“Supernaturally or otherwise, we are all haunted. Anyone who’s lived in this past century, this last week, cannot escape being haunted. For some of us, it’s a mass haunting, an all-pervading specter of guilt or futility or alienation that we suffer collectively. For others, the haunting is more private and more terrible because the ghosts are ours alone and we recognize them. Sometimes it takes so little to free ourselves of our ghosts. And if my believing in another man’s haunting helps to free him, does it matter whether science calls his agony hallucinatory or real?”
Joseph Stefano’s and Villa Di Stefano Productions (his sole effort as a director) The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre 1964 emerges as a fascinating yet obscure and underappreciated artistic artifact in the landscape of 1960s television horror. Its legacy, while somewhat overshadowed by Stefano’s more famous works, remains an intriguing footnote in the history of televised terror. The film ambitiously blends elements of horror, paranormal investigation, and film noir, creating a narrative that is both intriguing and yet potentially unwieldy.
In 1964, while Joseph Stefano was immersed in the production of the inaugural season of his acclaimed science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits (1963-1965), a series created and executive produced by his old friend Leslie Stevens. Stefano felt inspired to create a companion show that would explore more supernatural themes.
Over the next year or so, he wrote two scripts as pilots for the proposed spin-offs, The Unknown and The Haunted.
The Unknown didn’t quite hit the mark, so it was reworked and added as an episode of The Outer Limits entitled The Forms of Things Unknown, which starred Barbara Rush, Vera Miles, David McCallum, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre’s collaborative endeavor by Stefano, photographer Conrad Hall, and its incredibly intuitive cast of actors make it a little jewel that remained shoved in a drawer for decades. This made-for-TV film, which was originally conceived as the unrealized pilot for the ill-fated series called The Haunted, offers a compelling glimpse into Stefano’s creative vision beyond his most famous work on Psycho and highlights Joseph Stefano’s inclination to embrace a subtext that deals with psychological inner chaos through his eye for compelling narratives even within the constraints of modest television productions. The film’s existence in this liminal space between pilot and standalone feature offers a unique opportunity to examine the evolving landscape of horror in 1960s television.
The Haunted/The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre features Martin Landau as Nelson Orion, Diane Baker as Vivia Mandore, and Judith Anderson as their housekeeper Paulina.
Tom Simcox plays Henry Mandore, Diane Baker’s husband; Nellie Burt (who appeared in The Outer Limits episodes, Don’t Open Til Doomsday and The Guests in 1964 plays Mary Finch, Orion’s skeptical but loyal housekeeper, and Leonard Stone plays Benedict Sloane, the remarkably tolerant head of the architectural firm where Orion works. Both actors had a fine working relationship with Martin Landau and with each other and helped embellish Nelson Orion’s world. John Drew Barrymore was initially cast as Henry Mandore.
Tom Simcox, Nellie Burt, Martin Landau, and Dame Judith Anderson.
There’s also an additional nod to The Outer Limits with its use of an eerie score from series regular Dominic Frontiere, who created much of that anthology series’ transcendent hymn-like qualities. Here, Frontiere’s score keeps the story a little off-kilter and nightmarish.
The movie features black and white photography by Conrad Hall (an Outer Limits regular and later working on films like The Day of the Locust (1975) and Marathon Man (1975); 1965 would be his first of ten Oscar nominations, three of which he would win.
Conrad Hall’s visual artistry vs the television constraints is a standout element, pushing the boundaries of what was typically expected in TV productions of the era. His use of expressive lighting and ambitious camera work, dramatic use of shadows and light, striking black-and-white imagery, spectral elongation effects, and rare-for-TV crane shots demonstrate a cinematic ambition that strains against the medium’s limitations. It all lends to the film’s eerie quality. His camera operator, William A. Fraker, was on the brink of shooting Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and a career of five Oscar nominations in cinematography.
The Outer Limits Season 1 episode, The Galaxie Being aired Sep. 16, 1963
Also adding an effective creepy touch is the black-and-white art direction by McClure Capps and the sets by veteran designer Frank Tuttle. Fred B. Phillips’s makeup revises his groundbreaking work on The Outer Limits The Galaxy Being for the spectral figure using the reverse negative. The Galaxy Being itself was created using a negative image effect, with the actor wearing a black scuba diving suit covered in oily makeup that reflected light. When filmed, this created a glowing, otherworldly appearance when the image was reversed to negative. This gave the alien a distinctive face with no mouth and glaring eyes.
