Tag: gerard stiles

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 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.