Gallows in the Wind
The Sixth Sense
A storm at the site
of a small town (Chalmers, pop. 397) “destroyed in the great hurricane of
1893” brings a vision of death by drowning in a marble grave full of
water, housed in a stone crypt, to a woman on vacation at Preston’s
Lodge. Hurricane Betty develops, the vision recurs with a gallows and an
executioner hooded in black. He fells a tree with a double-bladed axe, a tree
crashes into the lodge.
Dr. Rhodes is
among the guests, shares the intuition to some degree, and saves another woman
when a tree crashes into the parlor. The crypt is a stone blockhouse nearby,
built as a prison. It’s a storm shelter where all the guests are herded
by the proprietor, who’s “never lost a roomer yet.” It
collapses on him, all the guests have returned to the lodge on the evidence of
the visionary’s intuition (the executioner unmasks as the proprietor).
“Usually a
psychic vision is a distortion of reality,” says Dr. Rhodes. The
atmosphere is similar to Huston’s Key Largo, with nightmare
sequences often in slow motion.