There are a few visual set pieces that are deconstructed; they are quite compelling. The movie also includes a bit of a rare hallucinogenic drug and a creepy bit of business, with a ghostly Dame Judith Anderson stalking Baker as she sits in a car on a clifftop in the tragic finale.
A striking title sequence features the Los Angeles skyline being wiped out by a tidal wave. The artful visual blend at the very start shows a wave breaking on a beach, metaphorically devouring the city.
There’s a visually arresting sequence that weaves together multiple elements of suspense and atmosphere. The scene unfolds in a single, meticulously choreographed shot that showcases both Stefano and Hall’s technical prowess and artistic vision.
The camera’s gaze encompasses the ominous phone line, a lifeline between two worlds: the foreboding crypt, the silent sentinel of family secrets; Pauline’s furtive movements, a dance of noirish light and shadow; and nature’s subtle intrusion.
A transition from a small, enigmatic black vial nestled in the crypt to Paulina’s windswept figure on the beach, her black attire echoing the vial’s darkness, a visual metaphor, linking disparate elements of the story through powerful imagery.
Stefano, fresh from his triumph with Psycho, cleverly leverages his Hitchcock connections in casting to orchestrate a cinematic reunion of sorts, bringing together some of Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful ensemble of cast members.
Martin Landau, who gave a mesmerizing performance in North by Northwest, brought his intense gaze and brooding presence of cool demeanor and class; Judith Anderson, the imposing Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca 1940; her steely spined visage lends her formidable presence as the sinister housekeeper Paulina, And Diane Baker, the fresh-faced ingénue from Marnie 1964, and in William Castle’s Strait-Jacket that same year, adds a touch of vulnerable allure.
Stefano’s shrewd choices infused each frame of this atmospheric production with an unmistakable aura of suspense, a subtle homage to the master of suspense. Each frame carries with it the echoes of these actors’ Hitchcockian past. In addition to Nellie Burt’s appearance on two episodes of The Outer Limits during Stefano’s tenure on that series, Martin Landau, who is one of my favorite underrated actors, starred in perhaps one of the most enduring, evocative, and emotionally compelling of that series, The Man Who Was Never Born which aired in 1963. Landau portrays Andro, a time traveler from a decimated world in the future who travels back in time to prevent the birth of the inventor who would become the inventor of destruction. He was cast opposite another favorite of mine, Shirley Knight, as Noelle Anderson, the intended mother of the future antagonist.
Martin Landau in The Outer Limits episode The Bellero Shield
One account suggests that the pilot for The Haunted either never aired on U.S. television or was shown only once in limited markets. Stefano wound up adding extra footage and an alternative ending to the pilot, extending it from sixty to eighty minutes and releasing it as a feature-length and re-named The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre internationally, but not in the US.
The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre reveals the adaptability required of creators in the face of network rejection. By extending the runtime and altering the ending, Stefano attempted to salvage his work for a different market, showcasing the malleability of content in the pursuit of an audience.
Kino Lorber yanked it out of obscurity and released it on Blu-ray, allowing us to witness its moody and intriguing hint at what might have been a full-length feature and a continuing series.
There is a commentary track by film historian David J. Schow and an unrestored print of The Haunted (the sixty-minute pilot) with a commentary track by film historian Eric Grayson, who actually owns the print that Kino Lorber used.
Eric Grayson, who covers The Haunted in the commentary, makes the keen observation that the name Mandore sounds like Manderley, the mansion in du Maurier/Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
One narrative suggests that the pilot’s intensity exceeded the comfort level of American audiences; reports indicate that the TV stations that did air it received countless concerns from viewers that the story was just too frightening for television, and ultimately, the show was dropped.
Joseph Stefano and Martin Landau planned for this movie to be the pilot for a new show similar in concept to The Twilight Zone (1959) and The Outer Limits (1963) but with a much greater focus on horror rather than science fiction and fantasy.
