Tales from the Crypt (comics)

Freddy has managed to cheat death for many decades by having his old friend, a surgeon, perform transplants on him to replace his organs with those from a younger man. But he has to steal them from corpses, and now he is finding he has less and less time before he needs another operation. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A public executioner decides to take the law into his own hands. (No host)

A private detective finds himself with a new case to solve when he and his wife rent a hotel room and find an unidentifiable body hidden inside. (No host)

Convinced that he became a werewolf after a mysterious incident during a trip to Europe, Ralph goes to visit his old friend George for help. However, with the full moon rising, he is closer to the truth than he knows. (No host)

A surgeon, furious that his fiancee has left him to marry an artistically gifted man, decides to take his revenge by cutting off his love rival's hand. The artist commits suicide, but the severed hand appears to have taken on a life of its own. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A morgue attendant begins having visions of death which he links to the "Living Corpse", a performance artist who feigns death during his act. (No host)

Marian Mander is convinced she is going insane when she begins to see and hear strange things after her son's death. Her husband is worried about her, but how deep is his own involvement? (No host)

A woman becomes mute with shock after witnessing a doctor murdering his wife. He commits the witness to an insane asylum but then decides he must kill her before she regains her voice. (No host)

A couple whose plane went down over the Bermuda Triangle are trapped on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. They think they are in luck when they come across a ship; until they find a skeleton tied to the helm. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Ida and Jim are plotting to murder Ida's stingy, drunken husband so they can be together. He proves a little harder to kill than they would like. (No host)

The young sub-curator of a museum is angry that his own invention is being ignored in favor of a new exhibit: the frozen body of a Neanderthal. The enraged man decides to get even by thawing out the body and leaving it to decompose in the sun, but he does not think to check that the caveman is really dead. (No host)

Daniel Richards is staying in Haiti with his wealthy plantation-owner friend. He ignores instructions not to spy on a native voodoo ritual but then notices something very interesting about the photo he took of the event. (No host)

A you-are-the-main-character story in which you are a man on a sea crossing, forced to take a cabin that is supposedly cursed: everyone who slept in it has either gone crazy or mysteriously left the ship. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Four wealthy, arrogant college students come to bitterly regret playing around with a book of voodoo spells. (No host)

Janet is worried that her workaholic brother is ruining his health, so she calls in the family doctor to give him a reviving tonic. When he begins going through a monstrous transformation, it is a race against time to find out what was in the tonic. (No host)

Theodore Warren goes into a trance and draws the face of a terrified-looking man. He is shocked but not as much as when he meets the man in real life—a man who is carving Warren's own name into a tombstone. (No host)

A prisoner on death row is visited by a professor who claims to be able to revive him after his death. The prisoner is executed in the electric chair, and the professor brings him back to life. He shoots the professor and goes to take his revenge on the judge who sentenced him to death but finds that he should not have been so hasty. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A couple on their honeymoon come across a deserted amusement park. Only one ride is open, and as they discover, the owner is a little too obsessed with making sure that his "dummies" look perfectly real. (No host)

A fraternity boy is determined to terrify the new pledges going through a hazing ritual and makes them go to the top floor of an old house rumoured to be haunted. He gets his comeuppance when the boys disappear and he is sent to find them. Reprinted from The Haunt of Fear #15 (1) (May/Jun 1950). (No host)

Larry kills his love rival, John, and as a parting shot is determined to marry John's wife wearing the same tuxedo that John wore at the wedding. Unfortunately, this is what John was buried in, and now Larry has to dig up the body to retrieve it. (The Old Witch)

Bill is in love with Laura, but Laura loves only Jim. Bill kills Jim and decides he must kill Laura because she knows about the murder. What Bill does not know is that when Jim promised to always protect Laura, he really meant it. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Jean and her lover, Freddie, are involved in a car accident. Jean needs a blood transfusion but no one at the scene is a match until a mysterious stranger appears and volunteers his help. Shortly afterwards, bodies begin turning up in town—drained of their blood. (The Crypt-Keeper)

