The Captain's Guests

Episode 19; the show aired originally on 5/26/1959.

The basic story revolves around a young couple that wants to rent a house. The man is an architect and takes an instant liking to a house that they sort of enter illegally.

Anyhow, the couple asks the Realtor about the house and he's reluctant to let them rent it but finally gives in. They are warned by another man about the house but ignore him.

The house is an old one and belonged to a sea captain whose portrait still hangs in the house. As time goes on, the husband begins to act stranger and stranger, eventually calling his wife by the name of the dead captain's wife, limping like the dead captain, drinking and hunting like him, also.

The wife begins to panic and asks a friend to help but the husband chases him out of the house at gunpoint and then attacks the woman, but before he can kill her a lamp that was knocked over starts a fire.

The husband rushes over to stop it from getting to the painting but fails. The other guy comes back in and drags the husband out, noting that his face has changed and his hair is all white like the captain's.

As the fire burns more and more of the portrait we are led to believe that the husband's face changes also although we don't see anything directly. After the portrait is destroyed the husband returns to normal.

Looking at the show now it's easy to predict that the house is haunted and that the evil captain is up to no good, but consider that the show was on TV in 1959. This was before any of the science fiction and paranormal shows that went into matters like this to the point where one of the hardest things for writers of such shows today is to write something that people won't already expect to happen since they've seen so much already.

Looking at the show that way, it contains a good degree of spookiness.

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