An anecdote attributed to Martin Landau claims TV executives “soiled themselves” during the pilot’s screening. While likely hyperbolic, this underscores the potential disconnect between creative ambition and network expectations. It highlights the subjective nature of evaluating content and the power dynamics at play.
According to David Schow in his commentary for the Kino Lorber release – the then-President of the CBS Television Network, James T. Aubrey, did pick up the series, but when the unpopular executive was fired from CBS, his successors scrapped all his other projects – including The Haunted.
This account involving CBS President James T. Aubrey, If true, demonstrates how industry politics and personnel changes could abruptly alter a show’s trajectory, regardless of its intrinsic worth. This unrealized potential serves as a poignant reminder of the often arbitrary nature of television development and the impact of network decisions on the evolution of genre television.
Despite its promising elements, The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre fell victim to the capricious nature of network television. The departure of CBS president James T. Aubrey effectively sealed the fate of the proposed series, relegating this potential pilot to standalone film status, and it begs the question – what if? – what would have been the potential impact of a Stefano-helmed supernatural anthology series? Stefano’s vision for The Haunted as an anthology series, with its promise of weekly paranormal investigations, could have potentially predated and influenced later similarly themed pilots that failed to take off.
Roy Thinnes and Angie Dickinson in The Norliss Tapes TV movie 1973.
There was a similar attempt at the television supernatural detective genre with Harvy Hart’s Dark Intruder in 1965, starring Leslie Nielson as Brett Kingsford, an investigator with an occult bent, and in the 1970s, there was Dan Curtis’s The Norliss Tapes 1973, and Spectre 1977 co-written by Gene Roddenberry, or the beloved television series from the prolific Dan Curtis with Kolchak: The Night Stalker. And, of course, The X-Files, the show’s creator, Chris Carter, lovingly touts the former as his inspiration.
The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre isn’t just a curiosity in Stefano’s career but also a harbinger of the more sophisticated, genre-blending television that would emerge in subsequent decades.
The enigmatic fate of The Haunted pilot not only emphasizes the conflict between artistic vision, network politics, and audience sensibilities in 1960s television. The show’s rejection and decision-making in the industry remain very opaque, as do the challenges faced by boundary-pushing, innovative content in early television. Despite its initial obscurity, The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre has gained recognition for its chilling atmosphere and compelling storytelling.
Nelson Orion (Martin Landau) is an architect by profession with a passion for the supernatural and a paranormal investigator who lives in a self-created garçonnière, hazy in its aesthetic futurism, precariously situated as an audacious cantilever on a cliff, hanging on the edge of a sheer drop.
He is recruited by heiress Vivia Mandore (Diane Baker), who mistakenly thought herself free from the domination of her recently deceased mother-in-law, Louise Mandore, whose ghost is seemingly exerting her will via telephone. Vivia is married to the wealthy and blind Henry Mandore (Tom Simcox). The couple lives on a large, rustic 100-acre family estate.
Henry is being tormented by nocturnal calls from the ghost of his dead mother, who, haunted by the fear of being buried alive, had installed a telephone in the family crypt. The old woman appears determined to continue her controlling ways… from beyond the grave.
In her will, she stipulated that there must be five doctors who examine her before signing her death certificate. She must not be embalmed. The coffin lid must remain open. And there must be a telephone placed by the coffin with a direct line to her son Henry’s bedroom. She would also be able to dial the code H.E.L.P., something also engraved on a cross in her tomb.
Louise Mandore’s death marks the beginning of an unsettling time. Not too long after, the phone rings in Henry’s room, its eerie tones ringing out through the silence. On the other end, a woman’s sobs echo, each cry steeped in dissonant sorrow and desperation. The haunting timbre of her voice weaves a chilling narrative as if the very air is thick with unresolved grief and lingering shadows. Like a ghostly leitmotif, these unsettling cries constantly remind us of the supernatural forces at play. The eerie wail of a tormented soul is a haunting prelude to the macabre tale that unfolds at the very top of the chilling The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre.
