If you missed the last one…
Happy Halloween! Today’s post is brought to you by Hallowed, an Iron Faerie collection of Halloween themed stories to enjoy any time of the year. The book contains my Book Collector story “Big Man” if Cthulhu Mythos or Noir Mystery is your thing. The clock is ticking and the Book Collector has 24 hours to get another copy of The Book of the Black Sun back. Not so easy on Halloween when your client is a child-sized magician dressed like a trick-or-treater.
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This book now available in Kindle.
The haunted houses keep coming in the Horror comics of the Golden Age. 1953 and 1954 are especially full of them. That last batch tended to recycle certain themes: the will that required a stay in a haunted house (and crooked lawyers), the building cursed because of a terrible murder, the poor friends who want to scare someone and pay a terrible price, the haunted painting (which started in the first Gothic, The Castle of Otranto (1765) For more on haunted paintings, go here. This crop of tales moves onto some different ideas.
We also see another Pulp illustrator join the ranks of the comic book artists with John Giunta. John’s first piece was “Beyond the Earth” (Scienti-Tales, January 1939). He would produce three covers for Weird Tales along with many illos. John was the artist who later drew the first Sword & Sorcery comic, “Crom the Barbarian” with Gardner F. Fox in 1950.
“This House is Haunted!” (Mystery Tales #8, February 1953) has Adam Benson angry when he finds men playing cards in his haunted house. He hears the tale how the place became haunted when Josiah came to town. Benson gets the idea that a fortune is hidden in the house. This leads him to a trap that sends him to the basement where ghouls wait to eat him. The card players, ghosts all, go back to their game. This one feels more Lovecraftian than ghostly.
“The Crazy House!” (The Phantom Stranger #4, February-March 1953) was written and drawn by Mort Drucker. A short one-pager about a house maid and her beau trying to scare an old lady out of her house.
“Devil’s Mansion” (Out of the Shadows #8, April 1953) Even shorter is this half-pager about the Devil’s Mansion.
“I Was Locked in a Haunted House!” (Uncanny Tales #7, April 1953) was written by Stan Lee. The narrator tells how he bragged to the other kids in his new neighborhood how he doesn’t believe in ghosts. He goes to the old Murdoch Mansion and talks to Mr. Hank. He doesn’t believe in ghosts either. Later the kid tells his buddies but they point out the mansion was pulled down in 1906. I love that the kid in the first panel is reading a copy of Marvel’s Mystic.
“Quiet Stalks the Undead Fiend” (Baffling Mysteries #15, May 1953) has Dora and Lewis Radcliff buy an old house, reportedly haunted. The couple find skeletons and an empty coffin.Ā They meet a stranger who claims to know all about the house. He is Waldo Kurtz, a vampire. He turns Dora into one too. Lewis stakes the monster in his coffin before he kills Dora, then burns the house to the ground and walks away. That last name, Radcliff, is perfect though Stoker may have been closer.
“The House!” (Chamber of Chills #18, July 1953) begins with Arnold and Emma Morgan buying an old mansion. They can’t stand each other and agree to live in different wings. Bates, the butler, wakes his master and tells him the ghosts of the two spinsters who owned the house fifteen years ago have appeared. They want Bates to kill the new owners. Arnold decides to let Bates kill his wife. The ghosts continue to haunt the house but it is Emma’s ghost that drives Bates to kill her husband. Emma regrets this when she learns that she and Arnold are linked together forever in death.
“The House Where Evil Lived” (Web of Evil #6, September 1953) has daredevil John Carlton in a stunt to stay over night in a haunted house. His servant, Drake, hates his employer and insures that the famous man will meet his end in the old house. Drake has contacted the owner of the haunted house and made arrangements. John Carlton goes in with some fanfare but comes out with white hair and dies insane. Drake meets some of the horrors of the house: a headless ghost, a two-headed gorilla and a specter and also dies. We learn at the end that the man Drake had made his deal with had died two days before these events.
“Death’s Last Laugh” (Haunted Thrills #12, November 1953) Biff Johnson is a terrible practical joker. He inherits a castle in Spain that is haunted. Bessie the cleaning woman tells him all about the cruel cavalier who haunts the place. Biff meets him and another ghost, a First Nations woman who the swordsman kills over and over. Biff tries to defy the cavalier and gets stabbed too. But Biff is lucky in that he is truly dead. The cavalier is doomed to haunt forever.
“The Screaming Man” (Adventures Into Terror #27, January 1954) has Philips and Barry, ghostbreakers, buy a haunted house. Philips is reluctant to enter as he has lost his nerve. Barry tells him he will return his lack of fear. The house is filled with a terrible screaming sound. It drives Philips over the brink into a pit. Philips allows him to die. He has been driven insane by their work and is the source of the terrible screaming.
“Die Laughing!” (The Thing #13, April 1954) has another practical joker lead his friends into a haunted house. He plans to scare them but meets the real horror and gets white hair and goes insane. Nothing new here except some unusual Steve Ditko art.
“The Haunted House” (Journey Into Unknown Worlds #26, April 1954) has Ben offered a thousand dollars if he can rid the house of its ghost. The daughter of the dead man, an old lady now, tells Ben to clear off. He doesn’t. He follows the ghost to the well where he finds a body with an ax stuck in its head. Ben dissolves the bones in lye to put the spirit to rest. Unfortunately, he doesn’t figure out who the killer is until too late. The old lady kills him and throws his body in the well. Ben is the new ghost of the house and new phantom fighters are invited in…
“Night of Terror” (Voodoo #16, July-August 1954) has Sue and John Trent in a loveless marriage. John calls a friend named Morris Slattery to set up a haunted house to trick his wife. They enter the old house and find Slattery dead. Sue gets frightened and falls to her death on the stairs. John thinks he is in luck but an ax ends his life. The cops arrest an old woman with an ax. She always goes there when she manages to escape from the asylum. John’s plan to torment his wife has ended in three deaths.
Conclusion
As was typical of Golden Age comics, the later stories get more sophisticated as the old and obvious plots get used up. 1953-1954, in general, focused not on Victorian retread so much as scenarios with ghostbreakers orĀ feuding husbands and wives. The focus is away from the old haunted house stuff and more on irony. This may have been the result of EC’s many ironic and black humor pieces that led the market. You still get some of the old chestnuts, the joker who meets a bad end, for instance, but less of these. The Silver Age is only a year away and the haunted houses would become cliches for funny animal laughs. For true Horror comic fans, there would only be the Warren magazines.
If you haven’t read the Book Collector stories…
