Don’t Die Without Me

A newspaper writer is spurred to investigate a wave of despair-ridden suicides in a shabby West Side rooming house. His search for the truth leads him to sleep in the room where two tenants have died. Exhaustive inquiry reveals no sinister curse, but, rather, despair, coincidence, and a chance availability of gas.

A reporter decides to look into a series of hopeless suicides happening at a rundown boarding house on the West Side. While searching for answers, he ends up sleeping in the same room where two people killed themselves. After digging deep, he finds no evil curse behind the deaths - just sadness, bad luck, and easy access to gas.

O. Henry, always the curious writer-reporter, witnesses police taking out the bodies of a golden-haired young woman and a dark-haired young man who rented, at different times, the same room in a run-down New York City boarding house. Intrigued, he tries to find out the reasons for their deaths, apparent suicides. While doing so, he spends a night alone in the room where they both had lived—and died.