ECHOES FROM THE GRAVE:
In the movie’s opening sequence, there’s a dissolve during the opening credits: it begins with otherworldly wailing over a foggy graveyard. We’re plunged into a visual and auditory pendulum swing, a stark shifting of imagery and sound from grainy, misty footage of a graveyard until we shift and abruptly land over a heaven’s view of a sprawling city. We hear turbulent music—and then waves crash over the city and completely blanket the screen.
Accompanied by Frontiere’s score, that creates an intense unease. The cityscape dissolves, swept away by beneath rolling ocean waves and hidden depths that swallow it whole until what remains instead is a serene coastal beach where we encounter a lone dashing figure strolling along the shore. His casual yet stylish attire suggests a romantic interlude. The soundtrack shifts accordingly, adopting a light-hearted and amorous tone that lulls us into a false sense of security.
The titles continue, and Frontiere’s music accompanies – seagulls in flight as Nelson Orion walks along the beach with a lovely romantic sweeping 60s vibe as he comes into focus, heading toward his futuristic home on the cliff. The orchestral strings swirl like the wind, and the strident horns stab at the air as he now stands on top of the cliff and looks down at the ocean. The name Orion – as in the constellation. Orion – the blind hunter.
But this respite is short-lived. The music abruptly reverts to its earlier menacing character, jarring us back into a state of apprehension. Frontiere’s music will send us on an erratic journey as it follows the story, at times strained, discordant, and bleak and, at other times, subdued. This pattern of tonal whiplash persists throughout the opening, deliberately keeping the audience off-balance and primed for the twists and turns that lie ahead.
As part of the following scene, we find Louise Mandore’s heir, Henry, blind since birth, anxiously awaiting the return of his wife, Vivia, who has been away on a business trip, managing his mother’s charitable work.
Henry is gazing out a window; though he cannot see, he waits for Vivia. As she steps through the door, they embrace. She can tell he is in distress. He tells her, “It’s been so long, so horrible. It began 3 days after you left. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I knew something was wrong, and for the first time in my life, Vivia, being blind, terrified me.”
Henry reveals his unsettling experiences, claiming to be tormented by eerie, nocturnal phone calls that have plagued him in her absence. Henry tells her that the household staff have all gone, leaving only one enigmatic figure— their new housekeeper- Paulina—(Dame Judith Anderson, who channels her formidable Mrs. Danvers) to help him through this uncanny siege. She came the day after they all left, and they had told her he’d be needing someone. Were they aware of an unsavory force in the house?
Vivia rings the servant’s bell. Below, answering the call, is Paulina, who comes gliding along the floor in her long, black, flowing dress. She slithers along the grand foyer like a serpent.
Frontiere’s unsettling score screeches like metal on metal, as if someone is pressing on unpadded brakes, screeling and skidding out of control, evoking the jarring dissonance of failing brakes. This auditory assault perfectly underscores Paulina framed in a menacing close-up as she delivers her deceptively polite greeting, “How do you do, Mrs Mandore? I’ve been looking forward to your return.”
Emerging from the shadows, Judith Anderson (who could scare anyone even in the light of day) makes a chilling entrance. With her striking eye makeup reminiscent of a gothic matriarch, she embodies an unsettling presence that immediately puts Vivia on edge.
As Judith Anderson approaches with seemingly predatory intent, the sense being she might pounce, Dominic Frontiere’s familiar musical motif from his work on The Outer Limits swells, reminiscent of that show’s otherworldly creatures, his music underscoring the moment they move closer in the frame.
The severe horn stabs evoke the chilling impact of Psycho’s shower scene, transforming Anderson into a menacing figure. It is a powerful musical cue.
Startled as if she has just encountered a specter, Vivia gasps and instinctively presses her back against the wall, her eyes wide with shock, just before the screen fades to black. The true nature of her fright will remain a mystery for some time.
At the family mausoleum, Halls’s camera slowly crawls up along the facade to the old stone architecture of the dead. The camera then shows telephone wires—and finally, a shot of the mansion as the phone rings inside and the outside wind begins to blow us closer to the house.
In this stark scene, one lonely solitary light illuminates one window among many, creating a sense of isolation. The persistent ringing of an unanswered telephone dominates the space, its insistence growing more ominous with each unanswered peal. Henry, reduced to a blurred silhouette, occupies the corner, dwarfed by the looming presence of the phone in the foreground. The telephone, now the central focus, transforms into an auditory and visual menace; its relentless summons fills the room with tension. Finally, compelled by the unceasing bells, Henry approaches and grasps the receiver, breaking the oppressive silence.
