely wife. After The Marriage of Figaro, an...
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Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "Britt Ponset's Christmas Carol" (1953) | Full Episode
Jimmy Stewart rides the winter trail as Britt Ponset, the easygoing drifter of NBC's The Six Shooter. With Christmas coming on, he comes upon Johnny, an orphaned runaway who wants no part of the holiday, so Britt sits the boy down and tells him Dickens' A Christmas Carol the only way he knows…
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Old Time Radio Comedy — The Jack Benny Program: "Jack and the Bean Stalk" (1954) | Full Episode
Spring has come to Beverly Hills, and Jack Benny is out in the backyard in overalls and long white gloves, planting string beans again — last year's crop was so small the bugs were picking them. This time he has a miracle fertilizer. Between Rochester refusing to taste his "mushrooms," Dennis...
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Old Time Radio Comedy — Abbott & Costello: "Return to P.S. 15" (1944) | Full Episode
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were the fastest, loudest comedy act in America, and their weekly NBC show turned every broadcast into a scheme that got away from them. In this November 1944 outing, Lou's old grade school — P.S. 15 — decides to honor its most famous dropout, and Lou heads back to the...
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Old Time Radio Comedy — The Jack Benny Program: "Dennis Wants to Join the Air Force" | Full Episode
For more than twenty years Jack Benny ran the best-loved comedy in American radio, and the joke was always himself: vain, penny-pinching, stuck forever at 39, and hopeless on the violin. In this April 1954 broadcast it is spring-cleaning day at Jack's house. Rochester has the place turned inside...
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Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "Rare Black Orchid" (1950) | Full Episode
Connie Brooks teaches English at Madison High, dodges her blustering principal, and never quite gets a date with the biology teacher. In this May 1950 broadcast, Mr. Conklin's prized rare black orchid becomes the center of the week's trouble — and Miss Brooks, as always, ends up standing closest…
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Old Time Radio Thriller — Lights Out: "Execution" (1943) | Full Episode
Lights Out was radio's premier horror series, and it reached its best-remembered form when writer-director Arch Oboler brought it back to CBS in 1942 — a half hour of dread delivered to a country already living through a war. Oboler used the show as readily for human terror as for the…
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Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Sinister Siren Caper" (1951) | Full Episode
The Adventures of Sam Spade let Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled private eye tell his own stories — every case dictated back at the office to his secretary Effie Perrine, period, new paragraph. In "The Sinister Siren Caper," broadcast March 16, 1951, a badly rattled man turns up in Spade's office…
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Old Time Radio Horror — Quiet, Please: "Whence Came You" (1948) | Full Episode
Quiet, Please was radio's quietest horror show and its strangest — Wyllis Cooper wrote and directed every episode, and Ernest Chappell told them to you in a calm, confiding voice with nothing behind it but an organ and a lot of deliberate silence. In "Whence Came You," an American archaeologist...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Philip Marlowe: "The Orange Dog" (1949) | Full Episode
Gerald Mohr played Raymond Chandler's private eye as radio's toughest and wittiest detective, working a Los Angeles of rain-slick streets, cheap hotels and expensive lies. In "The Orange Dog," a woman hires Marlowe to find her missing sister, last seen with a man named Horner. The only lead is a...
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Old Time Radio Western — Gunsmoke: "Carmen" (1952) | Full Episode
Gunsmoke was radio's great adult western — Dodge City, Kansas in the hard years of the cattle trade, with William Conrad as U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon. In this early episode from May 31, 1952, an army payroll is stolen and a major gives Dillon an ultimatum: get the money back, or Dodge City goes...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Sam Spade: "The Bow Window Caper" (1947) | Full Episode
Howard Duff stars as Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco private eye in the show that made Sam Spade a weekly habit — wisecracks, fast talk, and real menace underneath, dictated each week as a case report to his long-suffering secretary Effie Perine. In "The Bow Window Caper," a respectable…
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Old Time Radio Horror — Inner Sanctum: "The Black Art" (1945) | Full Episode
Behind the creaking door, Raymond welcomes you one last time. A man waits out his final night in a small-town jail, condemned for a murder he did not commit — until a beautiful, wealthy stranger offers him a way out. She has money, she has strange powers, and she has teeth. Simone Simon, fresh…
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Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "A Pail of Air" (1956) | Full Episode
X Minus One was NBC's great science fiction anthology, made in cooperation with Galaxy magazine and counting down into the void every week with stories by the finest writers in the field. In this March 1956 broadcast, adapted by George Lefferts from Fritz Leiber's classic, a passing dark star has...
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Old Time Radio Western — Tales of the Texas Rangers: "Soft Touch" (1950) | Full Episode
Movie star Joel McCrea rides the airwaves as Ranger Jace Pearson in NBC's Tales of the Texas Rangers — a hard-nosed police procedural with sagebrush in its boots, dramatizing real cases from the Ranger files with technical advice from the legendary Captain M.T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas. In "Soft...
