1972 - ASM #108 - Invite Your Friends for a HAUNTING

Paranormal Activity's incredible success at the box office this season shows that there's still room for good old fashioned low-rent haunted house scares in our world of $250 million blockbusters with state of the art visuals.

Well, back in the 70's it seems the former was all they had. Case in point, this ad:

"Just imagine how scared your friends will be when you flip out the light and they start hearing creepy sounds like a creaking door, chains rattling, and then a man's voice telling them that the house is haunted and they are to die one by one."

Yeah, that could actually be pretty scary, a nice precursor to an evening of wholesome FRIGHTMARES! Who do I make the check out to?

Then you find out what the hell the actual ad is for:

"This long playing 7" 33 1/3 RPM special haunted house sound effects record can be yours!"

So... this is a sound effects record. Not even a haunted one (well, I don't know that. It might be). So this thing is probably completely useless, at least unless you kept it maybe another decade or two, when you can take up turntablism and use some pretty awesome samples:

But probably not. Well, how about buying something involving a guitar, below that record ad? I dunno if it's selling guitars, lessons, or whatever, since the text is way too small for crappy printing. Even the price and address is way too small, so if the ad-buyer's scam was to take money in and screw the consumer on the fine print, they couldn't even do that. It's all fine print.

This "The Gayle House" ad for a Haunting sound effects record ran in Amazing Spider Man #108, May 1972.