Looking to score a break as a newspaper reporter and impress beautiful Alma Parker (Joan Staley), milquetoast typesetter Luther Heggs (Don Knotts) pitches a story about his small town's haunted house. When his editor (Dick Sargent) insists Luther spend a night alone in the spooky mansion, where a grisly murder-suicide had taken place decades earlier, the timid reporter learns that the house contains a supernatural resident who doesn't like visitors.