He asks, “Mother?” There is a woman sobbing on the other end. “What do you want? Mother, why do you do this?”
The camera follows the phone lines back to the crypt. Suddenly, Paulina emerges within the shadows, her black dress blown by the same uncanny wind as she sneaks away. Much like a wraith herself, Paulina is always stalking the shadows and prowling the cemetery.
Orion enters the scene. He studies the surrounding tombstones and the outside of the mausoleum, which is the size of a small house.
Under the cloak of midnight, Vivia encounters the enigmatic Nelson Orion amidst the graves, a rendezvous arranged at her husband’s request. Grateful for his willingness to take her unusual plea seriously, she thanks him for not dismissing her desperate call as a mere joke. ”Thank you for not dismissing my call as a prank.”He assures her, “You’d be amazed at how few pranksters ask me to meet them in a cemetery… at midnight… If you’re being haunted, Mrs. Mandore.”
A well-paid architect, Orion’s paranormal pursuits are conducted in his free time. He’s a skeptic, and Vivia assures him that she is, too. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but the goal here is to help her husband, Henry, get to the bottom of the phone calls from a sobbing specter. He doesn’t plan on taking a fee if the haunting is legitimate.
He tells her that Mandore is an impressive name. She tells him, ” Impressive and tragic… Mostly to the Mandores themselves.”
She tells him, “ I’ve seen villages in Mexico, living, people living in tin and mud and here… dignity protection and even art and all wasted on the dead. Yes, I suppose I am being haunted, Mr. Orion. By my memories of other people’s anguish.”
He asks, “ But not by a ghost?”
She tells him, “ How could I be? I don’t believe in ghosts.” He says, “ Unbelievers rarely are willing to pay my fee.” She informs him,“ My husband asked me to write you a check in any amount… My husband wants you to investigate a ghost that’s haunting him by telephone. He says it’s a woman’s voice, but It says nothing. It merely sobs and sobs. His mother died almost a year ago. He’s convinced that it’s her voice calling from in there. The telephone is within arms’ reach of her coffin.”
If it’s a hoax, he won’t charge them a penny. Whatever he does to uncover a crime or a prank, he turns it over to the police department.
She tells him he must be a very poor medium if he never gets paid. He tells her officially that he’s an architect and that he makes a sizable living at it. and “I am not a medium.” Her husband insists she refers to him as a psychic; he tells her, “ Which is a different breed of cat altogether.” He tells her it is natural to feel unquiet about coming into the crypt with him. She wonders,“ Even if I’m an unbeliever?”
” People who refer to themselves as unbelievers always remind me of Madame Pompadore’s famous remark, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.’ ”
As he closes the door behind them, a shadow casts itself on the door. It is Paulina lurking. She leaves through the iron gate.
“ Why a telephone within arms reach of her coffin?” he asks.
She explains, “Louise Mandore had a lifelong fear of being mistaken for dead and buried alive. When she was a very little girl, they brought her here to attend a relative’s funeral. they were nervous that she’d wander off alone. Somehow, she locked herself in one of the burial chambers. Poor Louise, I don’t believe she really thought that they’d bury her alive. but her Will made every possible provision for it.”
Henry’s mother, a year in her grave, seems to have discovered a way to breach the veil between life and death—through the telephone lines.
With a touch of macabre foresight, Henry’s mother had insisted on having a telephone installed in her final resting place within the family vault. Her fear of premature burial, once dismissed as an eccentric whim, now takes on a sinister new dimension. For Henry, each ring of the phone carries the weight of dread, as if the very sound could summon the dead.
The chilling dread of premature burial evokes Poe’s masterful exploration of this primal fear in The Premature Burial. In this haunting tale, Poe delves into the psyche of a narrator plagued by catalepsy, a condition that mimics death and fuels his overwhelming terror of being buried alive.
