'Way Out

Does anybody remember the TV show Great Ghost Tales. This show was very similar to Way Out. First, it was filmed live in New York City. Second, the show came on at 8:30 P.M. CST. Like Way Out, the show was short lived. Great Ghost Tales ran for 12 episodes, Way Out for 14. Fourth, Richard Thomas of The Waltons fame starred in one episode of Way Out and one episode of Great Ghost Tales. Way Out aired on CBS from 3/31/61 to 7/14/61. Great Ghost Tales aired on NBC from 7/6/61 to 9/21/61. The show replacing Great Ghost Tales was Hazel. A viewer would almost get the impression that Great Ghost Tales was a continuation of Way Out on another network with another announcer, Frank Gallop. On Way Out the episode that frightened me the most was "I Heard You Calling Me" about a woman who drowned 49 years ago aboard the Titanic. She haunted the room on the 7th floor of a hotel in London. On Great Ghost Tales, it was "A Phantom of Delight". This episode was about a woman who died forty years ago on her wedding day. Wearing her wedding gown, she would haunt her bedroom that was left locked and untouched by her parents.

I agree with evilgrows comments about this episode. I first saw it when I was 10 years old and have had nightmares about it ever since. I saw it at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, along with 7 other episodes, quite recently. It is just as I remembered it--its amazing what a ten year old mind can remember if its traumatic. Its just as creepy but not quite as scary as I remember it. The man is played by Murray Hamilton, who played Elaine Robinson's father in "The Graduate"---he's quite a familiar face. The wife is played by an almost unrecognizable Doris Roberts--- Marie on "Everybody Loves Raymond." The museum is a very interesting place to visit, and I highly recommend going there if one is in New York. Admissiion is $10, which can be applied towards a membership.

The "galaxybeing" did a good job of describing this series and did so with a great deal more specificity than I could. The show was genuinely frightening. I do remember the episode about the love affair with the headless "electric woman". It gave me nightmares as a child. One of the most chilling things about the show (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) was the lead in at the beginning. I recall hands sticking up out of sand and writhing to the tempo of beatnik bongo drums. As the drum crescendo increased in intensity, the hands would burn up.

No wonder it lasted just fourteen episodes in the days of Ward and June Cleaver! Definitely ahead of its time.

In one of the few extant episodes of the long defunct, "Way Out" actress Constance Ford takes the audience on a roller coaster ride not soon to be forgotten.

Though accomplished at all types of portrayals, Miss Ford's stock in trade was the vulpine proletariat tart--a woman who will stop at nothing to get where she's going, and doesn't make any bones about it! Consider her a more cerebral, subdued, and streamlined Shelley Winters type.

In "I Heard You Calling Me" she holds the audience in the palm of her hand all the way--it's a real tour de force, inasmuch as she's doing it "live on tape." As the telephone calls from beyond exert their growing menace over her, we watch her go from casual indifference, to hard nosed annoyance, to trembling rage, to nauseated panic, and finally to whimpering, resigned, child like submission--pathetically assuming a fetal position as she drops the receiver to the floor in anticipation of her impending doom.

At a recent screening, all attendees were impressed, most especially an astute 16 year old boy. "We don't have anything this good on now," he remarked as Mr. Dahl sardonically concluded the teleplay.

No, we don't, and the loss is ours. Another forgotten jewel in Mr. Susskind's crown.

I was seven years old when I saw this episode, and these many many years later it still is in place as one of the creepiest concepts and images I have ever experienced. Hope to see this one day on DVD, or on TV someplace. Far scarier and more unsettling -- at least this one episode that has stayed alive in my head -- than anything else, except perhaps some segments of "Thriller" with Karloff. Glad to see other people remembering this with the same intensity as I have! Obviously there were lots of us kids staying up and devouring this material, and funny that of all these, basically only "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" still resonate in any major way. "T Zone" because of the number of episodes became a classic, "Outer Limits" because of its sheer excellence despite a low # of episodes. Almost no hope for something like "Way Out" to have a life in syndication, which obviously it didn't. Hopefully this will resurface for us soon!