The owners of a failing amusement park find themselves in luck when a newcomer agrees to sell them the rights to an amazing new rollercoaster. They decide to save on further costs by not testing the ride for safety, but then when it opens, they are offered the first turn on the new attraction. (The Old Witch)

On New Year's Eve, Robert Arnold discovers a book in the attic that tells of a curse on his family: every 50 years, the oldest of the clan will die on New Year's Eve. Robert realizes he is the oldest living Arnold, but he does not believe in the curse. (The Vault-Keeper)

You and your friend, Carl, are on a long drive. While driving, Carl falls asleep at the wheel and crashes the car. You wake up, glad to have survived. But why does everyone you meet run away from you? (The Crypt-Keeper)

Tony decides to pay his "last respects" to his newly deceased wife but finds himself trapped in the crypt with her body. He is forced to turn to a shocking method of survival. (The Old Witch)

A man skeptical about the supernatural is talked into attending a seance. He is sure he can trick the medium into proving herself a fake by asking her to channel the spirit of his wife who is still alive. Or is she? (The Crypt-Keeper)

Jay and Bill, visitors to Haiti, are determined to witness a voodoo ritual. But when the locals catch them spying, it is not long before they start seeing strange dolls everywhere. (The Vault-Keeper)

Harry loses his hearing and with it his job and his wife. An old friend points him in the direction of a man who may be able to help by giving Harry a hearing transplant from a bat. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Two old friends are doctors who ca not agree whether illness is physical or just in the mind. When one of them is close to death, the other is convinced he can save his old friend through hypnosis, a technique so successful it keeps the patient's heart beating even after his death. (The Old Witch)

Duncan falls asleep while reading a horror story about a ghoul, and when he wakes up, he finds he has a strange new taste in food. (The Vault-Keeper)

Ralph wants to give his fragile, sickly wife such a fright that it will cause her fatal heart failure, and he can inherit her money, the money she gained when they murdered her wealthy old uncle together. He decides that making her uncle "reappear" will be just the shock to kill her, not knowing that the corpse is already ahead of him. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man who loves to collect hunting "trophies" discovers that it is not just animals that can be hunted. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A housewife is terrorized by an evil old witch who switches their bodies leaving the witch alone with the woman's husband. (The Vault-Keeper)

Eddie is madly in love with a woman who does not return his affections. He meets a mysterious stranger claiming to be an alchemist, who gives Eddie a potion to make the woman fall madly in love with him. The stranger says Eddie will soon be back for the antidote, and Eddie laughs, but soon finds out he should have listened. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Henri Mataud is the proprietor of a wax museum devoted to figurines of famous murderers. He becomes fed up with his wife "ruining" the exhibits by relieving them of their heavy weapons and awkward poses, so he decides to stop her for good, without realizing just how much the figures appreciated her efforts. (The Old Witch)

An artist who has been conned out of money goes to a voodoo practitioner in the hope of revenge. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Sandra and her lover, Fred, arrange to kill Sandra's husband, but at the same time as she is murdering her husband, Fred is hit by a truck and dies. When Sandra's husband wakes up in Fred's body, he has only one thing on his mind. (The Vault-Keeper)

A man buys a farm which he plans to turn into a flying school, ignoring the old farmhand's instruction not to bulldoze the Native American burial plot on the site. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A corrupt politician poisons his rival so he can become the town mayor. His actions quite literally come back to haunt him. (The Old Witch)

Two entrepreneurs want to pay off a French stage magician to perform his wondrous magic tricks on stage in the USA. He refuses, so they kill him and steal his manuscript with the intention of staging his horrific "illusions" themselves. There is just one important detail he left out of the script. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A woman whose husbands have all died in mysterious circumstances gets more than she bargained for when she goes to lay flowers at their gravesites. (The Vault-Keeper)

Myra is devastated after her husband takes off on an unexpected business trip and never comes back. His business partner returns without him, and Myra discovers that maybe her husband is not quite who she thought he was. (The Crypt-Keeper)

During the French Revolution, a corrupt duke makes money by taking bribes to save condemned aristocrats from the guillotine but then turns them in to the authorities. But, if a chicken can survive without its head, maybe a human can, too? (The Old Witch)

