Since Aunt Ada Came to Stay
Night Gallery

A green carnation is the only defense against the transference of a witch from an old and useless body to a younger one (this deed is prepared by steady infusions of seaweed tea). The professor of logic finds that the aged crone in his house (his wife’s relation) is dead and buried, near in time and some little distance away.

“I think it is entirely logical I may be going mad,” he says to himself. At the fatal hour, he keeps his wife near by teaching a class on Aristotle’s square of opposition at night, she takes a seat. The false Aunt Ada counters his blackboard diagram with a pentacle drawn on the floor of her room.

The confrontation takes place in the kitchenette. The witch amid her replicas is reduced to dust by the professor’s green carnation set ablaze.

His wife grows them in front of the house. Next morning she gets an odd chill as she passes them.

The Diary
Night Gallery

A television gossip columnist ravages an actress’s career and comes to nothing, her own life writes itself in three days following her victim’s suicide. The columnist is a gutter rat who has clawed her way up, stolen the actress’s married lover and married him herself, and hounds the woman as “a relic of Mack Sennett” arrested on Sunset Boulevard for being drunk and disorderly. The actress presents her with a One Year Diary from a curiosity shop and walks in front of a car during a New Year’s Eve party. The entry for January 1^st is written in the columnist’s handwriting before the event, it shows a state of depression after the suicide.

January 2^nd, phone out of order (she trips and falls, breaking it). A psychiatrist calls it a subconscious compulsion to write visions out of hyperæsthesia, she quarrels at a guilt complex. January 3^rd, her husband dies. She collapses. The next day’s entry is blank, she has herself straitjacketed in a padded cell, all she has to do to avert death by natural causes even is to write the next entry herself, anything at all. Five years go by in the cell with this routine and her cellmates, “Napoleon’s mistress, Delilah and Sarah Bernhardt.”

A Midnight Visit to the Neighborhood Blood Bank
Night Gallery

The camera moves left from a sleeping girl in bed to an open window and a large bat slowly flapping its wings as it approaches. Presently Count Dracula appears in the room, a fat vampire in evening clothes.

He goes behind the bed and lowers his face to the side of her neck away from the camera. She opens her eyes at this and says plainly, “I gave at the office.”

The vampire stands up again, interrupting his meal, says, “oh... sorry,” and walks back to the window. He takes from his pocket a small notebook and pencil, he licks the tip and makes a note of it.

Having done this, he is a bat once more, flapping slowly away.

Web of Death
Kojak

A Wall Street lawyer with a string of mistresses has a regular affair with a detective’s wife while his own in Scarsdale entertains the Beethoven Society.

The detective shoots him in the Manhattan pied-à-terre used for rendezvous. The alibi is a junkie’s arrest phoned in.

A medical examiner at the crime scene diagnoses the detective’s partner with appendicitis, Kojak fills in.

All the evidence filters back to Manhattan South in this particularly eloquent game of mirrors.

A badge isn’t a credit card, Kojak explains to his detective before booking him.