Episode 1071: The incredible part of our story

Quentin Collins comes to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood to deliver some bad news to his distant cousin, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. He was peering into the room in the east wing of the house through which an alternate universe is occasionally visible. He saw the room as it is in that other timeline, engulfed in smoke and occupied by a young woman calling the name “Barnabas.” Since Liz and Quentin’s distant cousin, Barnabas Collins, and Barnabas’ dear friend Julia Hoffman crossed over into the alternate universe some time ago and the aperture in the east wing is the only place where transits between the universes are known to be possible, Quentin proclaims to Liz that the “only conclusion” one can reach is that “we shall never see them again!” No sooner has he got those words out than the drawing room doors open to reveal Julia and Barnabas standing side by side, smiling happily, and saying “Elizabeth! Quentin! We’ve returned!”

One might think this would cure Quentin of the idea that he knows what the “only conclusion” is at which one might reasonably arrive, but no such luck. He tells Barnabas and Julia that today’s date is 3 August 1970. They say that was the date when they left the other universe, and that they then spent over a week in the year 1995, when they saw a bleak and horrifying future that resulted from a disaster that will occur later in 1970 unless they can somehow prevent it. Quentin says their experience in the future must have been an hallucination, because they can’t have come back to 3 August in one year from any date other than 3 August in another year. Julia and Barnabas share detailed recollections of their experience in the future, and have already met a living person in 1970 whom they saw for the first time as a ghost in 1995, but this argument shakes their confidence.

Quentin’s claim, nonsensical as it is to new viewers, actually does fit in with a notion the show has been developing since it first committed to being a supernatural thriller in late 1966 and early 1967. Since the laws of nature that science studies do not apply, they have to find other predictive models that will make it possible to build suspense. So they had well-meaning governess Victoria Winters figure out that women named Laura Murdoch incinerated their young sons named David at intervals of “exactly one hundred years!!!,” and therefore that Laura Murdoch Collins would soon present a mortal danger to her young son David Collins.

From that point on, the power of anniversaries has been a tremendously potent force in the metaphysics of Dark Shadows. Barnabas traveled back to the 1790s in #661 by going to a grave on the anniversary of its occupant’s death and shouting at the deceased for a while (shouting is also a potent metaphysical force.) Quentin himself first joined the cast of characters as the malevolent ghost of a man who died in 1897 and in 1968 and 1969 returned to haunt Collinwood, kill several people, and drive the survivors from the house. Barnabas traveled back to 1897 and bungled around until someone else changed history to prevent Quentin dying or even aging. On the anniversary of that change, the haunting broke, just in time to allow David to return from the dead. But when Quentin showed up as a living being late in 1969, everyone who had lived through the ten months of the haunting remembered it. So apparently the reality of Dark Shadows is a composite of all the various, mutually inconsistent timelines, and the consequences of the actions not taken are just as real as are those of the ones taken. The power of anniversaries is the thread that binds these unmatched events into a cosmic crazy quilt.

As the aperture between universes was a door to a room in the east wing, so the aperture from 1995 to 1970 was a door inside a room in the west wing. Barnabas and Julia were trapped in a mysterious playroom there when the ghost of a blonde teenager known to them as Carrie appeared, beckoned to them, and walked through the wall. A moment later, a door materialized in the spot through which Carrie had exited. Julia and Barnabas went through the door and found themselves on a staircase. They followed the staircase to another door. It was the door through which they had entered the playroom, but the corridor outside was in good repair, not in ruins as it was in 1995. They saw a girl there who appeared to be Carrie, though she was wearing different clothes, was alive, and demanded to know who they were.

Barnabas and Julia gave the girl their thanks for her help, and she repeated that she had no idea who they were or what they were talking about. She said that she was not named Carrie, but Hallie, Hallie Stokes, niece of Professor Timothy Eliot Stokes. She told them Liz was in the drawing room, Liz’ brother Roger was in Europe, and the year was 1970.

Later, Julia questions Hallie about some names and phrases she heard in 1995. Grayson Hall delivers all of these questions as if she were playing a Gestapo interrogator in a very bad World War Two movie. Even when Hallie says it is her bedtime, Hall enunciates the lines “All right, Hallie. Good night” while standing rigidly still and peering at the girl from under a single ruffled eyelid, as if the next words were going to be “Dream uff ze Fazzerlahnt, und uff ze famlee you shtill haff zere!”

Hallie is terrified of Julia, a perfectly natural reaction which Grayson Hall seems to think she needed to explain by turning into a villain from Hogan’s Heroes. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The script calls for Hallie to hear something sinister in Julia’s voice, and Hall was an extraordinarily accomplished actress who should easily have been able to make us understand why a friendly series of questions might sound that way to a nervous person. This exaggerated performance cannot be explained as an ordinary failure. She also failed atypically last week when required to show that Julia was secretly under the control of the evil spirit. There was zero subtlety in her performance, leaving it inexplicable that Barnabas didn’t instantly catch on. Those episodes, like this one, were directed by Henry Kaplan, a hack. Kaplan’s idea of working with actors involved poking them with a stick and tying them up with gaffer tape. Hall’s misfires may not have been a protest against Kaplan’s brutishness and incompetence, but he certainly did not do anything to help her correct them.

When Julia and Barnabas left for the alternate universe, Quentin was still living somewhere in the village of Collinsport; it was implied Julia was paying his rent. At some point since, he has relocated to the great house. We see today that he has moved back into his old room. This is as hilarious for longtime viewers as was the instant refutation of Quentin’s claim that the only logical conclusion from the available facts is that they will never see Barnabas and Julia again. During the 1968-1969 “Haunting of Collinwood” segment, Quentin’s room served the same function the mysterious playroom served in the excursion to 1995 and in this incipient Re-Haunting of Collinwood. It was a place known at first only to the children, who visited it, fell under the power of the ghosts of its former occupants, and thereby became the instruments of general destruction. But he’s even brought his old stuff with him, including his haunted phonograph.

When we got to know Quentin as a living being during the eight months the show was set primarily in 1897, we saw that he had the same vices and the same appeal Roger had when he was introduced as a villain at the beginning of the series. Roger was eventually nerfed into a harmless snob who made sarcastic remarks and sipped brandy, and then reinvented again as an upright family man. Throughout those personality shifts, Roger continued to be one of the “Logical Explanation People.” No matter what he saw or experienced, he would reject any supernatural account and insist “There must be a logical explanation!” Quentin has followed Roger’s character progression to the point where he, a former student of black magic who conjured up demons from a fireplace, who turned into a zombie the first time he died and into a werewolf after he was resurrected, who died again and became a ghost, whose second death was then averted when he became half of a magical dyad including an enchanted oil painting, and who is now a hundred years old even though to all outward appearances he is about 30, is insisting that There Must Be a Logical Explanation.

