Winter Chills Tales of Horror, Mystery, and Intrigue

You would think that winter is the most peaceful time of the year. After breaking ground and planting in the springtime, spending the summer raising crops, and harvesting and hunting in the autumn, winter is a time to relax and enjoy the results of the labors from the rest of the year. This might be true if all you had to do was sit by the fire and enjoy endless cups of hot cocoa, but the world keeps moving, even when it appears that the world has become a frozen wasteland. When the winds of winter howl, just being outside can be enough to kill you, and that helps make winter the creepiest time of the year.

If spring, summer, and autumn stand for birth, growth, and maturity, winter represents only death. Nothing grows in the snowy white wasteland of winter, there are only the frozen reminders of the life that once was. There are some uplifting things in the winter, the beauty of the freshly fallen snow, the merriment of the Holidays, but even these can be made terrifying. Three girls take a winter vacation when the sleigh driver lets them off to walk the rest of the way on Lights Out. They accidentally walk through a graveyard and when one does an impromptu dance, they accidentally call forth a poltergeist.

The cold of winter can close you off from the rest of humanity. This can be a good thing when you need to concentrate on your work like the two scientists on the Quiet Please episode "Northern Lights". The researchers are working on the mystery of teleportation and temporal displacement (the basis of a time machine) but they are blissfully unaware of the effect that the aurora lights will have on their experiments. In the dead of winter, they conjure up several wooly bear caterpillars who are only active in the bitter cold. Where could they come from?

Two years before the release of Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles took on the story of "The Green Goddess" on Campbell's Theatre. Three Briton's fly their small airplane over the frozen Himalayas but are forced down in the remote kingdom of Rukh. The Raja's three brothers are scheduled to be executed by the British, and the natives are convinced that the trio has been delivered as revenge by their Green Goddess. Of course, the Raja is more than willing to take advantage of the situation. The frozen Himalayan mountains are also the scene for Escape's "The Abominable Snowman". William Conrad plays a mountaineer who hires a Sherpa guide in Darjeeling after discovering that the Sherpa has actually seen a yeti.

We hear Conrad again playing U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. The Marshal tries to return to Dodge City during a terrible blizzard but is forced to seek refuge in "The Cabin" where he accidentally finds himself captured by a pair of desperate killers. In "Puckett's New Year", Doc is forced to amputate old man Puckett's foot after it is frostbitten. To prove he is still a man, Puckett proceeds to rob the Dodge City Bank. Matt and Chester are forced to ride out into a blizzard to capture an escaped rustler, even though they know that there is not enough evidence to convict him.

The Hallmark Hall of Fame also takes us into the Old West for "The True Story of Tom Mix". Lionel Barrymore, Clark Gable, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, William Boyd, and Will Rogers Jr. take part in this salute to the movie cowboy, but Mix had been a real-life U.S. Marshal before coming to Hollywood. In this story, he corners a pair of murderers in a cabin, but the winter blizzard has him stuck in the shack with them knowing if he falls asleep they will take care of him.

A beautiful woman tricks Simon Templar into coming on the ski train to Snow Valley so he can marry her on The Adventures of the Saint. The marriage might keep her ex-husband from murdering her, so "It's Snow Use" for Templar to resist.

There is another frozen body, this time found by Mark Trail who was crossing the Big Bear glacier in Wyoming on a survey.

See also: Winter Cold, Blizzards, and Arctic Expeditions Collection, Yeti and Bigfoot, and Darkness and Nighttime in Old Time Radio.