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Bela Lugosi is Dr. Charles Kessler, he lives with his daughter Virginia in their creaky old house and spends a lot of time pining over his absent wife. Once a year on their anniversary, he still treats it like she’s there, greeting and complimenting an empty chair and even going so far as to have his servants wait on her. Virginia’s fiancé Ralph visits unannounced (against her wishes) and catches the odd scene of her dad rambling to his invisible wife during dinner. Virginia lets him know that her mom ran off and hasn’t been heard from since. There’s also murmurs of unsolved murders. We quickly learn that the missing Mrs. Kessler is being hidden in a secret room underneath a shed on the property. She suffered a neurological disorder following a car accident (whilst escaping with her lover) and the gardener is secretly nursing her back to health before showing the doctor she’s still around. Ok. Sure. The doctor sees his wife outside of his window (she wandered out of her room) and it seems to cause a mental break in Lugosi, throwing him into a fugue state. That night, the obsessive new maid (Ralph’s ex, who took the job to put a halt to the impending nuptials) is murdered at the hands of the seemingly hypnotized Lugosi. The blame falls on Ralph because there’s a motive, an incriminating note and there’s no way it could be the well-respected doctor who has people dropping dead on his property. Ralph gets executed *checks notes*… holy shit… Ralph gets executed and his twin brother Paul shows up at the house to look into his brother’s death. He was never mentioned to the Kesslers and out of the country while everything was going to hell. You can tell he’s different than Ralph because his hair is better kept. The mental missus keeps sending Lugosi into a murderous funk when he catches her walking the grounds and that means death by night-coat for a few poor schmucks. Simple stuff from a simpler time. It’s the usual level of budget-conscious hijinks from a Katzman/Mayer production and Lugosi perfectly hams it up like you’d expect him to. Nothing wrong with that at all. No idea where the film title came from, as there are no ghosts and nobody is invisible, perhaps it’s a metaphor for mental anguish… Nah.
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