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I noticed a lot of people wishing there was a way to purchase a copy of this movie. I found a site online that sells rare and classic movies and stuff like that...and they carry this one. Plus, the DVD is only like $12.

Go to - http://store.thesmallscreen.org/spiswi19dvd.html.

Plug that URL into your browser and see for yourself.

I saw the movie when I was really really little and had just written it off as my imagination until I found it here. It combines two things little kids are understandably intrigued by: ghosts and sex. It's comforting to know that I was not simply too imaginative as a child, that the things I swear I remember weren't just fantasies! IMDb validated me just a little.

I wish I was alive in the sixties. Because according to these people, the greatest problem of THEIR time was "the sex lives of ghosts," not crime and poverty. Nice.

Certain movies can stick with you after years and years.

I've only seen "The Spirit is Willing" two or three times, probably most often on the CBS Late Night Movies. (That was way back in the Stone Age, when Carson was the only late-night talk show. I was probably in elementary or junior high school and would stay up way too late to watch the movies that started at 10:30 Central time. But enough about that.)

"The Spirit is Willing" was one of those silly, harmless comedies so fondly remembered. It had the hapless dad, the loving mother and the teenage son who was smarter than either, except when it came to the romance department.

What teenage boy wouldn't want to live in a house with a beautiful and sexy blonde ghost?! Oh, and of course, he had a beautiful blond girlfriend who looked just like the ghost!!

This is a movie the way they used to be made! Not hilarious, but definitely funny ... a guilty pleasure. (Now if only it would be re-released!)

I was sure I'd imagined this movie until I found it here. I remember watching it on TV as kid and loving it. I imagine it doesn't hold up much nowadays, though.

The theme song will ring around in my head every now and then; it was an infectuous tune with a tinkly harpsichord. "The spirit is willing... Her kisses are chilling... "The spirit is willing... But the body is weak..."

I'd love to see it again.

I remember loving this movie as a kid! I remembered it a time or two over the years in passing. No one I know could remember seeing. Tonight I was surfing and thought about John Astin being in some cowboy movie and that's what started my search on imdb. Then voila, I saw the Spirit is Willing Title, and it all came back to me. I ordered Evil Roy Slade from Amazon, but they don't have Spirit is Willing. They've got the vaguest movies, but not a kewl classic like this. I agree about the song being great. I WISH I COULD BUY THIS MOVIE!!!! I'd like for my kids to see it. If anyone knows how to get "The Spirit is Willing" please let me know.

Nathaniel Benchley (son of humorist Robert Benchley) wrote The Visitors, a frightening novel about a ghostly haunting, which was purchased for filming by legendary Hollywood showman William Castle.

Castle, who had yet to attain respect as producer (but not director) of Roman Polanski's masterly Rosemary's Baby (1968), had recently completed a successful string of blatant imitations of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), including Homicidal (1961) and Strait-Jacket (1964), and had stumbled with a pair of inept teen-thrillers, I Saw What You Did (1965) and Let's Kill Uncle (1966).

Evidently seeking to expand his audience while maintaining his position as king of schlock horror, Castle re-visioned Benchley's decidedly adult novel as a family comedy along the lines of his bland 13 Ghosts (1960). Unfortunately, Castle was hopeless as a comedy director, as his overly-broad Hammer remake of The Old Dark House (1963) had demonstrated. Humor had been an essential underlying element of Castle's most successful earlier films, The House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959), but this had been supplied by star Vincent Price and the ironic wit of screenwriter Robb White rather than any knack on the part of the director. Castle persisted and The Spirit Is Willing descended into lazy slapstick, as did its black-comedy follow-up The Busy Body (1967), also starring Sid Caesar.

In and of itself, The Spirit Is Willing is a fun little movie which today carries an aura of tacky nostalgia, but the golden opportunity for a chilling ghostly thriller along the lines of Robert Wise's classic The Haunting (1963) was recklessly thrown away.

It behooves Dark Castle Entertainment, which has been remaking the Castle "classics", to consider a new, dramatic version of the Benchley novel. With the blockbuster success of films like The Sixth Sense, The Others and The Ring, the time is right for The Visitors to arrive.