Welcome to Night Vale - Bonus Ep January 2026 - In The House Where I Was Born

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

See the schedule of the final stretch of our Murder Night in Blood Forest tour, and buy tickets here: https://www.welcometonightvale.com/live Some time ago, I went looking for recommendations on old radio plays to listen to. Despite what many people think, I don't actually have a strong familiarity with old radio plays outside of the famous War of the Worlds (which I once watched performed live in LA by the cast of Star Trek: Next Generation. Yes, it ruled.). One show that came up a lot was Quiet Please by Wyllis Cooper, who was considered one of the best innovators of radio drama in his time. One reddit comment called out "In The House Where I Was Born", a 1949 episode, as a highlight. So I gave it a listen. You can do so here. The episode does not sound anything like what we imagine old time radio to sound like. He's doing something that sound much closer to modern fiction podcasting. And I decided I wanted to write my own riff on the subject, replacing the more straight forward ghost story of the episode with something a little more specifically Night Vale. This is the result. Here's to you, Wyllis Cooper. From one writer of audio fiction to another: may your legacy live on. -Joseph Fink Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello from our January break. Today we have for you a preview of our Patreon-only bonus episode. This episode is called In the House Where I Was Born, and is a tribute to the great radio play writer Willis Cooper and his 1949 radio play of the same name. You can hear the whole thing right now on Patreon, along with 10 years of bonus episodes that have only been released on Patreon, James Herbaniac returning as Leonard Burton,

Cecil and Carlos' honeymoon, Tamika Flynn's book talk radio show. There's something like 40 Nightville episodes you haven't heard available now, and that's not all. The same membership also gets you. Add-free versions of all of our regular episodes, going all the way back to the beginning, monthly Zoom hangouts with the Nightville team,

access to the Nightville Book Club, led by Jeffrey and Joseph, an exclusive pre-sale access for our live shows. All of that right now on our Patreon. Speaking of live shows, We start the final stretch of our Murder Night in Blood Forest tour, heading through the western half of the U.S. We're not going to tour in the U.S. again for probably at least a year. So if you'd like to see us, this would be a great time. They didn't let us put the San Francisco show on sale until like mid-November for some reason,

so that one needs some help, tell a new friends in the Bay Area to check it out. Okay, after this short ad break, we proudly present in the house where I was born for after Willis Cooper. The way, Via-Aye, Embarked and profite, embarked and celebrate, riggolet, publié, savouré, admiring, and profite. Villaray, the voice we love. The time has come, as it comes every 15 years, to return to the house where I was born. In the house where I was born was a wide porch, two rocking chairs that were always too rickety to sit on, but too picturesque to throw away.

The spiders spent more time on the porch than us. It was their domain, and we left it to them. In the house where I was born was a line of dark windows, always dark. Even when every lamp in the house was on, the windows had a dark aspect, as though light didn't pass through them correctly. From inside, the daylight barely. cut through the gloom. Gloom and dust. This was the atmosphere of the house where I was born. In the house where I was born, there were three bedrooms and a fourth room that should have been a

bedroom, but we did not use it for that. Instead, we called it the waiting room. I don't know why we called it that. My mother was the one who named it that. Every morning she would ask me, is there anyone in the waiting room? And I would have to go check. There never was, although every single time I opened the door, I did so with a formless and nameless dread. I did not want anyone to be in the waiting room. In the house where I was born, there was a portrait of my grandparents on my mother's side. The portrait captures my grandfather's maniacal sneer and my grandmother's startlingly wide mouth. The painter must have been very talented and very brave, also quick. My mother would proudly tell me that three other painters had tried

their luck before this portrait was successfully completed. She wasn't sure what happened to the successful artist after. It doesn't matter, of course. She would coo running her fingernails along the textured surface of the paint, although us children were never allowed to touch it. The soul of the artist lives on in their work, she would say to me, and wink, like she had shared a secret, or a joke just a little too advanced for my age. We are all of us in town returning to the houses where we were born. This is not a not easy, but at least it only happens once every 15 years. Steve Carlsberg was born in a lovely little bungalow that was knocked down years ago to make

room for a vacant lot, so he has a most difficult day, in which he must track down the pieces of wood and plaster that was the house he was born in, and construct from them a temporary replica. Whether a replica built from the materials of the original counts as a version of the original is a question that philosophers have debated for thousands of years. But this is not a day for philosophy, and so Steve has no choice. He trudges through the city gathering splinters of wood, planks that have been recycled into homemade bookshelves, plaster dust mixed interchangeably with grains of sand by the dump. Dana Cardinal was born on a family vacation to New Mexico, and so she sets out barefoot across the desert, on a mini-week journey to the house where she was born. Why she must walk

barefoot is unclear, but we all know she must. That is part of it. She lowers her face against the wind and the sand. She sinks into herself and endures the passage. The sooner she does, she does, gets to the house where she was born, the sooner she can come home, missing, of course, three pounds of weight and about two hours of time. What happens during that missing time, and how those three pounds are removed from the body, are, of course, mysteries that will likely never be solved. In the house where I was born, there was a lovely silver coffee urn that my mom had inherited from my grandparents, the ones in the portrait.

It was only brought out for company, and on those occasions, I liked to sit at the kitchen table and study it. It was so large and fancy and unlike anything else in our home, and I wondered where my grandparents had gotten it, to whom had they served coffee from it. But these kinds of family stories, the every mundane moment are not passed on through the generations, and so are lost forever, even though those mundane moments are the bulk of

anyone's life. We remember our family through a few stories that were so unusual or out of character that they stuck in everyone's heads, and the rest is just each of us doing our best to draw a line between those dots and hoping we're anywhere near the truth. That's it. To hear the rest, along with 10 years of existing bonus episodes, please head over to our Patreon and support the show. Okay, see you in February with new episodes. We love you. Hey, Jeffrey Kraner here to tell you about another show from me and my Nightvale co-creator Joseph Fink. It's called Unlicensed, and it's an L.A. Noir-style mystery set in the outskirts of present-day Los Angeles. Unlicensed follows two unlicensed private investigators who small jobs looking into insurance claims and missing property are only the tip of a conspiracy iceberg.

There are already two seasons of Unlicensed for you to listen to now with Season 3 dropping on May 15th. Unlicensed is available exclusively through Audible, free if you already have that subscription. And if you don't, Audible has a trial membership. And if I know you, and I do, you can binge all that mystery goodness in a short window. And if you like it, if you liked Unlicensed, please, please rate and review each season.

Our ability to keep making this show is predicated on audience engagement. So go check out Unlicensed, available now only at audible.com.