Having thus far presented more duds than gems in Season 2, Rod Serling pulls a corker out of the bag with Long Distance Call, a genuinely creepy tale about a old lady whose obsessive love for her grandson extends beyond the grave.
Shortly before carking it, doting Grandma Bayles (Lili Darva) gives little Billy (Billy Mumy) a special birthday gift, a toy telephone that she tells him will enable him to talk to her 'even when she has gone'. Sure enough, after the old woman dies, Billy begins to hold conversations with her over the phone, much to the concern of his mother Sylvia (Patricia Smith).
Matters become more serious when grandma asks Billy to come and stay with her, the young boy following her instructions to throw himself in front of a car, and, when that fails, drown himself in a pond.
As medics fight to save the lad's life, his father Chris (Philip Abbott) picks up the toy phone and tells his mother that if she really loves Billy, she must give him back...
With a genuinely unsettling vibe, and sterling performances all round, this is easily one of the most effective stories of season two and could only have been better had it not been one of the handful of episodes that were recorded on videotape.
Keeping with the theme of death, those with a morbid fascination will be interested to know that Jenny Maxwell, who played Billy's pretty babysitter Shirley, was shot and killed in 1981 during an alleged botched armed robbery (according to reports, half of her head was blown away). The case remains unsolved.