Desmond Collins has fallen under the influence of an evil spirit emanating from a severed head he bought in Macau, and is now trying to find the body that used to be attached to the head. Lamar Trask is an evil spirit unto himself, and is trying to find the body of his late father, fanatical witchfinder the Rev’d Mr Trask.
It is not clear what the severed head is hoping will come of a reunion with its body, though longtime viewers will remember the last time a body part was reconnected to its original possessor. Evil sorcerer Count Petofi stuck his hand back on the end of his arm in #814. As separate entities, Petofi and the hand both wielded considerable magical powers. Reunited, they seemed to be unstoppable.
What Lamar wants is much clearer. He believes that his father was murdered in the 1790s, 45 years ago. He hopes that the killer might still be alive and that he will be able to take revenge.
As it happens, Lamar is right about what happened to his father. Vampire Barnabas Collins walled Trask up in his basement and left him to die there. Barnabas is back on the estate of Collinwood, having been sealed in his coffin in 1796, freed in 1967, and dislocated in time in 1970. It might be just for Lamar to expose Barnabas and destroy him, but it would also ruin the show. Besides, Lamar and his father are both hilariously obnoxious, so it wouldn’t occur to anyone to root for them.
Lamar persuades Cockney showgirl/ mentalist Leticia Faye to hold a letter from his late father while she goes into a trance. She has a vision of the Old House on the grounds of Collinwood. Lamar interprets this to mean that his father’s remains are there. Barnabas interrupts this scene and reproves Lamar for taking advantage of Leticia. He might have pointed out that what Leticia was doing is by any definition witchcraft, and have gone on to point out that the Rev’d Mr Trask would be horrified that his son would participate in it. But that would put Lamar on the defensive, and the function of a Trask is always to attack.
The Collinses think that Barnabas left for England in the 1790s and died there. They also believe that he and his fellow time traveler, mad scientist Julia Hoffman, are the offspring of that original Barnabas come to visit their late father’s birthplace. The other day, Daniel Collins, master of Collinwood, invited Barnabas to stay in the Old House as long as he liked. So Barnabas does not have to sit still for Lamar’s attack later, when he goes home to the Old House and finds him poking around. Lamar explicitly says that he is looking for his father’s remains. Knowing that they are behind a brick wall which has attracted no one’s notice in the decades for which it has stood, Barnabas is quite relaxed about this search. He tells Lamar that he is risking his good name by taking Leticia’s visions so seriously, and tells him to leave the house.
Desmond and Leticia live under the same roof. She is his mother’s permanent guest in their home, a mansion known as Rose Cottage. But unlike Lamar, Desmond does not turn to Leticia for guidance today. At the beginning of the episode, she walked into the room where he keeps the head, exclaimed about the evil present there, and fainted. So he gives her a wide berth for the rest of the day.
Instead, Desmond calls in Otis Greene, who was associated with the head in 1803. The head possessed Otis, as it is taking possession of Desmond, and led him to commit four brutal murders. Otis confessed to those murders and asked to be punished, but his talk about the head led the court to exercise a leniency extraordinary for the period and to set aside criminal charges, instead committing him to an asylum. Released from there about ten years ago, Otis has established himself as a successful antique dealer.
Otis enters and at once begins admiring Desmond’s furniture and telling him about the prices it would fetch in his shop. He looks at one chair and says that he knows a collector who would pay the fantastic sum of $100 for it, equivalent to many thousands of dollars in 2026. Desmond says he is not interested in selling the chair, and directs Otis’ attention to a table that belonged to someone associated with a witchcraft trial.
Otis is played by Abe Vigoda, his second role on Dark Shadows. Vigoda’s first character made his entrance in #684 expressing admiration for the fine things around him, as Otis admires Desmond’s furniture today. That was Ezra Braithwaite, a silversmith. Ezra was brought on to provide information that would lead to the ghost of a man from his own past. Ezra did answer some questions, but the ghost killed him before he could make an exit.
Evidently writer Sam Hall remembers Ezra. Not only does Otis make the same entrance as Ezra, but like Ezra he is there to talk about his past. He tells Desmond that his grandfather was the executioner in the town of Bedford, and that his work brought a curse on the family. Desmond shows Otis the head, and he is shattered at the sight of it. Desmond demands to know where the body is. Otis resists answering, but is quickly overwhelmed with chest pains. Desmond screams in his ear, and he starts gasping out cryptic remarks. “The noose, a ring of gold, the stairs, top of the hill, direct line, an unmarked stone.” He falls dead, and Desmond vows that the hidden body will be found.
Unfortunately, this marks Abe Vigoda’s final appearance on Dark Shadows. Vigoda’s first television role came in 1949, when he was 28 years old. He played a character identified as “Old Man on Train” in an installment of Studio One. He went on playing old men on television, in movies, and on Broadway until his death in 2016. His most famous feature film role was that of doomed capo Sal Tessio in The Godfather (1972,) and his biggest TV part was as Detective Philip K. Fish on the series Barney Miller and its spin-off Fish (1977-1978.) He once sat on a panel of cast members at a Dark Shadows convention. When it was his turn to talk, he said “My name is Abe Vigoda. I played Otis Greene on Dark Shadows. I don’t remember much about it,” and passed the microphone to the next person.
