Wade Denning "Famous Ghost Stories With Scary Sounds" (Pickwick, SPC-5146, 1975)

Another great 1970's horror record with Wade Denning's name attached to it, this LP is directly responsible for kicking off my lifelong enjoyment of Edgar Allan Poe through it's succinct adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart". As kids my pal Rupso and I would listen to that track over & over in his parent's basement and work ourselves into a spooked-out frenzy chanting along "I think it was his eye!".

While there are actually several genuinely creepy moments on this album it was "The Hitch Hiker" that gave me honest-to-god nightmares, and I recall many nights when I didn't want to leave my bed to turn the record player off after it was done playing. Over a decade later (and several thousand miles away) a friend and I got to talking about spooky stuff from childhood while (ahem) tripping on acid; out of nowhere he suddenly launched into a reciting of the whole damn piece. I almost started screaming.

As a pop culture aside; a few of these stories ("The Miser's Gold", "The Headless Horseman", etc) were also licensed to Post Cereal in the mid '70's and released as cardboard flexi discs that you could cut off the backs of Honeycomb & Alpha Bits cereal boxes. Nowadays though, they mostly just show up on ebay and discriminating blog posts.


Link Removed