Remember those four late-’70s rejection notes I shared that were written to me by DC editor Paul Levitz for stories I’d submitted to the company’s horror books such as House of Mystery and House of Secrets? At the time, I said I had no memory of which four plots had been rejected, and no way of finding out.

Turns out I was wrong. Because all I had to do was turn those notes over, which I discovered by accident.

This afternoon, I happened to glance toward a far corner of my desk, and noticed some scribbled blue pencil marks on a small sheet of paper. When I picked up the page and looked at it, I realized—this was one of the rejects face down, and what I’d scrawled was the name of the story being rejected.

Here’s what I discovered.

The story that Paul described as “too light-hearted” was called “Gingerbread Witch,” and I’m fairly confident that I eventually sold my concept to the TV series Tales from the Darkside as the episode titled “Baker’s Dozen.” Though somewhere along the way it became much less light-hearted.

I speculated earlier that the cancer story Paul didn’t run might have been what was eventually turned into my short story “The Man Who Would Be Vampire,” and I was correct, as that’s exactly what I wrote on the back in blue pencil.

As for the other two rejected stories, nothing ever came of them.

The plot that would “cause legal problems” was for the tale “Video Vengeance,” while the “in-joke industry” story was to be called “A Ghastly Tale,” and any fan of EC Comics will be able to guess just what the in-joke was there.

I’d tell you more about those, but I’ll leave that for another day, because—guess what? I still have the two unused typewritten plots, and plan to share them here eventually so you can see what form my House of Mystery submissions took in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I wish I had some of the ones that actually SOLD to show you, but those will have to do.