In the shadowy, sleepless realm between life and death, this unnamed narrator struggles with a terrifying affliction: This insidious curse plunges him into death-like trances, blurring the line between slumber and the grave. Haunted by the specter of premature interment, our narrator becomes an architect of his own salvation, stocking his crypt with supplies and an easy escape route. The story’s iteration is also illustrated in Boris Karloff’s Thriller starring Sidney Blackmer, who wears a bracelet warning of his deceitful condition and installs a bell inside the crypt that he can set it pealing in case he’s been entombed by accident. The tomb’s ingenious design, with meticulous precision, transforms his would-be final resting place into a fortress against fate. The tomb becomes a macabre masterpiece of survival.
In Henry’s world, the line between the living and the dead blurs with each phantom ring. Is it truly his mother reaching out, or merely the echo of his own grief playing tricks on his mind? As he grapples with these uncanny communications, Henry finds himself trapped in a real-life twilight zone, where the past refuses to remain silent, and the dead may indeed have something to say.
This haunting scenario also eerily mirrors two Twilight Zone episodes. The first; Richard Matheson’s Long Distance Call, a story that has left its spectral fingerprints across the landscape of supernatural fiction. Long Distance Call is episode 58 of the American television anthology series. It originally aired on CBS on March 31, 1961. In this installment of the series, a 5-year-old boy named Billy (Billy Mumy) communicates with his dead grandmother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday.
The second would be the Twilight Zone episode Night Call, starring Gladys Cooper, where a fallen telephone line transforms a quiet cemetery into a conduit for otherworldly communication. As if the spectral phone calls across the airwaves themselves were haunted, carrying whispers from beyond, she is reconnected with her dead lover who calls out to her through the telephone static.
Orion asks Vivia, ” How long did she expect a grown married man to stay in reach of that phone?” “For the rest of his life.” “She has that kind of hold on him?” “She simply knew Henry had no reason to leave the house. Why should he? He’s already traveled the world several times. I suppose he wanted the world to look at him because he could never look at the world.”
They step inside the grand mausoleum, a house-sized structure featuring multiple rooms, a sepulchral sanctuary, and artifacts of the dead. As they walk through the dark hallways toward Henry’s mother’s burial chamber, someone or some unseen follows them in the shadows. A sudden wind blows a door open. The sobbing and wailing begin, but Vivia and Orion are still unaware of it. The wailing travels through the tomb, looking for the two of them.
He asks, ” How long has he been getting the calls? She tells him it started two months ago while she was away on business.
He asks if the calls could be coming from somewhere else in the burial chamber, and she tells him it’s a direct line. Couldn’t someone else have a key to the crypt? It doesn’t work like an ordinary intercom; it has to be dialed, and only Louise Mandore knew that code number.
The sobbing echoes through the corridors, this unseen presence, revealing its movement from the perspective of that very force.
Vivia tells Orion that she believes he agrees with her about the situation. “That this is not a genuine haunting?” he says. “ That it is a prank?” He asks if she thinks it’s a prank. She doesn’t know. “But whatever it is, it’s driving Henry to the edge of madness.”
They enter Louise’s room. They see the phone. He touches it and remarks. “ It’s warm.”
She gets angry, “ Tell me how that cold, moldering hand could reach out and grab for a telephone?”
Doors burst open and crash shut. The spiritual blast erupts into the room where Louise rests, overtaking Orion and Vivia with swirling gusts, wailing violins, and piercing screams filling the air as Vivia becomes hysterical, fending off an unseen dark presence. She flails in utter terror as if it is passing right through her. She cannot fend off this unseen assaultive power – this aggressive wind with purpose.
Orion tries to calm her down once the room becomes quiet again, “Mrs Mandore, there’s nothing to fear. It’s quiet now. She asks him,“It?” He says, ” Don’t you feel it? Something Something present, something quiet. Waiting. Don’t you feel it,’? She tells him,“ No.”
He picks up the cross engraved with Dial H.E.L.P. that has fallen on the ground.
Orion wants to talk to Vivia’s husband now. He will take her to his house to spend the night. The otherworldly sobbing will continue after they leave the tomb.
Outside, she realizes that she has left her purse inside and goes back to get it, “I want to prove I’m not afraid… to myself.”
