Delusion

Episode 23, originally airing on Sept. 15, 1959.

Harold Stern is the name of the person the story is about.

A policeman comes to interview him, but the guy denies he's Stern. Apparently he has a rare type of blood that is needed to give a girl in the hospital a transfusion. He refuses to go to the hospital; he had stopped donating blood three years previously, and he refuses to say why.

He tells the policeman that, the last year he gave blood, something happened and he somehow became involved in the people's lives he gave blood to. The policeman threatens to book him on using a false name on government documents (which he was actually doing).

The father of the girl tries to convince Stern to donate the blood.

He ends up donating the blood and later the girl comes by where he lives.

Stern has a premonition about the girl and tells the policeman the girl will die.

They get to her apartment and find her unconscious and the smell of gas in the air.

He offers her a job as a secretary. It turns out, though, that he's constantly after her not to do this or that which could lead to her getting hurt (when he has a premonition about something happening to someone, it's only a vague feeling; nothing actually specific as to what or when or where whatever it is will happen.) She also ends up falling for a young guy.

She gets mad at him and tries to leave but he grabs her and chokes her to death. He died a few months later in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Looking at this from a paranormal point of view, the guy seemed to establish a type of psychic bond with the person he donated blood to, although this happened only in the last year he donated blood and in the case of the young woman. His premonitions of their future were extremely vague, though; he could say something good or something bad was going to happen, but not exactly what, when or where. In addition, he was definitely not always accurate, at least with the young woman. He knew that something was wrong when he and the policeman went to her hotel room and there was a gas leak, but he was wrong when he warned her not to go swimming, she did, and absolutely nothing happened to her.

So, at best, his premonitions were only vague intuitions. His killing of the girl at the end proved that he was severely mentally unstable, and this does nothing good for his credibility as far as paranormality goes.

So, it's a decent story, as a story goes, but as an actual paranormal event it's of very dubious value.


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