RIPLEY'S ONE MINUTE MYSTERIES

About ten years ago I made a solo fifteen-hour drive home from Florida. Most of the trip took place during a summer's night, which was fine by me. On a lonely, two lane, Mississippi highway about halfway through my journey my haul of snacks from the last 24-hour travel plaza ran out so my attention shifted to the radio dial. I scanned through swarms of static until a faint announcer's voice pushed through. His tone was earnest yet friendly and I could instantly tell it wasn't a modern broadcast. I was disappointed to hear that he was finishing up what sounded like an extremely interesting tale. The bumper music that followed was some freaky mix of random beeps and percussion with some horn blasts thrown in. I smacked the steering wheel. Aw Jeez! I was so bummed to have just missed this thing, whatever it was. But after a silence I heard something that perked me up. It was a different voice, a more spooky sounding one, and it proclaimed "Truth is stranger than fiction and this is the proof! This is Ripley's Believe It... or Not!" then I welcomed back the other spokesman who had returned with a fresh, far-out factoid. A couple stories later I realized I was amid a whole collection of one-minute Ripley clips played back to back to back! This went on for another chill-inducing half hour and I sat there grinning in the light of the dashboard, totally enraptured and totally thankful for this mysterious gift from the starry heavens.

Last week I found four hundred and sixteen of these Ripley's audio shows online. Take a listen to a sample. If you like that one then perhaps you too would enjoy populating your itunes with seven hours worth of these intriguing segments. I made up a digital "album cover" (seen above), bundled all the tracks together and uploaded them for your pleasure...


Download from Megaupload
416 MP3s, 32 kbps
102 MB Zipped file

The sound quality is pretty low and varies from clip to clip (I've heard skips in a few episodes) Although it's probably not too far from the way they sounded when they originally aired. But I'm more concerned that excessive exposure to the nightmarish introduction will lead to madness. Anyway, this stuff is truly magnificent.
Believe it.