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Art Bell, legendary host of Coast to Coast AM
He could entertain me for hours without even trying. A truly special individual. Rest in Peace, Art.

I've written and rewritten this introduction about ten times now because I wanted it to be so fucking perfect for this entry into my Digital Attic. But, you know what? There really isn't anything I can put here that does Art Bell justice, so I'm just gonna put it here: Art. Fucking. Bell.

Man.

What an entertainer. From his booming voice to his wonderful bumper music, this man absolutely ruled the late-night radio waves. Coast to Coast AM began under that name in 1988, but I wouldn't discover it until later in its run, sometime in the mid-'90s. It came on late, late at night—around midnight or 1 a.m. if I remember correctly—and ran into the early hours of the morning. At its peak, Art was being heard on hundreds of stations by millions of people, all of us scattered across the country listening together in the middle of the fucking night.

But this wasn't your ordinary talk show. No, Art Bell delivered unto us, his lucky listeners, stories about ghosts, UFOs, Area 51, aliens, monsters, conspiracies, time travel and weird supernatural fucking holes in the ground...

I can't even begin to describe the kind of crazy that would sometimes air on his show. But that was the thing—we drank it up. We'd lie back on our beds, hands behind our heads, eyes closed, and just listen. Our imaginations would run wild as the stories, interviews and callers came at us as nothing more than sound waves in the darkness. There were no videos to watch or endless feeds fighting for our attention. Art gave you the story, and your brain filled in the rest.

And for us tech-savvy folk, later on as the Internet truly developed, we discovered whole archives of his shows online—Shoutcast servers, MP3 files and God knows what else—just sitting there waiting to be listened to, uninterrupted, whenever we wanted.

Art Bell, legendary host of Coast to Coast AM
Art Bell at the controls, doing what he did best: sitting in the dark and making the entire world feel a little stranger.

There was something truly personal about listening to Art Bell. I don't know how else to explain it, but it was like uncovering some magical little relic that was all your own. You could share it with your family or friends, or you could keep it a secret, like your own personal guilty pleasure. Just you, Art and whatever lunatic happened to be calling from somewhere in the darkness that night.

I could go on and on about the stories. There was Mike "Mad Man" Marcum, who claimed he had built a working time machine. There was Mel Waters and his supposedly bottomless hole somewhere in Washington State. There was the mysterious Area 51 caller who sounded absolutely terrified while revealing supposed secrets about aliens and the government—and then, right in the middle of the call, the show's satellite signal suddenly went down. And, of course, there were the special Ghost to Ghost shows, where for hours on end callers would phone in with their own ghost stories. Those were some of my absolute favorites.

Throughout the years, Art retired, came back, retired again and eventually returned with other versions of his show, including Dark Matter and Midnight in the Desert. Sadly, Art Bell passed away at his home in Pahrump, Nevada, in 2018 at the age of 72. And because somehow it seems almost too fitting for Art Bell, he died on Friday the 13th.

And while the man may be gone, he left us this enormous wealth of radio to go back and listen to. Shows that can still stir our imaginations and remind us what it felt like to just wonder. To think outside the box. To be completely entertained by nothing more than voices, stories and our own imaginations. And, maybe most importantly, to occasionally stop and ask ourselves what the fuck is actually going on in this world.

I know I'll always cherish the hours I spent listening to Art Bell, both back then and now. There are voices from your past that, the moment you hear them again, somehow take you right back to another place and another time. Art's will always be one of those voices for me.

So I genuinely implore you: if you've never heard Art Bell, go find an old show and listen to one. Grab a glass of wine, a cigar, a beer—whatever the hell your thing is. Kick off your shoes. Turn off the lights. Put everything else away for a little while. And just listen.

Listen to Art Bell

If you've never heard Art—or just want to disappear back into the high desert for a few hours—here are some of the best places I've found to listen to the old shows.

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