Daytime Nightmare: Box 13

“Daytime Nightmare” is an episode of Box 13, the old-time radio show. Listen free on Stupid Potato.

Listen to Box 13 free, live around the clock: every episode, in the order it first aired. No sign-up.

What happens

Dan Holiday accepts a lunch invitation from attorney Mr. Waring, who promises adventure and profit. Instead of a conversation, Holiday is drugged, abducted, and placed in a sanitarium where he is told he is Edward Stokes, a supposedly insane man. Holiday discovers that Stokes is actually dead, and that Waring, Stokes's wife, and the sanitarium's Dr. Cordell have orchestrated an elaborate frame to make Holiday the perfect patsy for murder.

A city restaurant, a private sanitarium, and the surrounding woods and roads near the sanitarium

Characters: Dan Holiday, Mr. Waring, Susie, Dr. Cordell, Hugo, Samuel, Edward Stokes, Clarice Stokes

Listen for: The clever murder scheme where Holiday is made to impersonate a dead man so he'll take the fall for a crime, and his desperate escape through the woods

Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.