Triskaidekaphobia

 Just a quick and fascinating follow-up to yesterday's post - the debut adventure of the Ghost-Breaker was reprinted in Showcase #80 in 1969, to reintroduce him in his capacity of the man who refuses to believe there's anything supernatural about the Phantom Stranger. As was normal for those days, the art was re-coloured (without reference to the way it was coloured in the original) and re-lettered, but it was otherwise identical to the original appearance in Star Spangled Comics #122 in 1951. With one interesting exception...

The uncredited letterer had a lot of work to do, writing that entire verbose story out again, but apart from correcting a couple of spelling mistakes and introducing a couple of new ones, the only differences were two pairs of panels:

1951 version:

1969 version:

Terry's name has been changed to Terrence. Multiple other uses of 'Terry' have been left unchanged, including the first one. But the same amendment happens later, and the line about his name being 13 letters is removed too:

1951:

1969:

So... why? Is it possible that the original script said 'Terrence', and the change to 'Terry' was a last minute alteration when the anonymous writer thought it would be nice for the character to have 13 letters in his name? It would be fun if that was true, but it doesn't seem at all likely that the original script still existed eighteen years later. Changes to early-fifties horror stories when they were reprinted were often made at the insistence of the Comics Code Authority, but I don't think a mention of thirteen-letter names was on their list of unacceptable subjects.

It seems a lot more probable that changing the name was a deliberate decision on the part of Mike Friedrich, who wrote the new material, presumably just because he thought it sounded better. But the one time our hero's name is given in the present-day story, it's obviously a correction - the 'Terrence' sticks out to the left of the speech bubble, and would have fitted perfectly if it said 'Terry':

I blame the Phantom Stranger. He's just done it to get on Terry's nerves.