Midnight Ghost Shows with Chelsey Weber-Smith
10/14/20251 hr 44 min
What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulishly chaotic, wonderfully campy 4D theater performances that accompanied the scary movies of the era, beloved by a mostly-teenage audience who often became a part of the show themselves. Schlocky showman Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about how magicians-turned-ghostmasters used paranormal parlor tricks, gory skits, and marketing gimmicks to create a new form of vaudevillian dark comedy. As horror obsessives, Sarah and Chelsey muse about what it would have been like to attend one of these late night wacky fright fests that paved the way for the happily trashy theater camaraderie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Digressions include the resilience of the horseshoe crab, dollar store competition, and plot holes in the movie High Tension (2003).
More Chelsey Weber-Smith:
Listen to American Hysteria
Original music in this episode is produced + performed by Magpie Cinema Club
(except for Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree which is, in fact, from 1962.)
Listen to their cover of Season of the VVitch
Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler
More You're Wrong About:
Bonus Episodes on Patreon
Buy cute merch
YWA on Instagram
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsChelsea Weber-Smith· Guest0:00
(laughs) (spooky music plays) Welcome, mortals, to a ghoulish night of phantoms and monsters. A hellish parade of otherworldly horrors brought to you by me, your ghost master of the evening, Doctor Schlock, known to the uninitiated as Chelsea Weber-Smith. My beautiful assistant this evening, Sarah Marshall, will allow me to perform unspeakable terrors upon her for the entertainment of you, my precious, innocent, sacrificial lambs. Tonight I will be presenting to you an informative look at the history of midnight ghost shows. Campy, ghostly, gory performances that from the 1930s to the 1960s, accompanied horror movies in theaters. A combination of a spiritualist seance and a stationary haunted house. Beware, this show contains descriptions of hella fake violence, and you may not make it out alive of this twisted amusement.