When Vivia dashes back for her forgotten purse, she inexplicably lingers in the tomb, retrieving a vial from inside. She takes out the small black vile that sits in her gloved white hand. The room begins to light up. The sound of the Galaxy Being – a roaring vacuum sound – and the door slowly closing. Suddenly, the supernatural chaos resumes—flashes of lightning, ghostly winds howl, and a ghastly, blood-splashed apparition in a black shroud materializes before her—the horrible thing with an oily grimace in a shroud – wailing – comes closer.
Outside, Orion hears the door slam inside. As it draws closer to Vivia, he comes to her rescue outside the tomb; he hears her scream, ” No, I won’t, I can’t!”
As she comes running out of the room, he catches her. Orion sees the black vile sitting on the stone bench with her bag on the floor. The camera closes in on the mysterious vile.
After this new uncanny trauma, Vivia spends the night at Orion’s sleek modern beach house that juts out from the cliff. There, she can nurse her psychic wounds.
The narrative presents a compelling paradox in Vivia’s character. Despite her professed skepticism towards the supernatural, she exhibits an extraordinary susceptibility to fear, often succumbing to bouts of intense anxiety at the slightest provocation.
“I thought fear was better than death. It isn’t. It’s only slower.”
Whether it’s a gust of wind or any other seemingly innocuous occurrence, Vivia’s reactions border on the hysterical, creating a palpable tension throughout the story. As the plot unfolds, the reasons behind Vivia’s heightened state of distress gradually come to light.
Through the window, Vivia sees Pauline on the beach in her mournful black dress, looking out at the sea. She grabs her little black vile, empties it into the water, and drinks.
She meets Mrs. Finch (Nellie Burt), who brings her a breakfast tray. Mrs. Finch helped put her to bed the night before when she was in shock. “Did he explain my shock?” “He said something about you seeing a blood-splashed apparition in the mausoleum.”
As Mrs. Finch goes to answer the doorbell, she shows Orion the empty vile. “ The young and wealthy make remarkable recoveries.”
Orion methodically pursues the truth, engaging his cynical housekeeper, Mrs. Finch, in thought-provoking debates. As a nonbeliever, she employs logic and acts as a counterpoint to his eerie suppositions. She suggests hallucinations, hidden trickery the kind charlatans employ in their fake séances.
Their lively exchanges, where she proposes rational explanations like drug-induced hallucinations or hidden devices, add an enjoyable element of intellectual intrigue to the investigation.
Orion’s colleague Sloane appears. Nellie tells him that Orion didn’t make the meeting with the city council about saving one of their few historical buildings because he’s found another morbid case to occupy his time. When Orion greets him, Sloanes tells him, “Nelson, you don’t seem to appreciate the fact that you live in the age of the bulldozer.” He asks if he’s a restoration specialist and why he wastes his time on ‘the haunted.’ Suddenly, Vivia enters the room. Sloane smiles.
Vivia admires his art gallery, his walls covered floor to ceiling with paintings. Her attention is then drawn to a striking painting of the Mission at Sierra de Cobre that holds a prominent place on Orion’s vast gallery wall.
According to the legend, a bleeding ghost haunted the Mission of Sierra de Cobre. This ghost murdered an American woman, a school teacher. So, they called him in to investigate. Vivia seems transfixed by the painting.
She looks out the window again and sees her Rolls Royce down below the steep drop. Vivia turns to Mrs. Finch and asks if she’s ever seen a genuine apparition. “ I’m a realist, Mrs. Mandore. That’s the prime reason Mr. Orion employs me. Like all promoters of the faith, he needs his devil’s advocate.”
Vivia says, “ If you saw one, The terror you felt left no room for doubt.” Mrs. Finch assures her, “I’d make room. Someone’s got to not believe in ghosts.”
Orion drives her back home. They have to walk to the house; Her Rolls is there, blocking the long driveway, and it is missing the key. The walk to the house is a bit of a ways. She tells him about the family legacy of old wealth, having all its stake in real estate. They are the last family to refuse to sell their 100 acres. Henry is the last of the Mandores. Orion asks why he still uses his mother’s maiden name. He also tells her, “ It’d be almost immoral to let the bulldozers get to all this perfect nature.”
Paulina lurks in the trees, watching them. Then, like a black wraith, she moves on into the woods.
