March 30, 1943

A man accidentally makes a phone call to his deceased wife. She answers.

Suspense and CBS were all in on the star strategy with this episode. They were not the highest profile Hollywood actors at the time, but they were familiar. Lee Bowman, Susan Hayward, and Walter Hampden. Bowman’s career was in an upward trajectory as a leading man. He made lots of radio appearances in the 1940s. He eventually had a lucrative side career in real estate and public relations. He took over supervision of ABC’s 1960s radio series Theater Five, a series that deserves to be held in higher regard than it usually is, after the death of its producer Ed Byron. Hayward’s career was starting to get some momentum as well, eventually leading to five Oscar nominations starting in the late 1940s. Hampden was known as a great stage actor on Broadway in the 1920s and had done film work in the late 1930s onward. Both Hampden and Hayward were in Cecil B. deMille’s 1942 movie Reap the Wild Wind, considered one of the producer’s best successes.