'The Spanish Moss Murders' by Alvin R. Friedman David Chase

In a college laboratory, assistant Michelle Kelly rushes to leave work and bumps into some equipment, almost waking Paul Langoir, the subject of a sleep experiment; Michelle is then attacked and killed by a huge monster. Later, Kolchak is on the way to the dentist when he intercepts a police call regarding a murder at an exclusive French restaurant; arriving there he meets old adversary Captain Joe ‘Mad Dog’ Siskas, but is surprised when the policeman treats him cordially and offers information - it seems that he is now receiving therapy for his temper. When no-one is able to identify the strange vegetation found on the chef’s dead body, Kolchak sneaks into a police lab and discovers that the plant matches foliage found on Michelle’s body: Spanish Moss, a plant found in the New Orleans bayou county. The next victim of the monster is a homeless singer named Bobby Ray Solonge. Kolchak learns of the sleep experiments, and meets the single-minded Doctor Aaron Pollack; he then talks to the street singers in the French quarter and learns that Bobby Ray Solonge was an old friend of Langoir, but that the two of them recently fell out. Kolchak realises that Langoir is carrying out his revenge against a select group by ‘dreaming’ them to death, using a monster created out of his childhood: a Cajun ‘boogey-man’ called the Peremalfait. But when the Peremalfait then ‘kills’ Langoir in order to prevent him from waking up, Kolchak is forced to travel into the Chicago sewers to kill the monster with the only thing that can destroy it: a spear made out of bayou gum wood…

Darren McGavin (Carl Kolchak), Simon Oakland (Tony Vincenzo), Jack Grinnage (Ron Updyke), Ruth Mc Devitt (Emily Cowles), Keenan Wynn (Captain Joe ‘Mad Dog’ Siskas), Severn Darden (Doctor Aaron Pollack), Virginia Gregg (Doctor Hollenbeck), Johnny Silvers (Pepe LaRue / Morris Shapiro), Maurice Marsac (Henri Villon), Randy Boone (Fiddler), Ned Glass (Superintendent), Richard Kiel (Peremalfait Monster), Elizabeth Brookes (Lab Assistant), Rudy Diaz (Sgt. Villaverde), Brian Avery (Record Producer), Roberta Dean (Michelle Louise Kelly), Donald Mantooth (Sleep Subject)
Directed by Gordon Hessler

TX (US): 6th December, 1974

Notes:
*Featuring Carl Kolchak and Tony Vincenzo