Two medical students who are planning to rob a grave so they can save on expenses for their dissection project cross paths with a pair of conmen trying to fake a death. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A hypnotist's act includes reducing his wife to a near-death state by using his powers to slow her heart. He decides to do this to kill her so he can marry his new girlfriend, but he forgets that there is also a command to revive her. (The Vault-Keeper)

Arnold takes over his father's business and fires a loyal employee for being too old. The man returns to his native Haiti and sends Arnold a present: a sapling from a magical tree that prevents old age. It works just a bit too well. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A seaside resort owner tries to convince his old friend, a once-famous ventriloquist, to come out of retirement and perform at the resort. The dummy is less keen to take part in the act. (The Old Witch)

A child whose abusive stepfather keeps locking him in the closet appears to have found an imaginary friend. He tells his mother that someone really lives inside the closet, someone who wants to punish his stepfather. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Clint is on the run and asks an old "friend" to help him escape by boat—a friend whose lover he seduced, crippled in an accident, and then abandoned. The friend agrees to help Clint, but Clint did not specify exactly where he wanted to be taken. (The Vault-Keeper)

Myrna has a phobia of being buried alive. Now, her worst fear has come true. Can she escape from the coffin before her oxygen runs out? (The Crypt-Keeper)

A greedy businessman who loves spiders uses one of his pets to kill a business associate who was about to expose his embezzlement. On a trip abroad, he finds himself closer to his fanged friends than he could ever have imagined. (The Old Witch)

A prospector returns from the dead to take revenge on a rival who murdered him to steal his gold. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A film producer travels to the Arctic on location and falls in love with a beautiful young girl. He wants her to come to Hollywood with him and become a star. The girl's guardian angrily opposes this, and the producer convinces her to run away with him anyway. Once they arrive he discovers a very good reason why she should have stayed at home. (The Vault-Keeper)

Seven-year-old Toby lives with his abusive aunt, who beats him for stealing coal from the shed. She eventually decides to put a lock on the coal-bin to keep him out, which backfires when she becomes trapped inside herself. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Andrew goes to stay with his wealthy uncle Ambrose, whose other heirs have all mysteriously died after coming to live at Ambrose's mansion. Ambrose seems like a kindly old man, but his wife warns Andrew that something far more sinister is afoot. (The Old Witch)

The owners of a cargo vessel build a complicated rat trap to catch rodents on their ship, resulting in a device that traps the rats and forces them to kill each other for survival. Luckily, humans are more advanced than this—or so the men think, until their own boat begins to sink. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A sheriff investigates a series of strange murders in the Everglades. The bodies have been completely ripped apart, but he knows the killings are the work of no ordinary creature. (The Vault-Keeper)

Cartoonist Jack Kamen gets his own taste of fear when he joins the staff at Tales from the Crypt and has to start illustrating horror stories instead of romances. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Villagers take revenge on a greedy feudal duke who tortures his subjects to feed his love of jewels. (The Old Witch)

During World War II, a butcher decides to make money on the black market by selling rotted horse meat as steak, with horrific consequences when townspeople start falling sick. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A group of men frame their business partner to cover their own misdeeds but soon find themselves trapped in a "web" of more than just false evidence. (The Vault-Keeper)

Two obsessive gamblers face off in a "game" to the death. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A circus elephant trainer decides to use his act as a cover to kill his wife so he can marry his new girlfriend. He is not counting on his wife, or the elephant, making a reappearance in the ring—even after they're dead. (The Old Witch)

The Crypt Keeper recounts his own origins: born to a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy and a dead sideshow freak with two heads. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A greedy couple in India kill a young peasant girl who refuses to tell them the secret of her magic rope trick. They are sure they can work out how to perform it themselves and make their fortune, but did not heed her warning that the rope will take orders from no one but her. (The Vault-Keeper)

A spoiled young prince loves his elderly nursemaid. When she dies suddenly, the king and queen promise to hold a splendid state funeral. The prince is looking forward to the event until he discovers the nursemaid is not dead at all and decides to take matters into his own hands. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A con man who seduces elderly women so he can kill them and inherit their money meets his match in a new conquest. (The Old Witch)

