Forbidden Worlds #15 (American Comics Group, March 1953) leads with "The Vampire Cat!", one of the best-remembered stories in the whole ACG horror run and the issue's cover feature. At a Halloween party, the gypsy Vilma takes Steve — already engaged to Flo Blain — out to a Philosopher's Tree, a wishing tree said to grant any wish made beneath it at midnight. Vilma kisses him; Flo, arriving at exactly the wrong moment and seeing Vilma in her cat costume, wishes she would become one. The wish takes. Vilma learns from her grandmother that she must drink blood every night or stay a cat forever, and the story turns from romantic spite into a predation loop that ends with cat-nip, a window and a broken neck. Around it sit "The Glory Hand", "The Winged Terror" (Amazon adventurers and the things that spin cocoons in the upper canopy), "Out of the Past", "The Death Slave", and the pseudo-historical feature "Ghostly Avengers of History: Duke of Guise", which retells the assassination of the Duke as a revenant's revenge, with Jacques Clément, Jean Latour and King Henry III in the cast. Interior art comes from Art Gates (on "The Vampire Cat!"), Jon L. Blummer, George Wilhelms and Edvard Moritz, under a Ken Bald cover and editor Richard E. Hughes.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a dime comic subtitled "Exploring the Supernatural!", the companion to ACG's Adventures into the Unknown — the medium's first ongoing horror title. ACG was a small, resolutely independent New York publisher founded by Benjamin W. Sangor and co-owned by Fred Iger. Issue #15 has a documentary bonus: it carries the "Statement of the Ownership, Management, and Circulation" dated 1 October 1952, the filing that pins down ACG's corporate structure for historians — publisher Preferred Publications, Inc. of Buffalo, owners Preferred and B. W. Sangor, editor Richard E. Hughes, business manager Frederick H. Iger. That single page is why this issue gets cited in reference works about ACG far more often than its stories alone would justify. The series ran 145 issues to August 1967, survived the 1954 Senate hearings, and won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic.

Read today, "The Vampire Cat!" is the reason to pick this one up. It is a shape-changer story wearing a vampire title, driven entirely by two women and a careless wish — the men are bystanders — and it has had an afterlife online as a small classic of pre-Code villainess writing. It also shows ACG's distinctive register: no gore, a fairy-tale mechanism (the wishing tree), and a punchline that is more sad than shocking. Because the 1953 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, the original issue is freely readable through Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum, while the modern restored editions are not.