The Haunted Cell is an episode of the radio show Lights Out. It first aired July 20, 1946.
Story[]
The story begins with a small time criminal named Max Young regaling the listeners with a ghost story he witnessed firsthand. Max begins the story with him being picked up for an armed robbery he was in the middle of committing, but he also had a warrant for the murder of a policeman. The officer interrogating him, Detective Miller, was the partner of the slain officer, who tries beating a confession out of Max with a rubber hose. When that doesn’t work, Miller threatens to put him in a “haunted cell” until he confesses, which Miller says is inhabited by the ghost of Skeeter Dempsey, another small time criminal Max was acquainted with, but was executed in the electric chair the year before. Max thinks it’s not true, so the officer takes him to the cell with the lights turned off and leaves Max alone in the dark.
As Max is yelling for Miller to turn on the lights, he hears a familiar voice telling him to quiet down and introduces himself as Skeeter Dempsey. Max first thinks it’s a cop trying to scare him into a confession, but when he struck a match, there was no voice coming from where he was hearing it, causing him to faint. Upon regaining consciousness, Max is briefly in denial and ultimately admitting the voice was Skeeter’s and he’s a ghost. Skeeter is in Hell and trying to convince criminals like Max bound for execution to commit suicide as the punishment in Hell will be less severe, but Max refuses and continues to deny killing the cop. However, evidence was found and Max is convicted and condemned.
Max is kept in the haunted cell until it was time for him to go to the penitentiary to be executed. During this time, Max lost his fear of the dark and would regularly talk to Skeeter about history, death, and the people he had met in Hell such as Emperor Nero and Judas Iscariot. Two days before Max is scheduled to be executed, Skeeter makes the plea to him one more time to commit suicide to both escape the extreme pain before death in the electric chair and to escape the most extreme punishment of Hell. Miller then comes to tell him that he has to transport him to the penitentiary for execution. Miller is now remorseful for how he treated Max during his incarceration, but Max didn’t blame him. After Miller leaves, Skeeter tells him he has to go as well, but he’d see him the day of his execution. Before leaving, Skeeter reminds Max that there is a length of rope hidden under his bunk. And with that, Max’s ghost story ends.
Max ends the story telling the skeptics listening they should believe in his story because he did take Skeeter’s advice and hung himself with the rope. Max was telling the story as a ghost himself.