As if that were not enough, when we see Quentin in his room he is wearing a dressing gown, an article of attire Roger favored in his first months on the show. Roger drifted to the margins of the action as he lost his capacity for villainy; he made his final appearance in #979. The show has had so much difficulty figuring out what to do with Quentin since it returned from 1897 that we may well fear he is headed for the same fate, and these resonances do nothing to assuage that fear.

Hallie comes in to see Quentin. She asks if Barnabas and Julia are good people. He hesitates to answer. He knows that Barnabas is a vampire and Julia is a mad scientist. Nonetheless, they are his friends, and he believes that they are motivated by a sincere desire to prevent the disasters they think they have foreseen. So he might answer truthfully by saying that they are locked in a three-way tie with him for the title of Most Dangerous Person You Have Ever Met, but that he likes them, and so long as Barnabas doesn’t start looking at her neck and Julia doesn’t try to strap her to a table and hook her up to an apparatus including Tesla coils she will probably survive her encounter with them. But he’s more interested in reassuring her than he is in adhering to strict literal accuracy, and so he says “Now look, now you listen to me. Barnabas and Julia are very fine people, and you don’t have to be afraid of them or of anything else. Now you believe that.” None of the other actors is having a good day at the office with this episode, but David Selby is on top form, and he delivers this little speech with a note of urgency that makes him sound like he is telling the truth, but with a panicked flicker in his eyes that makes it clear he is desperate for Hallie to accept a lie that might keep Julia and Barnabas from murdering her.

Hallie tells Quentin that she saw Barnabas and Julia emerge from a door in the west wing. He calls Barnabas to his room and tells him that since the aperture to the other universe is in the east wing, that causes Quentin to think there might be something to their story after all. Barnabas leads him to the door, and says that the playroom was behind it in 1995. Quentin says that there is no playroom there and never has been. Barnabas himself knew that full well when first he opened the door and saw the room in 1995, but for some reason is shocked today when sees that it is a linen closet. Quentin says that there cannot possibly ever be a playroom there, since the other wall is to the outside. Evidently it is perfectly in order for an entire alternate universe to intermittently fit into a room in the east wing, but the west wing doesn’t swing that way.

In his post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn complains about Kathleen Cody’s performance as Hallie, claiming that she renders the next several weeks of the show unwatchable. I agree that in adopting a constant tone of freaked-out disbelief, Miss Cody made an acting choice that left her nowhere to go. If you’re already at the limit of the amount of bizarreness you can accept in your life, that’s it for you as a character on Dark Shadows.

I can see why Miss Cody thought that was the only way to go, though. This is her first substantive appearance on the show, and Quentin warns Barnabas not to tell anything disturbing to Hallie, because “She’s a very sensitive child… She frightens quite easily.” Everything else in the script reinforces the idea that Hallie is on the brink of a panic attack, so that’s how she plays it today. That’s the angle subsequent scripts are going to stick with, so I can see that Miss Cody felt she had no choice but to stay in the corner she had painted herself into.

When actors find themselves in a jam like that, a director might be expected to offer some kind of helpful guidance. That wasn’t going to happen with Henry Kaplan at the helm, and even principal director Lela Swift, an outstanding visual artist, was not an enthusiastic director of actors. John Karlen said that the only direction Lela Swift ever gave him was the single word “Go!” So once an actor took a wrong turn on Dark Shadows, they could find themselves trapped in a dead end. Many of the cast members who joined the show without much experience have spoken with gratitude about guidance they received from their veteran cast-mates; Karlen, Joan Bennett, Jonathan Frid, Clarice Blackburn, and Humbert Allen Astredo are most often mentioned as gifted teachers of acting. The only director any of the actors mentioned as a source of productive suggestions was John Sedwick, who left the show in June 1968. So unless Miss Cody could get some help from one of her cast-mates, it was very likely that her initial mistakes would doom her whole performance.

Episode 1070: Never without you

The sun has set, and vampire Barnabas Collins is opening the lid of his coffin in the basement of the Old House on the estate of Collinwood. Suddenly a cross is thrust in his face. He recoils from it, crying in pain and becoming immobile. The cross is wielded by the sheriff of Collinsport, who announces “I know all about you, Barnabas Collins!”

Before the sheriff can take matters any further, a teenage girl appears nearby. Shocked to see her, he reels away from the coffin. He jabbers at her, saying that he recognizes her and pleading with her not to come closer. Barnabas grabs him from behind and strangles him to death.

Barnabas didn’t have anything against the sheriff, but can’t deny that it feels good to use the old strangling muscles again. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Barnabas goes upstairs and finds his best friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman. He tells Julia that the sheriff’s gun was loaded with silver bullets, and that only the manifestation of the ghost of Carrie prevented his destruction. The police know about him, and more officers will be coming any time. Julia admits that she told the sheriff about Barnabas. Shocked, he says “You betrayed me?” He has said these words many times, always as a prelude to extreme violence. Julia braces herself, expecting the same. But to her amazement, Barnabas is gentle and understanding. He realizes she is under the sway of an evil ghost named Gerard. She says that she will betray Barnabas again and again, and urges him to leave without her. He says he will never do that. She embraces him, weeping, and he comforts her. For most people, a day that begins with the murder of a policeman is a day when nothing goes well, but Barnabas is not like most people. This is far and away the most mature behavior we have ever seen on his part.

The year is 1995; Barnabas and Julia have come unstuck in time and found themselves at Collinwood 25 years after a mysterious disaster wrecked the great house on the estate, ruined its inhabitants, and left Gerard in charge. They believe they can travel back to 1970 and prevent the disaster from ever occurring, if only they can find out what it was. Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn left him a note yesterday consisting of six cryptic phrases which he took to be clues, but Gerard killed Carolyn before Barnabas could ask her to explain them.

