Midnight Ghost Shows with Chelsey Weber-Smith

You're Wrong About

Sarah Marshall

True Crime, Society & Culture, News, Culture, Politics, History

4.6 • 23K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2025

⏱️ 104 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 tr...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome, Mortalsh, ha, ha, ha, ha.
0:13.0	Welcome, mortals, to a coolish night of phantoms and monsters, a hellish parade of otherworldly horrors brought to you by me, your ghostmaster
0:25.1	of the evening, Dr. Schlock, known to the uninitiated as Chelsea Weber Smith.
0:32.8	My beautiful assistant this evening, Sarah Marshall, will allow me to perform unspeakable
0:40.8	terrors upon her for the entertainment of you, my precious, innocent, sacrificial lambs.
0:50.6	Tonight I will be presenting to you an informative look at the history of midnight ghost shows.
1:00.7	Campy, ghostly, gory performances that from the 1930s to the 1960s accompanied horror movies and theaters,
1:12.3	a combination of a spiritualist seance
1:15.2	and a stationary haunted house.
1:19.6	Beware, this show contains descriptions of hella fake violence,
1:25.6	and you may not make it out alive of this twisted amusement.
1:31.0	Dr. Schlock's camp of the damned right here in the you're wrong about theater.
1:42.1	I am thrilled and chilled to the bone to make this unbelievable announcement.
1:50.2	Sarah Marshall will be hosting a brand new eight-part miniseries from the CBC on the past, the present, and the future of the satanic panic.
2:06.4	The podcast is called The Devil You Know and is premiering on October 20th.
2:16.7	Pause for gasps and roaring applause.
2:21.2	Let me also remind you.
2:24.6	If you love Your Wrong About, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash
2:31.1	Your Wrong About or Apple Plus to get bonus episodes every month.
2:37.5	Most recently you can learn about the history of one of my ex-girlfriends, Elvira,
2:45.3	Mistress of the Dark, brought to you by another Mistress of the Dark.
2:50.4	But sadly not my ex-girlfriend, Eve Lindley.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sarah Marshall, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sarah Marshall and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.