When "ambitious" Lydia kills her husband with the stroke of a mace to inherit his fortunes, he changes into a phoenix and hunts her down to a fiery end.; Newspaper reporter Jerry Vincent takes on a night job for a creepy man with a hood sitting in a room full of torture instruments. Vincent writes story beginnings about actual events. Mr. Todt writes the endings. Todt is Death. And everything Vincent writes about turns into a catastrophe. Finally Vincent too has to pay with his life.; Dick Adams comes upon a Chinese box containing a withered hand fulfilling wishes. When Adams gets careless in his wording ("I wish I had never laid eyes upon you" / "I wish that I were dead"), the hand first tears out his eyes and then strangles him.; Convicted killer Jules Scholler dies in the electric chair, but lives on as a zombie - kept alive by "the evil spirit of those who fear death", a death-like figure in a fancy hat. Mentoring him along the way, Scholler goes on a crime spree. When his body starts to rot, the spirit commands him to dispose of himself in the city garbage dump.; "The people in a small town of France still tell the story of a little hunchback..." When the hunchback witnesses a robbery, he gets stabbed to death by the criminal. But his ghost rings the church bells and alarms the town.; "Late in the nineteenth century, a strange death was recorded in the files of the London police..." British explorer is hit by mummy's curse for pillaging an Egyptian tomb.