Barnabas has brought occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes to the Old House. We find Stokes exclaiming to Barnabas “You killed the sheriff?” Barnabas confirms, “Yes, I killed him.” Stokes replies, “Everyone’s going mad. It’s the effect of this place. I’m not surprised at your terrible story. Horrified, not surprised.” One wonders what the story was that Julia and Barnabas told. Stokes’ role in the parts of the show set in contemporary times was always limited, because he is too decent and law-abiding to be a party to the continued existence of a vampire. He could never be allowed to learn the truth about Barnabas. He stays in the room, chatting amiably with Barnabas and Julia, so clearly they haven’t told him now, either. Perhaps they just told him that the sheriff was going to shoot Barnabas, and let him assume that the reason was that Gerard was making him do it.

Be that as it may, Stokes is still aware of the situation. “Do you realize that I will be implicated in all this if the police come here?” he asks. They say that they do, but that they desperately need him to make a third for a séance. He dismisses as hopelessly naive the idea that Gerard would allow a séance to succeed, but Barnabas says that Gerard may not have the power to prevent Carolyn’s spirit coming through and telling them what her note meant. The idea of one spirit trying to block another from emerging out of the supernatural back-world and speaking at a séance harks back to the very first séance on Dark Shadows, in #170 and #171, when undead fire witch Laura Murdoch Collins used her powers to impede the spirit of the gracious Josette from warning the company about her. Stokes gives in and agrees to participate; Julia, self-conscious because of her compromised position, is reluctant, but Barnabas proclaims that if Carolyn is to speak it will be through her.*

The séance begins. Julia goes into the trance, and starts speaking in what appears to be Carolyn’s voice. If this is Grayson Hall’s Nancy Barrett imitation, it is terrible. Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at it. But the voice does not give any useful information, and Julia is under Gerard’s power, so it is also possible she is faking the trance to throw Barnabas off. In that case, it is Julia’s Carolyn imitation, and it reminds us of the ups and downs in the relationship between those two characters.

When the séance is over, Stokes says he feels a presence. He rises from the table, drifts towards the window, and sees Gerard watching him from outside. Gerard touches the pane. Stokes staggers back, descends into a chair, and becomes still. Barnabas finds that he is dead. He looks up and realizes that Julia has fled the house.

Julia has gone to the great house. She is in a mysterious playroom with Gerard. Gerard gives her a dagger. She asks if she “must.” She is reluctant, but finally works herself up to joy as she says that she always knew it would come to this, that now she will be with Gerard as he wants her. She lifts the dagger to stab herself in the heart.

Barnabas enters. He confronts Gerard. As the two beings from beyond the grave stare each other down, Julia drops the dagger. Barnabas tells Gerard he cannot stop them leaving. Gerard looks offended at this. He touches Julia, who collapses. She is not dead, but she and Barnabas fear she is dying. Gerard leaves the room and takes his time locking the door from the outside.

Carrie’s ghost materializes to Julia and Barnabas. She beckons to them, then walks out through the wall. They stare at the wall, and a door appears. They pass through the door, and find themselves on a staircase. They follow the staircase, and come to another door. They exit in the same corridor outside the playroom; they have gone in a circle. In space, anyway- the time appears to be different. The corridor is in severe decay in 1995, but is in good repair now. And they see a girl who looks exactly like Carrie, but is alive. She asks them who they are.

This is the final episode set in 1995. It is also the last we will see of Don Crabtree. Previous sheriffs of Collinsport have been ridiculously ineffective. Crabtree’s sheriff doesn’t chalk up many successes either, but no one else meets with anything but failure in these two weeks. Every death and defeat we see reinforces the sense that the evil which Gerard represents is overwhelming. As the penultimate victim of the 1995 curse, the sheriff is second only to Stokes as someone who would have been able to make a positive difference, if anyone could have, and Crabtree makes us believe that he belongs in that position.

*In the main continuity of Dark Shadows, spirits at séances always speak through a medium of the same sex as themselves. In the séance in #990, when the show was set in a mirror universe, the spirit chose a medium of the opposite sex.

Episode 1069: The sheriff’s place

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves in the year 1995. The estate of Collinwood is in ruins, dominated by an evil ghost named Gerard. Barnabas’ distant cousins Carolyn Fredericks (née Stoddard) and Quentin Collins are insane. Occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes is sometimes openly hostile, sometimes apparently helpful, but never his usual trustworthy self. Everyone else they knew in 1970 has either gone missing or died. Julia has fallen under the possession of Gerard and turned against Barnabas. Most unaccountable of all, the sheriff of Collinsport is not completely useless at his job.

Barnabas has received a note from Carolyn asking him to meet her in what remains of the great house. He and Julia enter the house; she insists on waiting in the foyer. While he goes into the drawing room, she stares up at Gerard, standing in his usual perch on the walkway at the top of the stairs. Barnabas looked right at Gerard there yesterday and did not see him, so apparently he can be selective about making himself visible.

Barnabas finds Carolyn sitting at the desk in the drawing room. She falls over dead. He calls for Julia. Gerard shakes his head, and she does not respond. Barnabas goes to the foyer and brings her to the spot where Carolyn had lain a moment before; she has vanished. The note she was writing is still on the desk; it is made up of six cryptic phrases which Barnabas declares to be clues as to what happened in 1970. He reads them aloud- “The night of the sun and the moon,” “The night Rose Cottage was destroyed,” “The unfinished horoscope,” “The night I sang my song,” “The picnic,” “The murder.” Julia keeps interrupting him, declaring that the phrases are meaningless and Carolyn was mad. He keeps wondering why she has become so uncooperative.

Barnabas tells Julia to find a telephone and call the sheriff. Often on Dark Shadows, people dismiss the idea of calling the police when someone turns up dead, saying that it’s too late to do anything but bury them and move on. But after a lot of back and forth, Julia goes off and does place the call.

Barnabas goes to open the secret panel in the drawing room to see if Gerard stashed Carolyn’s remains there. Gerard himself appears to Barnabas. Barnabas yells at him for a while. Julia comes back, and Gerard disappears. Julia wonders why Gerard did not try to harm Barnabas; Barnabas says that he knows he cannot harm him. This seems to be news to Julia. In 1970, Quentin knew that Barnabas was a vampire. We learned the other day that his contact with Gerard erased this knowledge. We may wonder if this fact has also slipped Julia’s mind.

Barnabas goes upstairs, and asks Julia to bring the sheriff to him when he gets to the house. She agrees. Once he is out of earshot, she asks Gerard if he had to kill Carolyn. She seems sad about it.

Barnabas is at the door of the one room at Collinwood that is in good repair, a mysterious playroom on an upper floor. He can’t get the door open. Julia brings the sheriff, and Barnabas says that the door wasn’t locked when he was there earlier. The sheriff says he has some questions and Barnabas angrily responds “Not now!” Cops don’t love it when you answer them that way, in my experience, but the sheriff does seem to be a bit cowed by the surroundings and he lets it pass.

