Astounding Stories #90
In "The Ghost Who Loved a Girl!", a twisted jailer’s cruel experiment with an alien manuscript backfires when his prisoner, believing the tale of a hidden underground civilization, uses a forgotten digger to reach them—only to be welcomed as one of their own. The jailer, left with nothing but false hope and a lifetime of futile searching, is haunted by the very story he sought to weaponize. Steve Ditko’s distinctive art brings the eerie, melancholic tale to life, while Kurt Schaffenberger’s cover captures its haunting mood.
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A sadistic jailer buys a book detailing an alien civilization that has retreated below the Earth in order to avoid surface climate change in order to torment his prisoner with false hope of escape. The prisoner finds the book and believes the story and later he finds a working digger to bring him down to the aliens below who welcome him. The astonished jailer spends the rest of his life unsuccessfully attempting to locate another working digger.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).