The Headless Ghost

I was impressed at the good grace with which the Earl of Ambrose (Jack Allen) took the impertinence shown by a brash young American visitor in suggesting that claims of the castle being haunted were just 'mularkey' cooked up to draw in the punters; especially as the little oaf doesn't even inquire if he's ever actually seen any ghosts himself.

Despite the whimsical title sequence, the racy exotic dance by Josephine Blake that accompanies the ghostly banquet and a fairly gruesome moment involving a snake (plus the fact that on its original release Anglo-Amalgamated paired this film with the incredibly nasty 'Horrors of the Black Museum', also scored by Gerard Schurmann) belied my initial expectation that this would be a children's film.

The rather grand castle set looks as if it was left over from an earlier production, and the torches in wall mounts left burning overnight would probably even in 1959 have been in breach of fire regulations.