Comments for Classic Film With Evil Tree Root in Basement of Haunted Mansion

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Classic Film With Evil Tree Root in Basement of Haunted Mansion

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Jun 07, 2011
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Finally found!
by: Anonymous

Hi,

almost exactly two years ago I posted this Wanted-Ad for a ghost movie I recalled from my childhood days - and a few days ago I finally found it -- just on YouTube, where it's meanwhile completely uploaded.

It's The House That Wouldn't Die, a 1970 TV-adaption of Barbara Michael's ghost story "Ammie come home", starring Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Egan, Kitty Winn and Michael Anderson Jr.

The plot:
An elderly woman and her young niece move into the house of a recently deceased aunt and shortly thereafter they have to learn that the house is still occupied by the ghosts of the original owners who lived in the time of the Revolutionary War (ca. 1780).

Not long after arriving, strange disturbances, such as mysterious cold drafts and a male voice in the night calling for somebody, alarm the women, and when the niece out of the blue and like in trance starts to attack her beloved aunt, with the help of some friends, among them a teacher and a young student colleague of the niece, they arrange a seance in which the girl gets possessed by the spirit of a young woman, who is desperately begging for help (and redemption).

In search of a solution they discover a family Bible hidden in a secret compartment of a roll top desk, which contains the names of the original owners and a name that has been crossed out in ink.

The teacher then gets also possessed -- by the ghost of the strict and dominant former houseowner -- and when happenings eventually seem to get out of control they finally find the mystery's solution in the basement, where the bodies of a young couple of long ago lie buried behind a walled-up part of the house's original foundation, -- both once slain by the father of the young woman who sought final peace by "using" the niece.

The "weeping noise like a sheep's bleating or a child's crying" in my memory was the male (the father's) voice desperately calling for her daughter ("Ammie come home!"), -- and the tree root, I remembered all the time so vividly, and which the people in the film really discover in the shine of a torch, ironically has no further meaning in the whole story; - it's just an old tree root, grown through the soil and down through the basement's ceiling.

Thanks a lot for your patience.

Jun 22, 2009
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The Evil 1978
by: Anonymous

The Evil (1978)

An ancient horror slept beneath the old haunted mansion...nothing could stop its escape!

A psychologist buys an old mansion at a bargain price and asks a colleague and his students to help him fix it up. Things are fine until a cross is removed from a stone door in the basement and Satan himself starts wreaking havoc on each person one by one. Their only hope of ever leaving alive or dead is the ghostly resident that built the house.

Richard Crenna as C.J. Arnold
Joanna Pettet as Dr. Caroline Arnold
Andrew Prine as Prof. Raymond Guy
Directed by Gus Trikonis

Love this movie.

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