You are the protagonist in a story where you take the place of Frankenstein's monster. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Conmen try to scam a town into believing there is oil buried underneath an old cemetery. (The Vault-Keeper)

A selfish king forces his subjects to pay exorbitant taxes to make him rich, until he demands that people lose body parts if they can not pay. Then, his subjects come to claim his own unpaid tax contribution. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A mortician's elderly aunt is very particular about how she wants an embalming to be performed in her house. Namely, the embalming of her own body. (The Old Witch)

In the early 1900s, a Hungarian immigrant family is blamed for a series of werewolf attacks in town. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man pays a visit to his sister in a deserted town besieged by vampires, but why does no one come out before dark and what does the local restaurant have to do with it? (The Vault-Keeper)

A playboy uses bride and groom voodoo dolls to make a rich, elderly woman marry him so he can get his hands on her money. When he meets a new girlfriend, he uses the dolls to kill his wife, unaware that the doll still holds power even after the death of the real bride. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Explorers uncovering the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh do not believe in the reported curse of the mummy that lies inside the tomb until they decide to steal the pharaoh's treasures for themselves. (The Old Witch)

You are taxi driver working in a town where a series of recent murders have been attributed to vampires, and you become suspicious of a passenger who seems to know a few too many details about the deaths. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A shrewish housewife investigates when her friend suddenly goes on a long trip without warning and the friend's husband takes up a new interest in carrier pigeons. (The Vault-Keeper)

A bigamist has been living with two separate wives, one of whom loves bowling, while the other loves to play golf. They discover this ruse when they meet in a hotel where their respective tournaments are being held; and decide to take their revenge in a most sporting fashion. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A vengeful old mortician loves to desecrate the corpses he buries. But, one of them turns out to be not so dead and calls on the others for help. (The Old Witch)

A doctor goes to extreme lengths to convince a colleague of his medical theories about death. (The Crypt-Keeper)

You are a man caught in an endless nightmare: attacked by werewolves, vampires, and zombies, buried alive, and more. Can you work out why you are here and find a way out of this torment? (The Vault-Keeper)

An arrogant young man takes over a small-town fire department. He decides to kill the only other town fireman, an old man who refuses to retire. The old man is not so eager to give up his job. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A doctor swears vengeance when he is disbarred from practicing. He imprisons the committee members and transplants their brains into dogs, using the animals to make him rich as a sideshow performer. However, their survival instinct is stronger than he thought. (The Old Witch)

A swindler marries a wealthy woman for her money and then kills her, disposing of her body in the faithful old trunk that she carries while travelling. The trunk is determined not to let him get away with the murder. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man falls in love with a woman he met at a masquerade ball, despite never having seen her real face. They agree to unmask each other on their wedding night, but the groom may not be so keen on what he finds under the mask. (The Vault-Keeper)

A practical joker visits the doctor for aches and pains caused by constant laughing, little knowing that the doctor was the victim in a prank that went fatally wrong. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A reporter investigates a series of deaths of homeless people, which he believes are linked to a mysterious charity in aid of street-dwellers. (The Old Witch)

Children overhear a plot between the local doctor and undertaker to make money by poisoning the wealthiest people in town and then charging their families for elaborate funerals. When their latest victim turns out to be the father of one of the boys, the children devise a little scheme of their own. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A lonely grave is filled with the body of an equally lonely woman who was murdered by her niece and nephew. She returns from the grave, which does not want to let her go, but she repays it by filling it with two new corpses. (The Vault-Keeper)

A macabre twist on the fairy tale, "Sleeping Beauty". (The Crypt-Keeper)

An elderly, paraplegic newspaper seller loses his livelihood when a rival takes over his pitch. He is not able to physically do anything to stop this but his shadow has no such limitations. (The Old Witch)

Carla is terrorized by her husband, a sadistic sideshow freak with the power of telepathy. He learns that she is having an affair and settles on a plan to kill her lover using a series of local murders as a cover. But Carla finds a way to settle the score—and whoever or whatever committed the murders is still on the loose. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A diver kills his rival in order to mine an area of abnormally large pearls for himself but finds a surprise waiting for him down in the depths. (The Vault-Keeper)

