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Study 144 - Blind Man's Buff (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-02 19:58:15
Edited:
2025-10-16 16:07:30
Imported:
2025-10
Tags:

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Content

Start Spooky Season Spookily with Blind Man's Buff, a haunted house tale by H.R. Wakefield!

Special thanks to reader Greig Johnson! Check out his YouTube and Patreon channels.

Pitch Black Manor has a new album lurking 10/3. GRAB IT FOR BANDCAMP FRIDAY!

While you're there, nab some soundtracks to the show. All proceeds go to the artists on 10/3!

Thanks to Ramsey Campbell for the Wakefield recommendations. Check out his books An Echo of Children as well as Six Stooges and Counting! And you can listen to our interview with Mr. Campbell here!

Here' s that radio drama version of Wakefield's Ghost Hunt!

Comments

Newk

Nice Pitch Black Manor drive by. Chris rock blocked you with the pitch black maze interjection.

S Jayne Bradley

I literally leave my keys on the floor in the hallway of my house because if I try to put them somewhere safe I will spend forever trying to find them.

HRPrice

I can’t tell you how often I find myself sitting in my car, looking for my car keys, reassuring myself that they HAVE to be nearby because I needed them to unlock the door to the damn car. I fear the day I get something with a button ignition. Driving off without my keys will become possible.

Robert Curtin

This story is so cool! As someone with a crippling fear of the dark, this one really got to me as well, even in the summary. The missing door (likely supernaturally moved or removed) reminded me both of Skinamarink, (which I believe you guys have talked about in the past, another film which absolutely terrified me, as I was a very young kid left alone at night in a large house on several occasions in my childhood), but also of portions of House of Leaves, which I won't spoil for those who haven't read it. (Also, I would love to hear you guys cover that story, [House of Leaves], though an entire podcast dedicated to that insane book is probably more appropriate.)

Jason Thompson

I love this story. So simple and so good. It also really impresses as one of the DEADLIEST haunted houses ever. “Enter and immediately die” house!!

Cole Caron

Don’t follow Chris’s bat advice unless you know what you’re doing. The risk to you (rabies) is real but mostly overblown. Bat bites tend to happen when they become trapped in homes, not when people encounter them in the wild. The risk to the bats is worse. In many places around North America entering bat habitats risks spreading white nose syndrome, a fungal infection which spreads quickly when introduced to a new roost and can cause mass bat death. You could inadvertently contribute to a mass extinction if you enter the wrong cave without thinking.

Jason Thompson

I still need to read House of Leaves. I liked Skinamarink! You should do an Extra Credit show on it, I would be interested in your thoughts. I like it when you dare to tackle material that from another perspective could be considered extremely boring (*cough cough* The Night Land *cough cough*)

Alan Ricks

Blind Man’s Buff? Are we sure Chris “I just want to see naked Old Men” Lackey didn’t pick this story too?

Rick Hound

This might be its own small comedy or petty irony, I knew the word vitiate from Star Wars, the mmo of the Old Republic series had the main bad as the name Darth Vitiate tho not pronounced the same way.

Mooncubus

Usually when I go to the bathroom at home I take my glasses off and set them on the counter. Almost every day without fail I'll make it back to the living room, sit down, then go "wait where are my glasses?" and start looking around for them like Velma. But the other thing is sometimes I'll set my keys down somewhere and then I'm panicking to find them when I actually have to leave. I know they can't be in a weird place, I literally just had them. I end up looking everywhere for them, checking the same places over and over, and getting increasingly angry at myself. Maybe I just have poor short term memory or something, but I don't think it's necessarily an age thing.

Sanjay Mathew

Britain and Ireland are rabies-free so bats probably aren't associated with as much immediate physical danger there. I know here in Singapore which is likewise rabies free people who get entangled with bats don't routinely need rabies shots.

Jason Thompson

It occurs to me, when Lovecraft says Wakefield has too much “sophistication” he may be alluding to sexual content. I generally like Wakefield, but in a few stories which you haven’t covered he has fairly strong implications of rape and sexual abuse. The villain of “He Cometh and he Passeth By” is an Aleister Crowley-like modern-day wizard, who’s also a sex predator, and Wakefield can’t conceal an obvious sleazy prurient interest in this part of the story. I’m not a Wakefield expert but you may be able to find more about this by googling.