Barnabas asks the sheriff to try the door. He does, and the knob turns easily. He turns to Barnabas and asks sternly “How much of this is in your imagination, Mr Collins?”

Barnabas’ embarrassment doesn’t last long. Carolyn is laid out on a table in the middle of the room, a spray of flowers on her chest. The sheriff remembers how lovely Carolyn was when she was young; Barnabas stalks around the room yelling at the invisible Gerard. When the sheriff says it is time to go, Julia insists on sitting with Carolyn for a while. The sheriff tells her she’s crazy to want to stay in the middle of the house. He’s not exactly sane himself, leaving her alone at what is after all a crime scene. Once the sheriff and Barnabas have gone, Julia receives further instructions from Gerard.

Barnabas, the sheriff, and Julia pay their respects to the late Ms Fredericks. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

The sheriff finds Quentin at the Old House on the estate. He questions him, and gets some very strange answers. Quentin has worked himself into a state when Julia comes back. She announces that she is a doctor and will now give Quentin a sedative. The sheriff takes her word for her professional credentials, and tries to wrestle Quentin into position for her to give him an injection. He can’t manage it, but Julia speaks to Quentin in a tone that is sufficiently authoritative it calms him down right away. Once he is sedated, Quentin asks the sheriff to take him back to the psychiatric facility from which he recently escaped. The sheriff agrees.

The sheriff turns to Julia and asks where Barnabas is. In lieu of an answer, she tells him to come back to the house immediately before sunset. We cut to Barnabas opening the lid of his coffin. The sheriff is there, sticking a cross in his face, and announcing “I know all about you, Barnabas Collins!” Odd as his behavior in the playroom may have been, this sheriff clearly has more on the ball than did any of his predecessors. It’s a good thing the others weren’t up to his standards. If Sheriff Patterson had been as quick to catch on to what was going on around him in April 1967, Barnabas would have been staked by the end of the month and Dark Shadows would never have become a hit.

Sheriff Patterson may be on the minds of longtime viewers. Sometimes fans wonder what Barnabas’ ultimate plan was when he returned to prey upon the living in 1967. Weren’t the Collinses going to catch on that there was something a bit odd about their “cousin from England” sooner or later, as girls kept disappearing or turning up drained of blood? I think the answer is what we see in these two weeks of episodes, and also in the feature film House of Dark Shadows. Had Barnabas gotten his own way, eventually all living people would have fled Collinwood and no one from the village would have dared approach the estate. He’d have ventured forth occasionally to take fresh victims, but otherwise Collinwood would have been entirely cut off from the outside world. The buildings would have decayed and the grounds been overgrown. It was only because Julia showed up and devised a way to limit his consumption of human blood and to give him hope his curse could be put into remission that he himself did not long ago reduce Collinwood to the condition to which Gerard has brought it.

Episode 1068: Almost pleased

I wonder how long the actors had the script before they started taping this one. As unspeaking, barely mobile ghosts Gerard and Daphne, James Storm and Kate Jackson didn’t need much prep time; as lunatics Carolyn Fredericks (neé Stoddard) and Quentin Collins, Nancy Barrett and David Selby probably didn’t need much more. But vampire Barnabas Collins has a lot of dialogue today, and Jonathan Frid rarely seems to be within a country mile of his scripted lines. That isn’t so unusual, but Grayson Hall’s trouble really stands out. Barnabas’ friend, Julia Hoffman, MD, is possessed by Gerard and is pleased that Barnabas keeps meeting with one failure after another. We are supposed to know this, Barnabas isn’t. But she has a huge grin on her face each time she gloats to Barnabas about one of his setbacks. The one time Frid is clearly delivering a line that was written for him, Barnabas tells a conspicuously blissed-out Julia that she seems “almost pleased.” Hall was a highly accomplished actress, and we would expect her to be able to do “secretly pleased” in her sleep. But when this line comes up, she gets a bad laugh.

Far and away the happiest we have ever seen Julia, this strikes Barnabas as “almost pleased.”

The episode ends with Barnabas going to the drawing room of the great house of Collinwood in response to a note from Carolyn. He finds her sitting at the desk there. He talks to her for a moment, then notices that she is not moving. He touches her, and she falls over dead. The episode has its problems, but that is an extremely effective closing curtain.

Episode 1067: Collinwood works on all our imaginations

Dark Shadows just spent sixteen weeks in an alternate universe where Quentin Collins was neither the family-annihilating ghost he was when first we saw him in December 1968 nor the charming rogue we got to know when the show went back in time in March 1969. Instead, he was a foul-tempered sourpuss who treated his wife like an irritating child and refused to learn anything from anyone. Like those previous iterations of the character, “Parallel Time” Quentin had a compulsion to choke people, but unlike them he was no fun to watch.

Now we have traveled forward in time to the year 1995. Here, Quentin is an escaped mental patient who is sometimes extremely docile and at other times just as extremely refractory. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is his zeal for strangling anyone who bothers him. He sees the elderly Timothy Eliot Stokes, expert in the supernatural, and at once grabs him by the throat. Quentin’s friend Barnabas Collins pulls him off of Stokes. Barnabas suggests that Dr Julia Hoffman should give Quentin a sedative. He responds “The only sedative I need is to get my hands around Stokes’s neck. I’ll be calm for the rest of my life!” That’s our Quentin.

Barnabas tries to keep Quentin from giving Stokes his signature Collinwood Handshake. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin blames Stokes for the fact that the estate of Collinwood has been a demon-ridden ruin for the last 25 years. Stokes has been telling Julia and Barnabas that it was that way when he got there. He returned from a trip to Europe in the autumn of 1970, a few months after Barnabas and Julia left on their journey into the alternate universe and out to this future year, and found the place in its current condition and everyone associated with it destroyed in one way or another. But Quentin says that the real disaster came only when Stokes tried to exorcize a ghost. That just made the ghost angry.

Once Quentin is out of the way, Barnabas tells Stokes he believes that Quentin’s madness is a symptom of the ghost’s continued hegemony over Collinwood. He is determined to try another exorcism. Stokes advises him against it, but says he will try to help him if he does go ahead.

