AllMovie

A true "guilty pleasure" crime melodrama with horror movie touches, the low-budget The Living Ghost stars future Academy award-winner James Dunn as Nick Trayne, a retired detective hired to look into the mysterious disappearance of banker Walter Craig. Working with Craig's pert secretary Billie Hilton (Joan Woodbury), Nick is questioning Craig's alarmingly suspicious friends and relatives when the missing banker (Gus Glassmire) suddenly turns up in a strange, zombie-like state. According to Dr. Bruhling (Lawrence Grant), Craig is suffering from a paralyzed cerebral cortex, a state that may render him dangerous and that is in all likelihood induced by someone else. And, sure enough, Nick has barely begun to understand what the good doctor is suggesting when Craig is found hovering over the dead body of his brother-in-law, George Phillips (J. Arthur Young). But is the cataleptic banker actually a killer or is someone even more dangerous behind the murder? The trail leads Nick and Billie to a nearby shack where strange experiments have recently been conducted and, in time, to the real culprit. The Living Ghost was released on videocassette as A Walking Nightmare, and a nightmare it certainly is.