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Turtles in Movies   The Whispering Ghosts (1942)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a comedy-mystery with Milton Berle and John Carradine, made before Television took over when live radio dramas had 15 million listeners. It only has a brief trivial appearance of a tortoise of unknown species, but it's an interesting one. Berle's character H. H. Van Buren is broadcasting a true crime murder mystery radio serial when he learns that he's wrong about the murderer and needs to return to the scene of the crime to learn who the real murderer is. The crime scene is an old abandoned ship named the Black Joker. He and his comic valet Euclid Brown (Willie Best) board the ship and see and hear a lot of mysterious things - fresh blood, a crow delivering a message, a crazy woman and sea captain, and the sounds of ghosts and a movie of one of them. When they hear a knock at the door, Van Buren opens it to see a tortoise with a lit candle on its back in front of the door, walking around. As Euclid stares dumbfounded, Van Buren points at the turtlle and says "A crawling hot foot." Then he searches the ship and finds a some actors who have been paid by Van Buren's rival Gillpin to haunt the ship to prank Van Buren. The tortoise with a candle on its back is interesting because I'd seen one like it before in Abbott & Costello Meet the Killer Boris Karloff, made a few years later in 1949. When I searched the subject I found out that it was once common for burglars in the Middle East to put a tortoise with a lit candle attached to its shell into a house they were planning to rob to scare anyone who was home and make them scream, which alerted the burglars that the house was occupied. The candle also helped to illuminate the house and its contents for the burglars. Anita Sullivan gives three more examples of turtles with candles. You can watch the movie and read a full synopsis of it at The Silver Scream.