Wyllis Cooper created a weekly horror program, Lights Out!, in 1934. Originating from the radio station of an NBC affiliate in Chicago, Illinois, the stories involved invisible creatures, vampires and all sorts of ghouls. The horror series was heard regionally and not nationally. Cooper, no doubt having proven he could conceive of clever horror plots, quickly made the movie to Hollywood for a career at Universal Studios (The Phantom Creeps, Son of Frankenstein). This left a void when the network decided to expand coverage of the program nationwide in the summer of 1936. Enter stage left, Arch Oboler, a playwright who would later succeed with a career on the Rudy Vallee radio program, and The Chase and Sunburn Hour. Oboler's idea of horror was different from Cooper's, and his first radio script for the series, "Burial Services," has since become both legend and folklore.
Over the decades, rumors have circulated that the premiere episode of Lights Out! in the summer of 1936 was so gruesome that thousands of letters flooded into the network. Most of the letters were protesting and questioning how such a graphic story could be done on the radio. Forgetting the fact that the new series was heard at a very late time slot when the majority of the American public was asleep in their beds, the script was considered horrific not because of ghosts or ghouls, but because of the story. During the burial service of a young girl, the men and women who knew the deceased paused to recall various memories of her life... before the dirt was tossed onto the top of the coffin.
Arch Oboler, interviewed over the years, often lent credence to the folklore by often recalling how many letters arrived at the studio and how he discovered early on that some stories of horror -- by nature -- were indeed too graphic to tell.
NBC never recorded the radio broadcasts of Lights Out! in 1936, so a recording of this episode is not known to exist. Thankfully, I found the original radio script in an archive and providing a PDF of the file through the link below. You can read it and make the decision yourself.
