Crypt of Shadows #18
In "What Was the Staggering Secret of the 13th Floor," Stan Lee and Larry Lieber deliver a chilling twist on a classic urban legend, with Don Heck’s moody art and Artie Simek’s sharp lettering heightening the tension. When a spy holds a terrified passer-by at gunpoint in a hotel elevator, the cheerful operator calmly vanishes—revealing the building’s most unsettling truth: the 13th floor doesn’t exist. Ron Wilson’s cover, inked by Vince Colletta, captures the eerie stillness of the moment before the secret unfolds.
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An oddly cheerful elevator operator is held at gunpoint with a passer-by by a spy planning to blow up the hotel. The elevator lets the spy off at the 13th floor, and while the passer-by is terrified, the elevator operator simply fades away, explaining that the bomb will never go off, since there is no 13th floor.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).