Meanwhile, the ghost, who according to the credits is named Gerard, has taken possession of Julia. The ghost has ordered Julia to do something she does not want to do. She keeps this from Barnabas. She tells Barnabas they should give up and go away. He refuses, and she sadly says that whatever will happen will happen. From the look on her face, it seems that the ghost has ordered her to do away with Barnabas and she is resigned to the idea that she will eventually obey this command.

There are other ghosts in the area as well. Yesterday Julia and Barnabas saw the ghosts of two teenagers who were apparently named Tad and Carrie while they danced a minuet and exchanged a chaste kiss, and they heard Quentin talking earnestly to an invisible person he called Daphne. A woman with long black hair briefly comes into Barnabas’ view in his parlor today; the credits confirm that she is Daphne. Anyone who watched US television in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s will already know that she is Kate Jackson, and might be interested to know that she is making her first screen appearance.

When Daphne appears, the air smells of lilacs. That comes as something of a relief. The opening voiceover told us that Collinwood is ruled by “a ghost whose mere presence corrupts the surrounding air.” That would suggest rather a less pleasant odor than that of lilac perfume.

The ghost of the gracious Josette was the chief supernatural presence on the show for its first 42 weeks, and an occasional visitor for some time after. Her signature was the scent of jasmine, so longtime viewers are getting a hint that Daphne will turn out to be important.

Episode 1066: And all that

For many months starting in late 1968, the estate of Collinwood was haunted by the ghost of Quentin Collins. Quentin’s presence became steadily more intolerable until the living members of the Collins family had to abandon the great house in #694. At the end of that episode, we saw Quentin standing on the walkway at the top of the foyer stairs, laughing in triumph.

Vampire Barnabas Collins traveled back in time in #701 and blundered around until history was changed. In #838, set in September 1897, Quentin’s death was prevented. On the anniversary of that event in September 1969, the haunting broke, though the people who lived through it remembered Quentin’s ghost and the events of the haunting. A magic spell was cast on Quentin keeping him forever young, and late in 1969 he took his place among the Collinses whom he had once driven from the family home.

Now, Barnabas and his friend, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, have come unstuck in time again. They find themselves in Collinwood in the year 1995. The house is in ruins, the members of the family either dead, missing, or insane, and the village of Collinsport full of people who won’t answer any of their questions. Quentin is around, having escaped from a psychiatric facility and come back to the estate. Today, Barnabas and Julia have taken him to the great house to try to get him to tell them something useful.

Julia and Barnabas want Quentin to see an upstairs room that is in much better shape than the rest of the house. They open the door, and see a ghost which appears to be strange and troubled teen David Collins. Quentin flees in terror and makes his way to the foyer while Barnabas and Julia watch the ghost vanish.

Quentin finds that he cannot open the front doors. He sees the ghost of a young man staring at him from the walkway at the top of the stairs. Like Quentin during “The Haunting of Collinwood,” this ghost has lots of curly black hair, does not speak, and wears a dark suit from the nineteenth century. Since David Selby is very tall and James Storm is rather the other thing, I can’t help but think of him as Mini-Quentin. The credits tell us that his name is Gerard.

Quentin cannot abide the sight of Mini-Quentin. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Quentin rolls around on the floor, terrified of Gerard. Barnabas and Julia come and try to calm him down. Quentin says the doors won’t open; Barnabas opens them. Quentin runs out. Julia says she senses an evil presence, which, considering that every character we’ve seen so far is a murderer, is not too surprising. She and Barnabas leave.

Two ghosts dance a minuet by the gazebo. Julia and Barnabas think that one of the ghosts is David; the other is a blonde girl whom they do not recognize. The ghosts kiss each other. They walk towards the woods and vanish.

Barnabas and Julia go to the Old House on the estate. They find Quentin, and overhear him talking in an anguished voice to someone named “Daphne.” He tells them that the ghost they saw was not David Collins, but was named Tad. Julia remembers that they found a birthday card addressed to “Tad” and signed “Carrie.” If the ghost who looks like David is actually Tad, one might assume that the blonde girl is Carrie, though she could be Daphne or some other personage.

The next afternoon, Quentin finds Julia sleeping in an armchair in the parlor of the Old House. He asks to see Barnabas. Julia reacts with puzzlement. She says Quentin knows perfectly well that Barnabas cannot rise until the sun sets. He says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Julia is shocked. Once you’ve learned that a fellow is a vampire, that information doesn’t usually slip your mind. But he seems quite sincere. He wanders off.

The blonde girl appears at the window and beckons to Julia. Julia follows her, silently. It seems at first that Julia is in a trance, since she does not call to the girl by the names “Carrie” or “Daphne.” But when the girl leads her into the great house, Julia keeps moving her head around as she watches her step, making it clear she is wide awake. The girl leads her into the strangely intact room, where Gerard is waiting for her.

Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day is full of remarks about how cleverly they blur the line between soundtrack music that the characters can’t hear and atmospheric sounds that they can, disorienting us in a way that adds greatly to the effect of the scares and confusion. It is indeed powerful, and there is a lot of other good stuff in this one.

But this is the first episode of the 1995 segment I wouldn’t show to someone new to Dark Shadows to entice them into watching the show. The pacing is just too slow for the material. We have time to start asking questions that take us out of the story. For example, Julia and Barnabas lament that they have no idea what is going on and are desperate for Quentin to tell them what he knows. But as soon as he volunteers a piece of information, telling him that they saw Tad’s ghost rather than David’s they flatly contradict him. Also, Julia gives Quentin a sedative. We wonder where she got it, since her prescription pad is 25 years out of date and any samples she had in her bag have been sitting out, unrefrigerated and exposed to dry rot, for that same period. Those and other incongruities are the sorts of things we could easily overlook if we were moving as fast as we moved in all five episodes last week, but when events move as leisurely as they do today they mean trouble.

Episode 1065: How long will it be before they all come back?

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves in 1995, 25 years ahead of their proper period. The great house on the estate of Collinwood is in ruins. Some of the people they knew are missing, some are dead, and the rest are determined not to help them find out what happened when disaster struck in 1970.

In his post about the episode on his great blog Dark Shadows Every Day, Danny Horn writes that “if this is July 1995, then Barnabas and Julia are on completely the wrong track. They want to know where Elizabeth and Roger and Maggie are, and the answer is obvious — they’re watching the O.J. trial. Where else would they be?”

