Lights Out

Millions of radio listeners preferred invented terrors to the real war horrors reported nightly overseas. “The Inner Sanctum,” “The Whistler,” “The Hermit’s Cave,” “The Shadow,” and “Lights Out” were among the highestrated shows on the air this summer. Each promised chilling escape up front with its own creepy introduction: a tolling bell, a strolling graveyard whistler, a creaking door. The writer Richard Hubler speculated that the shows’ twelve million nightly listeners slept better after a good scare. And, he added, the programs “are getting a bigger audience of escapists every day the war keeps on.”