Robert Stack may scare the wits out of viewers as the host of TV's "Unsolved Mysteries" with his calm yet creepy and mysterious voice. But at age 6, something scared him when he and his French nurse saw, in his own words, "an operatic fantasy".

"I had been brought up on opera in Italy, but this was one I'd never seen before. As far as I could tell, it was about a masked man in love with an opera singer and very jealous of her admirers. He lived under an opera house and killed off the lady's admirers by drowning them, dropping things on them, and so forth. So far, this wasn't too different from Puccini. In the climatic scene, our dweller carried his lady love down to his apartment and began playing to her on a great organ.

"As his girl friend reached forward to take off his mask and reveal his identity, my darling mademoiselle [Robert's French nurse] said, 'Watch now, dear, this is when he is discovered as the fairy prince.' There was a slight pause after she pulled off the mask, and then full face into the camera appeared the most ghastly apparition ever put on film. It was Lon Chaney's masterpiece, The Phantom of the Opera. I let out a six-year-old shriek of terror and slid under the seat. That night I shared my mother's bed, and I didn't stop shaking for two days. As for mademoiselle, she was suspicious of everything American until the day she died."

Robert Stack: 1919-2003