Dates
- Cover date
- September-October 1954
- Pages
- 36
Editions and covers
- Original editionSource ↗
Creators
Stories
- About Face · The Witch's Cauldron! · 8 pages
A father thinks he has twins, a beautiful girl and a deformed girl. When he shoots the hateful, vindictive monstrosity to free himself and his beautiful daughter from her presence, he realizes that his wife had given birth to a Siamese infant with two heads joined at the back of the skull and hidden the secret from him.
- Game Washed Out! · The Vault of Horror! · 7 pages
A man in a Puritan colony kills his wife and dumps her body with a weight attached into a pond in order to solicit another man's wife to run away with him. He is caught kissing her and so is sentenced to three dunkings in the pond, where on the third dunk, the dead wife loops the coil of rope over him and pulls him off the chair while he drowns.
- Easy Dough · 1 pages
A man robs a baking company. While hiding in a vat from security, he gets buried in dough and cut into pieces by the cookie shaper machine.
- A Special Editorial · 1 pages
This was an editorial request to readers to write letters to the Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Delinquency in support of comic magazines as being "harmless" entertainment. It was at this time that comics were under fire by "do-gooders" wanting to rid the nation of this type of entertainment
- The Silent Treatment · The Old Witch's Grim Fairy Tale! · 6 pages
In this grim fairy tale a remorseful king demands silence after his boisterous merry-making prevents him from hearing his daughter's shouts for help leading to her death. Eventually his demands on the peasants get so absurd he orders them to stop breathing because of the racket he claims to hear they make. They revolt, and one of them sews a sensitive metronome into the king's body that goes off with the slightest disturbance, and when the still-lying king brushes away an insect, the sound so bothers him he throws himself off a cliff.
- Swamped · The Crypt of Terror · 7 pages
This story is told by a shack in the swamp whose occupant is an idiot cannibal. He disposes of his victims beneath the rotting supports of the shack and eventually it collapses bringing him down into the bog to join his victims.
Reprinted in
Haunt of Fear (1985), Haunt of Fear (1991), Haunt of Fear (1994), The Fantagraphics EC Artists' Library (2012), EC Horror Library of the 1950's (1970)