The Ghost Walks
Cast & Crew
Frank R. Strayer
John Miljan
June Collyer
Richard Carle
Henry Kolker
Johnny Arthur
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
While driving from New York to the vacation home of playwright Prescott Ames on a stormy night, the car carrying Ames, theatrical producer Herman Wood, and his effeminate secretary, Homer Erskine, breaks down. They walk toward the nearest lighted building, the home of Dr. Kent, where Ames's fiancée, Gloria Shaw, happens to be staying along with Terry Gray, who refuses to take Gloria's engagement seriously, and his sister Beatrice, a psychic. Beatrice, who is being treated by Dr. Kent, walks through the house in a trance because her husband John was murdered exactly three years before. Dr. Kent hopes to expose the culprit during the evening, and, when a blood stain mysteriously appears on the dinner tablecloth, Beatrice insists that John has joined them at the table. After the candles blow out and a ghostly face appears in the darkness, Wood and Erskine flee in terror upstairs, where they find the script of Ames's latest play, "The Ghost Walks," and realize that they have just seen its first act. Downstairs the actors laugh at the reaction of Wood and Erskine until Beatrice is found murdered. When they try to explain to Wood and Erskine that everything was indeed staged for their benefit, but that Beatrice really has been murdered, their guests refuse to believe them because Beatrice's corpse has vanished. A guard from a nearby sanitarium arrives with news of an escaped lunatic, and the telephone lines are discovered cut. Later that evening, Terry makes aggressive advances toward Gloria, who nevertheless hides him in her closet after her screams rouse the entire house. Terry mysteriously disappears, and shortly afterward, Gloria also vanishes, arousing suspicion in Ames that Terry and his fiancée are having a secret tryst. In the meantime, Wood, mistakenly believing that the guard is one of the performers, offers him a job and subsequently disappears while following the guard to see a demonstration of his acting talents. Two more guards from the sanitarium arrive and locate a secret passage behind a painting with removable eyes. Searching through underground passages, the actors and guards finally find the lair of the sanitarium escapee, who had disguised himself as a guard. The insane Professor Twitterly is just about to reenact the horrors of another mad doctor who used to live in the house before Ames purchased it. Beatrice has been revived and placed on an operating table, with Gloria, Terry and Wood to follow, when Twitterly is interrupted and lured back to the sanitarium. After the rescue, Woods asks Ames to rewrite his play in order to recount the tale of the evening they have all just survived.
Director
Frank R. Strayer
Cast
John Miljan
June Collyer
Richard Carle
Henry Kolker
Johnny Arthur
Spencer Charters
Donald Kirke
Eve Southern
Douglas Gerrard
Wilson Benge
Jack Shutta
Harry Strang
Crew
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
Although onscreen credits list Donald Kirke's character name as "Terry Shaw," he is called "Terry Gray" in the film. According to modern sources, the film was shot at the RKO-Pathe Studios using the RCA Victor Sound System, and Abe Meyer was the musical director.