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Old Time Radio Horror — Creeps By Night: "Six Who Did Not Die" (1944) | Full Episode
Creeps by Night was the Blue Network's 1944 anthology of subtle, psychological chillers — a series so unnerving that listeners with heart conditions were warned to stay away. Boris Karloff launched it; by this July broadcast the host was known only as "Dr. X." In "Six Who Did Not Die," the…
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Old Time Radio Western — The Six Shooter: "Hiram's Gold Strike" (1954) | Full Episode
James Stewart stars as Britt Ponset, the drifting Texas plainsman of NBC's The Six Shooter. Old Hiram Grover has spent forty years scratching at the hills, and at last the assay comes back rich — Hiram has struck gold. But word of a strike travels faster than a man can guard it. Two drifters get…
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Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — X Minus One: "How-2" (1956) | Full Episode
X Minus One was NBC's great science fiction anthology, adapting the best of Galaxy and Astounding for adult ears. In this Clifford D. Simak story, Gordon Knight orders a build-it-yourself robot dog kit and receives, by clerical error, an experimental android named Albert. Albert never tires…
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Old Time Radio Comedy — Our Miss Brooks: "Mr. Boynton's Parents" (1950) | Full Episode
Eve Arden is Connie Brooks, the wisecracking English teacher of Madison High, forever fielding a blustering principal, a scheming student, and one bashful biology teacher who will not take a hint. In this Mother's Day broadcast from May 14, 1950, Mr. Boynton's mother and father arrive in town…
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Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Doctor From Vienna" (1960) | Full Episode
Paladin is a West Point man with a Shakespeare habit, a suite at San Francisco's Carlton Hotel, and a business card that reads "Have Gun, Will Travel." John Dehner plays him with velvet in his voice and gravel underneath. This time the trouble comes to his own front door: a physician calling...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Boston Blackie: "The Buckley Protection Agency" (1947) | Full Episode
Boston Blackie is the reformed jewel thief who works the underworld from the inside — an enemy to those who make him an enemy, a friend to those who have no friend. In this 1947 episode, the Buckley Protection Agency is a shakedown racket dressed up as a business, and it wants Blackie on the...
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Old Time Radio Western — Have Gun Will Travel: "Five Days To Yuma" (1960) | Full Episode
Paladin dressed for the opera and rode out in black — a West Point man with a chess-knight calling card who would rather talk you down than shoot you, and who was very good at both. Here the Governor of Nevada wants a man named Jeremy Thompson delivered to Carson City, and Thompson is locked up...
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Old Time Radio Thriller — Suspense: "Headshrinker" (1958) | Full Episode
For twenty years Suspense was radio's outstanding theater of thrills, dropping ordinary people into extraordinary danger and letting the tension do the rest. In "Headshrinker," a psychiatrist crosses the line with the patient he is supposed to be healing, and the affair poisons the very thing…
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Old Time Radio Horror — Quiet Please: "Wear the Dead Man's Coat" (1948) | Full Episode
Quiet Please was radio's quietest horror show — Wyllis Cooper writing, Ernest Chappell talking straight to you, one organ in the dark, and almost no sound effects at all. In "Wear the Dead Man's Coat," a freezing, broke man kills a stranger in the street for the overcoat on his back. It's the...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Boston Blackie: "Joe Nelson's Pet Shop Gambling Scheme" | Full Episode
Boston Blackie is the reformed jewel thief who solves the cases the police can't — "enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend" — with Inspector Faraday always half a step behind and usually pointing at Blackie. In this June 25, 1947 episode, ex-con Joe Nelson is…
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Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "The Haunted Artist" (1948) | Full Episode
Dan Holiday, the mystery novelist who goes looking for trouble through a newspaper classified ad — "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything, write Box 13" — opens a letter from a painter who thinks he needs an exorcist. Michael Davis works alone in a studio at 183 Lincoln Mews, and he...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Sherlock Holmes: "The Elusive Agent Part 2" (1949) | Full Episode
John Stanley's Sherlock Holmes carried Baker Street through radio's late golden age, each half-hour framed as a case Dr. Watson recalls over a glass of sherry. "The Adventure of the Elusive Agent" is a rare three-part serial from the spring of 1949, set not in the gaslit 1890s but in 1913, with...
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Old Time Radio Detective — Johnny Dollar: "The Star of Capetown Matter Part 3" (1956) | Full Episode
Bob Bailey stars as Johnny Dollar, the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account. A jittery underwriter sent him to Cape Town to guard the Star of Capetown, a $150,000 diamond owned by a playboy who treats a priceless stone like pocket change — and by the end of the...
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Old Time Radio Mystery — Box 13: "Double Mothers" (1948) | Full Episode
Alan Ladd stars as Dan Holiday, the newspaperman who walked away from the city desk to write mystery novels and went looking for plots by running a standing ad in the Star-Times: "Adventure wanted, will go anywhere, do anything — Box 13." Tonight the box holds an unsigned note asking him to come…
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Old Time Radio Sci-Fi — Flash Gordon: "Rules Over Cave World" (1935) | Full Episode
Before Buster Crabbe ever pulled on the boots, Flash Gordon flew through American living rooms on the Mutual Broadcasting System — a 26-week serial adapted almost panel for panel from Alex Raymond's celebrated Sunday comic page, with Gale Gordon the very first actor to play the hero. In this...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Step back to radio’s golden age—curated classics in comedy, mystery, drama, westerns, and adventure from the 1930s–1950s. Drawn from a library of 40,000+ restored episodes, with new selections added regularly.
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VintageRadioShows.com
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VintageRadioShows.com currently has 356 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Step back to radio’s golden age—curated classics in comedy, mystery, drama, westerns, and adventure from the 1930s–1950s. Drawn from a library of 40,000+ restored episodes, with new selections added regularly.
How often does VintageRadioShows.com release new episodes?
VintageRadioShows.com publishes regularly with 356 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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