Barnabas’ distant cousin Carolyn owns Collinwood now, and she doesn’t have cable. So she is in the great house, a demon-haunted wreck which most people avoid. Julia and Barnabas have followed her there. They hear Carolyn talking and laughing inside an upstairs room that didn’t exist in 1970. They let themselves in. Unlike the rest of the great house and every other structure on the estate, the room is in perfect repair, well-lit and full of luxury items. Carolyn has repeatedly told Barnabas and Julia to stay off her property, even sending the sheriff to arrest them on one of their previous trespassing expeditions to the great house, and she is outraged at this latest intrusion. She demands how dare they follow her into the room, and they respond by praising themselves for their good intentions.

Julia and Barnabas finally leave the room, and Carolyn relaxes. She turns and starts talking to someone who, to her surprise, is not there. She is all the more furious that Barnabas and Julia have driven this person away.

Not content with one home invasion, Julia and Barnabas go to the apartment of their former friend Timothy Eliot Stokes. Before they pushed past him into his parlor, Stokes had been reading a letter from a psychiatric facility where Barnabas and Carolyn’s distant cousin Quentin is a patient. His interior monologue read the part to us about Quentin having taken a turn for the worse. While Barnabas hectors Stokes, Julia leans way down and reads the letter. It turns out Quentin has escaped from the facility. At length, Stokes tells them that he was out of town when the disaster occurred in 1970 and that he doesn’t know much about it. He agrees to help them.

Julia keeps it classy. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Later in the episode, two scenes take place between Stokes and Carolyn. Carolyn enters Stokes’ apartment and reproves him for collaborating with the enemy. She laments that Julia and Barnabas ruined the birthday party, and that there won’t be another birthday party for a year. He has no idea what she is talking about and tries to reason with her. He finally takes her home. These, like every scene with Carolyn in the 1995 segment, are spectacularly good. Nancy Barrett is an excellent actress, Dark Shadows suited her strengths perfectly, and crazy lady Carolyn Fredericks was as good a part as any performer could wish for. Thayer David was terrific also, and the two of them are unforgettable together today.

Barnabas and Julia return to the playroom, since they haven’t been arrested yet tonight. They find a brand new birthday card addressed to “Tad” and signed “Carrie.” Barnabas has never heard those names in connection with Collinwood and wonder who they could be.

Barnabas says that he wants to question Quentin. Julia responds “Barnabas, If Quentin has been in a mental institution, he can’t help us.” It’s true that it takes special training and considerable experience to gain useful information by questioning severely disturbed people, but Julia has those qualifications. She is a psychiatrist who, when we first saw her in #265, was conducting an examination of a barely verbal patient. Over the last three years, everything that Julia had in those days has been stripped from her, a theme the show has been exploring heavily for the last six weeks. This line seems like a throwaway, but it underlines the transformation we have seen.

Quentin’s existence depends on a magical portrait painted in the year 1897. In an upstairs room at the Old House, Julia and Barnabas find this portrait intact. At that very moment, Quentin himself rushes in with a knife and tries to slash it. Barnabas thwarts him.

Quentin won’t believe that Barnabas and Julia are who they appear to be. He babbles as if he were still in the psychiatric facility. He claims never to have heard of the playroom, then insists the playroom was always there. They take him to the playroom, their third trip there today. Quentin looks in the room and flees in terror. Barnabas and Julia stay, and see the ghost of strange and troubled teen David Collins. The appearance of David’s ghost is one of the most forceful week-ending images in the series, up there with Barnabas’ hand darting out of its coffin in #210 or the Old House in sunlight in #365.

Episode 1064: There are only intruders

A disruption in the very nature of time and space has thrust vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman into the year 1995, where the great house of Collinwood is in ruins and everyone is annoyed with them.

Yesterday, Julia and Barnabas were poking around inside the great house against the express instructions of its owner, Carolyn Fredericks, as conveyed earlier in the evening by the sheriff when he arrested them for trespassing. A heavy bust fell from the railing on the top of the foyer stairs, narrowly missing Julia. She and Barnabas fled the house. They looked back, and saw a young man in nineteenth century garb glaring at them from a window.

Today, Barnabas and Julia are in the parlor of the Old House on the estate. She tells him that when she saw the man in the window she was overcome by a powerful sensation. “It was the very essence of evil! I felt evil all around me. I was trapped by it!” Regular viewers may have thought Julia would be used to that by now, but apparently not. “It made me aware of something deep inside me that I don’t even understand — as though, with that one look, he could concentrate every grain of evil I have in my nature! Make it grow, and grow…” She asks Barnabas if he felt the same thing, and he says he didn’t, not at all. He concedes that he is an inhuman abomination from beyond the grave, so maybe he’s immune to that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, Carolyn is at home in the old shack by Finley’s Cove, accompanied by Mrs Johnson, who was the housekeeper at Collinwood in the late 1960s. Carolyn is brushing her hair and smiling. She reminisces about when she was a little girl and Mrs Johnson used to brush her hair. Mrs Johnson is not shy then or later about contradicting anything Carolyn says that is not so, but does not deny that she did that. So the audience is supposed to believe it. Some say this is a retcon, since Mrs Johnson did not join the staff at Collinwood until 1966, when Carolyn was fully grown. But in a comment on Danny Horn’s post about the episode on his great Dark Shadows Every Day, I expounded a theory as to how it might be true:

In the early episodes, Carolyn talks about having gone to school in town. How did she get there?

She can’t have walked; it was miles away, much of it along a winding road with several blind curves. Her mother never left the grounds during those years, she couldn’t have driven her. Roger was living in Augusta with Laura.

(I should expand on this point. Roger says that when Carolyn was born, he was away at boarding school. So he would still have been in college when his niece first became a pupil at Collinsport Elementary. He then busied himself squandering his inheritance, a process which included the ten years between his marriage to Laura and his return to Collinwood. So that doesn’t leave any time for him to have looked after his “Kitten” when she was little.)

The only servant was Matthew. Matthew and Carolyn don’t seem at all close; it doesn’t seem likely that he drove her to school every morning. If a school bus came up the hill to Collinwood day after day, the kids who rode it couldn’t have maintained the attitude Carolyn describes, whispering behind her back about her living with the witch in the haunted house. Sooner or later they’d have started talking to her face to face about it.

Carolyn also talks about Bill Malloy being more like a father to her than any other man, and the two of them do have a cozy relationship. Carolyn is also very quick to fall in with Mrs Johnson when Burke pitches the idea of her joining the household staff at Collinwood. So I think we have to conclude that Bill Malloy and his housekeeper were in charge of getting Carolyn to school in the mornings. Malloy was on the fishing boats, so that would require an early start to the day. There were probably many days when little Carolyn was still in her pajamas when she got to the Malloy house. On those days, Mrs Johnson brushed her hair while the water came to a boil for breakfast.

