Echo

This was the 20th show in the series and originally aired on June 2, 1959.

Paul Marlin has been found not guilty of murdering his wife.

A nasty reporter confronts him on his way out, the reporter obviously believing that Paul Marlin is guilty.

He is convinced by his lawyer to go away for a while. A lot of the townspeople think he was guilty and the newspaper guy is going to continue to needle him as much as he can.

A bad storm starts, he hears the sound of a dog baying and the clock rings at the wrong time.

Those things aren't too bad, but then he looks in the mirror and sees a guy with a gun. The guy shoots a bunch of times and you see the gun fire, but there's no one in the room (and no sound from the gun.) (Apparently the sound of the storm and the dog were both tied in to the appearance in the mirror and did not happen in "real" time.)

He goes out for a drink.

Then the guy he saw in the mirror actually shows up at the bar. He runs away, the guy follows, he runs away again. When he gets back to his hotel room he finds the guy's luggage in it.

The guy is his former wife's brother.

He grabs the gun and points it at the guy who has been rather friendly up till now. While he's holding the guy at gunpoint he ends up confessing that he did murder his wife. He shoots the gun a bunch of times. The guy was later executed for the murder.

An interesting episode. Skeptics would dwell on the fact that he was under a lot of stress and therefore could have hallucinated the shooting in the mirror and the other sounds. The narrator has the opinion that Paul's guilty conscience arranged somehow for the sounds and image, driving him to murder.

That would be an interesting possibility except that, in so doing, a totally innocent man was murdered in cold blood which would have, logically, run counter to what the subconscious would have wanted (at least in my opinion, anyhow.) I would think his subconscious would have wanted a way for him to be punished without killing yet another person.

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