"The Interview" is the first story in Haunted Mansion #4. It was written by Dan Vado and illustrated by Drew Rausch.
Synopsis
One dark night, a woman named Sarah speeds her car down the road toward Gracey Manor, stressing about being late for an interview - she's applying for a job as a housekeeper at the mansion, and she's blown every interview she's had that week. Her doubts continue as she runs to the mansion's front door, knowing her mom would laugh at her if she knew Sarah were going for a housekeeper job.
Before she can knock, a somber maid answers and chides her for being late, startling Sarah. The maid leads Sarah into the mansion as they discuss the job, with the maid wondering why Sarah would apply when she is young, pretty and has a college education: "a job like this, in a place like this, can age you prematurely." Sarah nearly gaffs about the aging effect on the maid, and quickly changes tack to explain how times are tough, she needs the money, and how the job was advertised as a live-in position.
The maid invites Sarah into her office for discussion. Sarah spots a crystal ball and asks if a fortune teller lives here, causing a miffed Madame Leota to materialize inside. The maid asks Leota to not startle the "new ones," and tells Sarah that most of the mansion's residents are non-corporeal (though Leota insists she's alive and well). The maid is not a ghost, since spirits have a hard time interacting with the real world and leave most haunted houses dusty. She then points out to Sarah that she, on the other hand, is actually dead.
The maid reveals (in a flashback sequence) that as Sarah rushed to the mansion in her car, she swerved to avoid the Hitchhiking Ghosts that appeared in front of her and crashed into a tree; she was still so focused on the interview that her ghost carried on to the mansion, never realizing she had died. The maid explains that this is not an uncommon occurrence in some ghosts, so driven in life that they do not notice the obvious condition of death, much like Leota (who rebuffs that she has no idea what the maid is talking about, and that it was because of her psychic abilities that she knew Sarah was coming at all).
Before Sarah has a chance to properly react, and while Leota mentions she might have left something out, a voice that only Sarah hears shouts something: "Clear!" Suddenly, Sarah wakes up as a medic with a defibrillator restarts her heart. The paramedics load her onto a stretcher and take her to an ambulance, saying she was lucky that someone saw her car accident and called them. As Sarah slowly loses consciousness, she laments having blown another interview, though thinks that the mansion looked like a nice place to live; back inside the house, Leota says that they've "lost another one."
Trvia
- Strangely, the final panel of the story shows the house to look like Phantom Manor, as opposed to the antebellum mansion.