Richard Upton Sinclair Lewis Pickman

There are a couple things I found interesting about this story. It has a link to gothic horror in its ambiguity, for one. At the end it’s stated that he had some sort of aneurysm, perhaps a stroke, which could absolutely be disorienting. Lose your keys, lose your orientation, fumble for the matches, have anomalous sensory experiences, and without intervention, very possibly perish. Was it supernatural or was it some sort of neurological episode in an inopportune place? The other thing is there’s no option for any visual representation here. It seems that it really is best represented as a story in text. Maybe an audio-only version could work with the inclusion of the inner monologue.

SoSpoke

Finally, a book adaptation of the hit song "inky slinky"

Tippi Polo

Chad, you mentioned a story that plays like a found footage movie. I believe that story was adapted for tv. Check out Tales from the Crypt Season 2, Episode 16, titled "Television Terror," where Morton Downey Jr played Horton Rivers, a sleazy talk show host investigating a haunted house. https://youtu.be/TnJwvGkINbA?si=t0bWk94RZMjPrBPp

Allison Albright

I kept thinking at least the piece of furniture he found in the darkness was a nice chair. It would be so much worse if he had nothing but a side table to cling to. Awesome story!

Philip Cowan

Great story. It combines the fear of the unknown with the frustration of not being able to solve a problem, to produce an insidious terror, like a maths test or, for me, a French exam, particularly my oral. I think I got 18%. This story reminds me of the demise of the Jack Nicholson character at the end of The Shining. If, like me, you have got lost in a maze, repeatedly coming back to the same place and dead ends, will resonate with you. Talking of creative writing, notice the use of repetition that frightens and frustrates us, especially the narrow passage the protagonist ends up in, again and again, or the ‘no one goes up to the manor after sundown’ said three times without yielding further at the end. And what the hell happened, anyway? It’s what the author refuses to explain that makes it frightening. I still get chills when I hear French spoken…

Ben A

I'm so happy you guys are covering more Wakefield. Not every one of his tales is as good as the Red Lodge (though the Frontier Guards, for one, surpasses it), and if you read them in quick succession some of his narrative quirks become a little too apparent, but all his ghost stories are at least fun diversions. In addition, I'm glad that you brought up Ghost Hunt, Chad. It is a fun Wakefield yarn. It's also still one of the best episodes of the Suspense! radio drama, and truly is terrifying. (I've loved that episode since first heard it as a kid.) It has the same element of leaving unresolved what is real and what is in the characters' heads as in Blind Man's Buff, but it has a much more harrowing ending. There are close cousins for Ghost Hunt that come to mind as well. Another house on a cliff where (spoiler!) spirits push the innocent to jump to their deaths is a theme in the 1944 film The Uninvited (starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), which is based on a very gothic horror (not particularly strange) book Uneasy Freehold. And there's a cousin radio drama from the '70s, the CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode entitled "A Ghostly Game of Death", which at least starts as a knockoff of Ghost Hunt. The ending has a weird similarity to another tale you guys have covered (ages ago!), The House and the Brain.

Jim Cannon

Project Guttenberg has been adding a ton of old Weird Tales stories and selections from Golden Age of Sci-Fi magazines in the past year, and I just finished reading one of them from the Jan/Feb/Mar 1938 Weird Tales. Its a nomination for the next Werewolf History Month, too. "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" by Manly Wade Wellman. Its a little long, but well written as you'd expect from Wellman, and has kind of an Unknown Armies approach to lycanthropy. Worth a look!

Alan Ricks

I thought he was taking more about interactive bat exhibits at Zoos than actual bat caves out in the wilderness.

Alan Ricks

Thats a great title!

Tomas Rawlings

Note on the title, so buff also means to shine something using a cloth or brush. So after adding polish to boots say, you’d use a brush to rub it on and then another brush to buff them. Given the game has people gently pushing the blindfolded person around, the title buff, works. Also the general idea of a non-Euclidean space inside the manor echos the later surreal horror novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski which has a group of characters exploring a strange house who’s dimensions never make sense.