Comment left by “Acilius,” 27 January 2021, on Danny Horn, “Episode 1064: Here Comes the Hotstepper,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 20 August 2017.

Carolyn seems to be a crazy lady these days. Yesterday, we saw that much of this is an act, but in her scene with Mrs Johnson we see that it is an act she puts on even when she is alone with someone she trusts. It allows her to smile and laugh and be happy even when she is surrounded by the residue of an unimaginable catastrophe.

Carolyn tells Mrs Johnson that she will be going to the great house of Collinwood to get ready to host a picnic at the gazebo, which she pronounces “ga-ZAY-bo” in a bit of Collinsport English that we’ve been hearing intermittently since Lara Parker invented it in the summer of 1968. Mrs Johnson reacts with horror, saying that no one can go to the devil-haunted wreckage of Collinwood, but Carolyn laughs off her objections. Carolyn shows a picture of a picnic they had at the ga-ZAY-bo in 1970, the last year Collinwood was habitable. Mrs Johnson spots a figure in the background and declares that was “the first time we saw him.” Carolyn gets upset and tears up the picture.

Barnabas had insisted to Julia that the man they saw at the window may not be the only supernatural entity operating within the great house, and Carolyn seems to confirm that he is right. She does not want to hear Mrs Johnson referring to him, nor does she want to have a picture of him. But she happily says that she is going to the great house tonight with a present, because it is his birthday. Apparently him and his refer to different beings, each of which inheres in the haunting. One wonders how much of supernaturalism would dissolve if people would just use proper names instead of pronouns.

Julia and Barnabas barge into Carolyn’s house. Carolyn tells them to get out, which they refuse to do. They badger her with the story of what happened when they were illegally roaming around in her other house, and Mrs Johnson runs out. Eventually Carolyn resumes her crazy lady demeanor. Barnabas and Julia give up and leave, and for a moment we wonder if they are on their way to let themselves into some other property of Carolyn’s.

Julia and Barnabas go back to the Old House. They find that Mrs Johnson is waiting for them there. They tell her that they are time travelers, and that if she will tell them what happened they might be able to go back and prevent it. She is dubious about this claim, but starts telling the story anyway. She casts her mind back to the summer of 1970. “It all began when the days were so beautiful, you couldn’t help but be happy. There was a spirit of joy at Collinwood; there was a feeling that hadn’t been there in a long time. There was so much love among all of us at that time…” This would be the period that began immediately after Barnabas and Julia left.

Mrs Johnson says that all of the beauty and joy and love and other things you might experience when you don’t have a vampire and a mad scientist around your estate came to an end one quiet night. She seems to be on the point of saying something important when she looks at the window of the parlor and sees the glaring young man. She breaks off, screams that she won’t tell, and runs out into the night. Julia tells Barnabas she felt the evil presence, and that the ghost was there. They go out to look for Mrs Johnson.

The ghost catches up to Mrs Johnson first. He touches her shoulder, and she dies. When Barnabas and Julia find Mrs Johnson, she is sitting on the ground, her back against a tree, her eyes open. This was the same posture in which Clarice Blackburn’s character Abigail Collins was found when we saw her corpse in #432. That image was a brief shocker in the last couple of seconds of the episode; this time the camera zooms in on Blackburn’s face and pans across it, allowing her to show that an outstanding actress can give a powerful performance even when she is altogether motionless.

Carolyn happens by. Julia and Barnabas hide. Carolyn thinks Mrs Johnson is alive and chatters to her. As the truth begins to dawn, Carolyn’s alarm mounts. Finally Barnabas and Julia emerge from the shadows. Carolyn accuses them of killing Mrs Johnson. They deny their guilt. Carolyn is unconvinced, and indeed we cannot help but think that since Mrs Johnson lived through the 25 years of their absence and turned up dead so shortly after they returned, Julia and Barnabas cannot be exactly innocent.

Barnabas and Julia follow Carolyn into the great house. Julia wonders what Mrs Johnson could have meant by “the children’s old room.” This is a blooper on Grayson Hall’s part- Mrs Johnson mentioned “the room the children called The Playroom.” Julia and Barnabas hear music playing, and follow it to a room upstairs. Barnabas looks at the doorway and remarks that the room was never there when he knew the house. The shot is framed at such a severe Dutch angle that we can tell something isn’t on the level.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

They hear Carolyn inside, talking and laughing with at least one other person. Since their whole philosophy of life now seems to be making themselves as obnoxious as possible to Carolyn, they let themselves in.

Episode 1063: To see what you own

The sheriff of Collinsport arrests two trespassers at the long-deserted great house of Collinwood. They are Barnabas Collins and Dr Julia Hoffman, who inexplicably disappeared in 1970 and have even more inexplicably reappeared in 1995. The owner of Collinwood, Carolyn Fredericks (formerly Carolyn Stoddard Hawkes) has complained about them.

Barnabas pretends to be his own son, and claims that Carolyn’s mother, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, put the Old House on the estate in his father’s name in the late 1960s. While we never saw this happen, from 1967 on Liz often did talk about the Old House as if it and its contents were Barnabas’ property. Furthermore, the sheriff’s office appears to be right across the hall from the registry of deeds, and the Sheriff himself appears to be far more competent than most Collinsport law enforcement personnel we have seen, so if Barnabas were lying he would probably catch on.

The sheriff says that Barnabas may have a right to go to the Old House, but that he found him and Julia at the great house. He asks a number of intelligent questions, none of which Julia or Barnabas can answer to his satisfaction. He threatens to hold them on a vagrancy charge. When Barnabas says that “I have a great deal of money… I own property here,” he backs off that threat, but he does tell them that he hopes their friends from Bangor come and take them away very soon.

Barnabas and Julia leave the sheriff’s office. Carolyn enters from the back room where she has been eavesdropping. She asks the sheriff to look at a picture in her photo album. It is a picture of Julia taken in 1970. The sheriff notices that she hasn’t changed a bit, not even the way she wears her hair. He asks Carolyn if she has any pictures of Barnabas, and she says that she does not. She says that the only picture of him she knows of is an oil painting done in the 1790s.

There was another oil painting of Barnabas done in 1967, and Carolyn’s late cousin David took a photograph of him in #659. The 1967 portrait hung in the Old House, which Carolyn may not have visited in the last twenty five years, and the photograph David took was an oddity that likely would not have been put into an album. So it isn’t really strange that she doesn’t think of them.

