This was part of an hour long anthology series that was recently release by Kino on bluray. The story is about Jamie (Perry King), a novelist who moves into a cheap boarding house where his friend Virgil (James Keach) already lives. Mrs. Moffat (Gwen Verdon) is their older landlady, not old, but about 16 years apart from her crush Jamie. She shows more interest in his novel than she shows in Virgil’s sculpture or the third tenant’s medical career (Stephen Macht). Jamie wants to write a story based on a girl he’d known who killed herself over an unrequited love and a young man like himself who has never known love.
Despite the house being quite large and rent being cheap, the house loses people based on a violent past and reputation for haunting. People believe that the 70 year old Mr. Petersen who built the house and his 17 year old bride still reside as ghosts after she was found with her throat slit and him strangled.
Soon after moving in Jamie is the obsession of a very corporeal ghost who keeps first wanting to touch him, then attack him. Instead of being frightened, Jamie and his two housemates are fascinated by the invisible being they manage to tie up in his bedroom. That’s right. They tie up a ghost. A breathing ghost, no less. Then Jamie feels the ghost up, determining that the body is female. Nope. Jamie just lost by vote for hero of the tale. If you had tried that with Claude Raines, he’d have taught you some manners . . . then murdered you. Jamie continues to philosophize and thinks of how this life experience will help his art. That’s right. He pretentious and a perv.
Since this isn’t readily available to watch, I’ll give away the ending for those of you who are curios.
SPOILERS!
Jamie and Mrs. Moffat have a night together and immediately following, Jamie sees a crying young woman in his room briefly. He’s convinced that the entity is Lucy, a girl he and Virgil knew who drowned (the subject of his novel), but the rest of the house thinks it must be the young bride with the cut throat. Jamie reveals in conversations with the tied up presence that he’d told Lucy he’d loved her because “he wanted her”, then admitted that he was incapable of actually loving anyone. He tells the ghost that if he’d been married, he could have never finished his novel and it was almost done.
Even though he says that Lucy was jealous of his writing, he wants to read parts to her, thinking she will be proud of him. Jamie sets her free when the others plan on trying to kill her (not sure how that works) thinking that she’ll forgive him and leave him alone. Instead, she burns his novel. Normally, when an author’s work is destroyed in a movie or book, I’m devastated. But not this time. Screw you, Jamie!
While Mrs. Moffat thinks she and Jamie are in love (which is even more tragic since her previous marriage was an unhappy one), he is missing his ghostly companion and attempting/failing to rewrite his novel. One night, Jamie senses that the presence has returned and Mrs. Moffat catches him talking to his invisible friend. She naturally freaks out and Jamie calms her down with a glass of wine. When he returns to procrastinating on his writing, Mrs. Moffat hears a man’s voice in her room repeatedly asking, “Where are you?”
Back in his room, Jamie calls out to Lucy and sees the ghost of Mr. Petersen followed by Mrs. Petersen (Ann Miles) with her slit throat. Shortly after that, the presence attacks Mrs. Moffat and almost chokes her to death. Jamie and Virgil decide that the presence might not be an actual ghost but some unnamed evil using the images of the ghosts to mess with them. A mirror is dropped on the entity and they hear a woman’s scream, then assume whatever it was is gone. Sadly, Jamie survives and appears to learn nothing. Boooooo! Hiss!
