Share

Auditory Anthology
Tales From the Blue Line - The Replay
While cleaning out her late father's house, a grieving woman discovers an old audio cassette that appears to be a recording of her own future.
Tales From The Blue Line: Every morning at three, Mason and Ally ride the Blue Line into downtown Chicago together. The train brings out its own brand of weird, which has led to Mason and Ally trading spooky stories to help their commute pass a little faster.
If you have a story you’d like to contribute to the series, you can visit https://submissions.soundconceptmedia.com/
You can support the show by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack: https://auditoryanthology.substack.com
By becoming a paid subscriber you can listen to every episode completely ad-free!
Curator: Keith Conrad linktr.ee/keithrconrad
Narrator: Darren Marlar https://darrenmarlar.com/
Other shows hosted by Darren:
Weird Darkness: https://weirddarkness.com/
Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paranormalitymag
Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/microterrors
Retro Radio – Old Time Radio In The Dark: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/retroradio
Church of the Undead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/churchoftheundead
More episodes
View all episodes

The Unobserved Observer by F. Davies-Mouncher
09:46|Late for school and dreading the stares of her classmates, Olivia gets an anxiety she never asked for when she suddenly realizes no one around her can see or hear her at all. What starts as a terrifying morning quickly turns into something else entirely, as Olivia begins to understand exactly what she can get away with when nobody’s watching. F. Davies-Mouncher delivers a sharp coming-of-age story about visibility, power, and the temptation of getting away with it.We love bringing you stories from listeners just like F. Davies-Mouncher — if you’ve got a tale of your own itching to be told (sci-fi, horror, supernatural, or anything in between), we’d love to hear it.
They Can’t Stop All of Us & Maiden Voyage - Chapter Six: The Ask
15:38|On the maiden voyage of the MV Atlas, the world’s largest cruise ship, a ghost operative team attempts a silent extraction of a high-value defector carrying an impossible secret: an ancient, non-human artifact. Hidden amongst twenty-two thousand passengers and stalked by an elite foreign intelligence network, the team must execute a precise, high-stakes tradecraft operation in international waters — one wrong move could blow their cover and trigger a confrontation that could break the global order.Our companion short story, “They Can’t Stop All of Us,” follows Bennett before all of this began — covering the infamous “Storm Area 51” gathering as a journalist, and catching something in the Nevada night sky that her camera can barely explain, let alone she can. It’s a quiet, personal glimpse at the woman who’s about to become central to Mercer’s plan, and one more thread in this world’s stranger undercurrent.
Glow Worm by Harlan Ellison
26:16|After a nuclear war wipes out all life on Earth, Seligman — an experimental soldier engineered to survive the unsurvivable — finds himself the planet’s sole occupant, marked forever by a strange green glow that clings to his skin. Alone and searching for any remaining trace of humanity among the stars, he begins to realize that what was done to his body may have cost him something far more permanent than he first understood.Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) was one of the most prolific and celebrated writers in science fiction, winning eight Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards over a career that spanned television, film, and prose. “Glow Worm” was first published in the February 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, early in a career that would go on to include work on The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and the acclaimed anthology series Dangerous Visions.
Gravit by K.C. Ozden
09:42|Ash has spent three days convincing a skeptical partner to search a stretch of empty ocean for a shipwreck he swears is carrying something impossible: cars made of a rare element the world thinks was mined to extinction decades ago. When their meter finally comes alive, it turns out Ash’s “story” might be worth more than either of them imagined. K.C. Ozden delivers a tight, tension-filled treasure hunt with a sharp sci-fi twist.We love bringing you stories from listeners just like K.C. — if you’ve got a tale of your own itching to be told (sci-fi, horror, supernatural, or anything in between), we’d love to hear it.
North Sea Retrieval & Maiden Voyage - Chapter Five: The Pitch
17:14|On the maiden voyage of the MV Atlas, the world’s largest cruise ship, a ghost operative team attempts a silent extraction of a high-value defector carrying an impossible secret: an ancient, non-human artifact. Hidden amongst twenty-two thousand passengers and stalked by an elite foreign intelligence network, the team must execute a precise, high-stakes tradecraft operation in international waters — one wrong move could blow their cover and trigger a confrontation that could break the global order.Our companion short story, “North Sea Retrieval,” pulls Mercer, Novak, and a salvage specialist onto a listing, half-sunken supply ship to recover a mysterious sealed case — and into a locked compartment that shouldn’t be making any sound at all. It’s another quiet thread of the unexplained running underneath this world, tangled up with a job that’s already dangerous enough on its own.
Home Is The Spaceman by George O. Smith
22:59|After becoming the first human to travel faster than light and vanishing for eighteen months on what was supposed to be a twelve-hour mission, test pilot Billy Enright finally returns to Earth — only to find himself hauled before a Board of Inquiry demanding to know exactly what took him so long. His explanation is one of the great punchlines in classic pulp sci-fi, and it turns a “missing persons” story into something far funnier and stranger.
Pulling the Plug by Tony Tidwell
08:28|When aliens who secretly engineered human evolution announce they’re shutting the whole experiment down, world leaders and scientists gather at the UN with nothing left to offer but excuses. Tony Tidwell delivers a sharp, darkly funny fable about squandered potential — and what happens when the universe finally decides humanity has run out of chances.
X Minus One: Early Model
22:16|Unfortunately we were not able to put together our normal Sunday episode with Chapter Five of Maiden Voyage, our audiobook for paid subscribers on Substack. We’ll have that for you next week, but in the meantime to tide you over, here’s one of my favorite episodes of X Minus One, the series that inspired our podcast. It’s “Early Model,” an episode that originally aired July 11, 1957, based on the short story of the same name by Robert Sheckley
Welcome to Paradise by Allyn Donnelson
25:51|A spot welder’s late-night mistake at a Chicago factory sends him somewhere no one could have expected — and pulls him into a top-secret discovery so significant, the government isn’t sure it should ever come to light. Told through a series of increasingly earnest letters to the President, “Welcome to Paradise” is a warm, funny slice of 1950s pulp with real heart underneath the gags.Allyn Donnelson is known today for a single published science fiction story, “Welcome to Paradise,” which appeared in the September 1954 issue of Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy. Beyond that, virtually nothing is known about the author — but it’s a story that’s stuck around and found new fans for a reason.