Carolyn does remember some other things about Barnabas, though. We open with Julia and Barnabas heading towards the Collins family mausoleum in the old cemetery north of town. They find that the door to the secret chamber is standing open, and are shocked that someone else knows about it. They find Carolyn there. They pretend not to have known about the chamber. They also pretend to be puzzled by the empty coffin in the chamber.

Carolyn says she knows why the coffin is there. She tells Barnabas it is waiting for him. Then she turns to Julia and says that it may also be waiting for her, whichever one dies first. They leave. Carolyn closes the panel and says with a gleam in her eye that it is waiting for him.

“It is waiting… for… him.”

Barnabas is a vampire, and the coffin is his resting place. In the fall of 1967, he bit Carolyn and took her as his victim. He was cured of vampirism in March of 1968. The bite marks disappeared from his victims’ necks at that point, and it seemed that their memory of what he was and what he had done to them faded as well.

But for months after, Nancy Barrett played Carolyn as if she remembered a good deal more than Barnabas knew she remembered. The scripts didn’t give her much support in that interpretation, but it was well over a year before she had to make it clear Carolyn no longer knew about Barnabas. Perhaps whatever happened while Barnabas and Julia were away jarred Carolyn’s memory loose. If Carolyn does remember that Barnabas is a vampire, she is being astonishingly reckless in her scene with him and Julia in the secret room. Barnabas takes a menacing tone when she says that she knows why the coffin is there, and the background music makes it clear that he is on the point of striking when she says it is waiting for him. She laughs after she says to herself that “It is for him”; perhaps the light in her eyes is nostalgia for those days in 1967 when she was his blood thrall.

There is also a scene in Julia’s old room at Collinwood where they find that the box containing the notes she took while trying to cure Barnabas of vampirism has been forced open. They wonder who may have seen those notes.

Julia and Barnabas go back to the great house. She points out that the sheriff will lock them up if he finds them there, a concern Barnabas dismisses. He mentions that they have to find another place for the coffin, and suggests the great house. It would be interesting if they were lugging a coffin around when the sheriff showed up, but Julia puts the kibosh on that. Barnabas then says maybe the Old House. They busy themselves running up and down the stairs in the foyer for no discernible reason. They hear some music coming from nowhere in particular. Barnabas declares that this cannot be a sign of danger, since “music is seldom used to frighten.” For months in early 1969, an evil spirit possessed Collinwood and drove the family out by the incessant playing of a sickly little waltz, but apparently that has slipped Barnabas’ memory.

Yesterday, a man called Victor Flagler told Barnabas and Julia that he and his wife Jeanne had gone into the great house on a dare. Something pushed a heavy object off the rail at the top of the stairs. It landed on Jeanne’s head, killing her, and Victor heard laughter in the house. Julia and Barnabas don’t notice that there is a weighty bust perched on that rail today that wasn’t there yesterday, and Julia stands on the floor beneath it. It falls, and she gets out of the way in the nick of time. They leave the house.

We see a blue dot pulsating inside the house. Barnabas and Julia don’t get a look at that, but when they are outside they do see a man in nineteenth century garb sneering at them through a window. He is the face of whatever is going on in the house. The credits give his name as Gerard.

Episode 1062: You shouldn’t look the same

Vampire Barnabas Collins and mad scientist Julia Hoffman have come unstuck in time and found themselves 25 years in the future, in the year 1995. The great house of Collinwood is in ruins. They are trying to find someone who can tell them what happened after they left in 1970.

They meet Carolyn Collins Stoddard Hawkes, who has changed her name to Carolyn Fredericks. Carolyn now lives in an old shack on the beach. She is offended that Julia and Barnabas look the same as they did in 1970. She refuses to answer any of their questions and orders them to leave her house.

During the day, Barnabas takes shelter in his coffin in the secret chamber hidden in the old Collins family mausoleum. Julia leaves the mausoleum and finds Carolyn waiting outside. Carolyn warns her that she and Barnabas must leave the area. Julia goes on her way, and occult expert Timothy Eliot Stokes comes out of the shadows and talks with Carolyn. Carolyn had seemed to be drifting in and out of lucidity while talking to Julia, but she is crystal clear while she and Stokes discuss the need to get rid of the new arrivals.

Julia goes to the county building and tries to get the clerk to answer questions about what happened in 1970. He is frightened by the mention of the date and claims that there are no records of any kind from that year. She finds Stokes in the corridor outside the clerk’s office. She greets him joyously. He tells her to go away, lest he and others be “forced to act.”

After nightfall, Julia and Barnabas decide to visit a man named Victor Flagler, whose name the clerk had mentioned. As Barnabas and Julia leave the mausoleum, Stokes and the clerk watch them go and speculate as to their destination. Evidently the secret chamber is no longer secret at all.

Victor is in his 30s; he has a framed picture of his wife Jeanne that appears to have been taken during the Coolidge administration. Some fans complain that everyone in the 1995 segment dresses in clothes that might have been found at Ohrbach’s in 1970, but I don’t think that’s a problem. The Collinses of Collinwood had a stranglehold on the economy of the village of Collinsport in the 1960s, and if they were annihilated in 1970 and their assets left to rot it stands to reason people in the area would still be wearing the clothes they bought then. But the antique style of this photograph really does take me out of the show:

A photo taken no earlier than 1985. Screenshot by Dark Shadows Before I Die.

Victor initially resists having anything to do with Julia and Barnabas, but finally tells his story. He and Jeanne went into Collinwood on a dare, believing it to be just a big empty house. They felt an evil presence there, and something pushed a heavy object from the top of the foyer stairs onto Jeanne’s head, killing her. When Victor found that Jeanne was dead, he heard laughter resounding through the house.

Barnabas and Julia go back to the mausoleum, only to find that the door to the secret chamber is standing wide open. They wonder who knows about it.

The clerk’s name is Ed. He is played by Ronald Dawson, who also appeared in #910 as art restorer Henry Osmund. This is Ed’s only episode, and Dawson’s final appearance. It is also Victor’s only episode, and Cliff Cudney’s final appearance. Cudney played a zombie in #963, 964, and 965. Both Dawson and Cudney have much better chances today to show us what they could do than those earlier parts afforded them. Indeed, all the actors are on top form. All roles played by Nancy Barrett are serious contenders for the title Best Character Ever, and in her scene with Barnabas and Julia in the little house on the beach, we can see that Carolyn Fredericks will be no exception.