Dr. Richard Boyer is a psychiatrist who sees a beautiful woman through a restaurant window one night and immediately becomes obsessed. Ironically, he has a patient the next day who talks of his own obsession with a woman that fits the description of the one that Boyer had seen the previous night. The psychiatrist soon discovers that there is an epidemic of men suffering from this affliction around the town, seeing the woman once and then "turning to stone", becoming catatonic after seeing her a second time