Runninghead

Yes! I loved the plug for Pitch Back Manor and the careful tone when Chris later says "Pitch Black Maze" made me ponder "wait..is Chris avoiding paying royalties to Chad here?!" 😂

Runninghead

I came here looking for answers but I guess it's just not that kind of story. I was expecting there'd be some kind of reveal- like the protagonist is struggling to come to terms with being newly blind and the inability to find his matches is his mind preserving his delusion that it's a temporary state. A few other horrific interpretations occurred to me too, which just proves how cool Weird Fiction can be. Great story!

Pete Williams

The modern "lurking millennial horror" would be trying to buy a house.

Ethan Cordray

I had some trouble finding my car keys this morning, so this episode really resonated! But on the other hand -- there are a lot worse things than being in a nice, quiet dark house with a big comfy chair. Maybe the ghostly face-brushes were just trying to suggest that he should take a little nap and wait for dawn.

Jim Cannon

I was kind of surprised when Chad pooh-poohed the strategy of sitting and waiting, because that was the only thing I could think of to get out of this situation. Sit in the chair and wait for some light (moonlight, villager's torches, sunlight, what have you) - wandering around in the dark, you could fall down a flight of steps or walk into a low beam and knock yourself out. Of course, within the context of this story, camping out in the chair makes you a literal sitting duck for the supernatural presence casually brushing against you, but in the really real world, staying put makes the most sense. Well, actually, leaving the front door open to the strange house while you fumble for a light switch makes the most sense, but I have to work with what I have here.

Alan Ricks

Thats exactly what The Ghost of the Human Chair wants you to do…

Gideon Falcon

I'm actually familiar with "Ghost Hunt" from a different podcast I follow (the Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society); it once had a radio adaptation on the Escape! series (Or perhaps it was Suspense, I don't recall exactly). And yeah, in audio it still comes across exactly like a found footage film.

Matt Baldwin

I lost my first pair of reading glasses not long after I got them. Annoyed with myself I bought 2 more pairs so I'd have a back up. Fast forward 8 months I found them under a car seat. I also found a delightful chicken recipe from Transylvania!

Pete Williams

I know what you mean, I've been living in a dark, quiet house for over 200 years and it's never bothered me.

Philip Cowan

“I came here looking for answers”. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you have been badly misinformed.

Pete Williams

I've only just managed this past year. There's nothing quite like the terror of what lurks beneath that odd patch on the wallpaper.

Ceral107

I can't believe that I finally caught up with all episodes! Started listening to you guys back in early 2020 when the Pandemic hit. In those five years you have been with me during the highest highs and helped me through the lowest lows of my life. Here's to more of the former and less of the latter to all of us! I'm so excited to finally read along and participate in the comments! And with that, there's only one thing left to do: sorting the episodes from old to new and starting it all over again.

Kidz Bop Nine Inch Nails

I lose my phone so much that I trained my dog to sniff it out for me. Luckily I've also trained him to deter spooky mansion ghosts (ghost hunting comes naturally to dogs), so I feel like I'd be pretty safe in this situation.

Christopher

Maybe it's just my dirty mind but when you explained why it was buff instead of bluff, my first thought was "oh the person who is it is just naked and in the buff." To my disappointment that was not the correct meaning. In unrelated news, I may have invented a new game!

Jeremy Impson

I've been like this my entire life.

Akeel1701

I just watched the Greig Johnson video about the making of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy prop - that was very well done, and the wee scene at the end was awesome.

Pete Williams

I know this is an overused joke but i regret nothing.

Tom Král

It always happens when I'm scrolling on my phone whatever app I'm on at the moment to search something on the internet, forget what I wanted and have to go back to the app and scroll a bit back to see the images in sequence that gave ne the original thought haha

Moonflight Dancer

The moment when he drops the matches reminds me of Jack London's "To Build A Fire". It is the final damning defeat, brought on by venturing alone into a place you are not welcome.