Vivia asks him, “ Why do you traffic in the supernatural? It’s one thing to rail against urban development, but why believe in things that science has disproven.”
“Disprove? No, no, merely not being able to prove. I’ve always been against any dogma or philosophy that says we must discard, disbelieve that which science cannot prove, computerize, or tame.”
“Mrs. Mandore, supernaturally, we’re all in some ways haunted, anyone who’s lived in this past century, this past week, this cannot escape being haunted for some of us it’s a mass haunting, an all pervading spectre of guilt or futility or alienation that we suffer collectively. For some, the haunting is more private, more terrible because the ghosts are ours alone that we recognize sometimes it takes so little to free ourselves of our ghosts. And if my believing in another man’s haunting helps to free him, does it matter whether science calls his agony hallucinatory or real?”
They make it to the house and enter. In this story, there is always the sound of the wind stirring. ” Mrs Mandore, What did you see in that chamber last night?” She asks, ” What did I imagine I saw?”A blood-splashed apparition? Did you see her, Mr Orion?”
He wonders, ” Her? No, but I saw the effect she had on you. What did she want you to do?
Vivia dismisses him, ” Lend her a quarter for the powder room.”
Once inside the Mandore home, he shakes Henry’s hand, but Orion can feel eyes burning the back of his neck. He turns around and sees Paulina. Henry introduces her and asks if he minds if she sits in on their consultation. “I’d like her to see for herself that you’re not a charlatan.”
Orion asks her, ” Is this the first time we’ve met?” She answers, ” Perhaps I was among those who tried to touch your sleeve. the day you rode into my village Sierra de Cobre.” He wonders why the choice of word, ” Charlatan?” She is no longer cryptic, ” You could not exorcise the bleeding ghost.” He insists, ” There was no ghost at the mission of Sierra de Cobre.”
She tells him forcefully, ” My own child was once splashed by the black blood on him.”
He combats her superstition, ” Water, thickened with sugar colored with soot. sought for the tourists.” But she meets him there, ” The people of Sierra de Cobre had faith in you. We expected you to rid our mission of its horror if you’d merely failed in that, we would have forgiven you, but to cast suspicion on us to say that one of us would murder an American.”
Henry: “Some of us would rather believe in the supernatural, Mr Orion. Ghosts can be less frightening than crime. Or madness.”
Orion asks him plainly, “Mr. Mandore, do you want to believe that these calls come from the realm of the supernatural?”
Henry desperately seeks a supernatural explanation, fearing he may be succumbing to madness like his father if his mother’s ghost isn’t real. Vivia’s susceptibility to nightmares makes her particularly vulnerable to paranormal experiences, which she struggles to cope with. Meanwhile, Paulina’s icy demeanor barely conceals a volatile, threatening secret of a darker nature.
Henry says, ” Vivia’s afraid that they’re the hallucinations of a blind madman. She hides her fear under that incredible tranquility of hers. but at odd times she weeps as only as someone who loves someone can I hear Paulina going to her and calming her somehow. Her fear isn’t totally unfounded, Mr Orion. My father went mad the night I was born, and some strains of madness are inherited; of course, she’s never heard this phone ring. Neither has Paulina.”
Orion tells him, ” Mr. Mandore, I don’t believe there’s anything supernatural about these calls.”
Pauline glares at him. “Again… he will try to persuade you that someone is trying to break your mind… and your heart… He’ll decree trickery here as he did murder at Sierra de Cobre.”
Orion’s architectural expertise in restoring forgotten homes mirrors his approach to helping troubled souls. He believes everyone carries their own inner ghosts, whether real or imagined. “For others, the haunting is more private.”
The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre is a fascinating artifact of 1960s supernatural television. It blends elements of horror, noir, and paranormal investigation into a uniquely old-school, atmospheric package. While it never achieved the series status its creators envisioned, the film has endured as an obscure cult classic, appreciated for its moody cinematography, compelling performances, and skillful balance of supernatural and human elements.
This is your EverLovin’ Joey sayin’ there’s nothing more chilling than a ghostly serenade of sobbing on the other end of a phone. Even when it’s your own mother complaining that you don’t call her enough!