Ezra, an old sea captain, moves in with his sister, Mildred. He goes insane, having the house remodelled to look like the inside of his ship and treating Mildred as a slave. But when the exertion gives her a fatal heart attack, Ezra finds himself all at sea. (The Crypt-Keeper)

The proprietor of a seafood restaurant, who loves to torture the lobsters he serves, finds out what it is like to be in their place after he kills an associate he had ripped off. (The Old Witch)

Geniuses Andrew and Philip have been best friends all their lives until Philip marries an unscholarly woman and stops spending time with Andrew. Lucky for Andrew, he has devised a way to keep Philip with him forever. (The Crypt-Keeper)

The corrupt director of an insane asylum decides to clean the place up before an inspection, but he discovers to his own cost that one inmate may not be so crazy after all. (The Vault-Keeper)

A circus performer's daughter is seduced by a ruffian knife-thrower who is already married. The father hatches a plot to have the man sent away to jail by killing his wife during their act but does not anticipate a last-minute change of circumstances. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A German World War I soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is relieved from his post and goes to live with a friend, a butcher whose shop is mysteriously full of meat despite wartime rationing. (The Old Witch)

A violinist undertakes a dangerous journey to visit his old teacher and becomes determined to kill the werewolves that inhabit the surrounding woods. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Two friends suspect each other of being the vampire who killed their mutual third friend and many other people in the town. (The Vault-Keeper)

The servant to a plantation owner takes revenge for a family his master killed. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man whose greedy brother has made constant demands on him throughout their lives can take no more when his brother demands an expensive ornament for the hood of his car. (The Old Witch)

Roy Dixon committed the perfect murder at Four Corners. All four connecting states have made a bid to send him to death row, but he walked free. So why are his nightmares of execution becoming all too real? (The Crypt-Keeper)

Paul finds himself being threatened at gunpoint by his wife's lover, who does not seem to know there is a very special requirement for joining her family. (The Vault-Keeper)

A man takes part in a game show with a sinister twist. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A struggling art dealer tries to take advantage of three old ladies who are able to create wonderful tapestries after they have witnessed a violent accidental death. (The Old Witch)

A ship's captain, who is in love with a crew member's wife, kills her husband by deliberately exposing him to a flesh-eating virus. (The Crypt-Keeper)

You attempt to steal a miser's treasure that he has been bringing up from a shipwreck. You kill him when he gets in your way, but when he said he was ready for you, he was dead right! (The Vault-Keeper)

Fortune hunter Pearl attempts to seduce a wealthy man and is delighted when he tells her he "wants her for his wife." But what exactly does he mean? (The Crypt-Keeper)

An executioner in post-Revolution France is paid by a corrupt noble's brother to expose the man as a monarchist and have him sent to the guillotine. The executioner saves the man's head as a trophy, but he finds it harder to dispose of than he expected. (The Old Witch)

The survivor of a shipwreck becomes caught up in the "food chain" when he finds himself stranded on an island with nothing to eat but a single rat. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man serving time on a penal colony makes a plan to escape by killing the governor and taking the corpse's place in the coffin. If only he had stayed around to hear the victim's last request. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Howard has to leave his beloved wife to go on a business trip, but he begins to suffer from a recurring dream of her being murdered. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A man is trying to woo a much younger woman, who rejects him because of his age. He finds a doctor who can give him the body of a young man again—for a hidden price. (The Old Witch)

Local men turn vigilante when the mayor will not help them rid the town of the werewolf that is killing people. The mayor, however, has his own reasons not to get involved. (The Crypt-Keeper)

Inmates at a home for the blind turn the tables on the sadistic overseer and his dog by trapping them in a maze in the basement. (The Vault-Keeper)

Elmer's selfish wife and her freeloading parents have always criticized him for his failure to "get ahead" in life, not realizing how literally he would take their words. (The Crypt-Keeper)

A con man marries a sick old woman for her money but finds out she has a very strange relationship with the local rag man. (The Old Witch)