A traveling chautauqua show. an educational and entertainment troupe, pitch their tents in a small American town with an ensemble of speakers, lecturers, teachers, musicians, and actors as manager Walter Hale must deal with a myriad of problems, including small town prejudice and politics, nepotism, union problems, and a murder.

Johnny Barrett, an ambitious journalist, is determined to win a Pulitzer Prize by solving a murder committed in a lunatic asylum and witnessed only by three inmates, from whom the police have been unable to extract the information. With the connivance of a psychiatrist, and the reluctant help of his girlfriend, he succeeds in having himself declared insane and sent to the asylum. There he slowly tracks down and interviews the witnesses - but things are stranger than they seem ...

In what appears to be a cross between Critters and The Towering Inferno, the residents of a shoddy L.A. apartment block are chased up to the roof by hoards of the eponymous hairy horrors.