DARK SHADOWS FORUMS
General Discussions => Current Talk Archive => Current Talk '26 I => Current Talk '09 II => Topic started by: Philippe Cordier on September 22, 2009, 05:44:42 AM
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I haven't been able to post here very often this year ... most of the time (when I wasn't writing cover letters) I was absorbed in medieval genealogy. The last few weeks I've been absent because I moved back to my home state to the house I grew up in. The job I had moved out of state for didn't last long because the company made cutbacks with the recession. (If anyone knows of a position anywhere in the U.S. for a researcher/writer with a library degree, please let me know ... )
One of the good things about moving is that you tend to find things that had been missing since the previous time you moved. The find that most elated me was discovering my "Dark Shadows Episode Guide" published by Pomegranate Press. And all the notes I made from re-watching 1840 and 1840PT over the summer seem to have made it here, too.
Back at home now, my mother asked me to go through boxes of my sister's and my old children's books to find which ones could be given away. Here too I made some exciting finds.
Here's my summary of one that's most relevant to my writing this post - this is from the first chapter, which I read last night:
Dan Pride, an orphan raised in private schools in London, arrives by train from Boston to a small town on the coast of Maine; he is picked up at the station by the hired man, a young, talkative man in his 20s, who tells the 13-year old about the boy's ancestors and why his family is shunned by locals. It seems an ancestor was executed for witchcraft in colonial times. The boy arrives at the dark, forbidding house of his uncle ...
One phrase leapt out from the first few pages because I had always thought that my memory of this came from DS - but I see now that I was wrong:
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
The book has enough similarities in subject and atmostphere with DS that some aspects must have become fused in my later recollection.
I wonder if anyone else remembers this book, or read similar books during the time of DS's original airing. "The Witch's Bridge" was published in 1967; my second edition Scholastic paperback was published a couple of years later, and I read it in 1970.
Last night at about midnight I made another startling discovery. I was idly googling the name of the town of some of my ancestors in northeastern France and had discovered a link to a book about witch trials in that province. I was familiar with the researcher's previous work, a historian at Oxford University. As I paged through an online preview, I stopped for a moment almost in disbelief. I saw the name of one of my ancestors from the town I was seeking. I had no information about him previously other than his name. He is mentioned in this book as having accused a woman of witchcraft in 1608, when he was 32 years old, and signed his statement with what is described as the flourished signature of an educated man. He later testified against her, and she was subsequently tortured and executed. The account is quite detailed. Unfortunately, this isn't the first ancestor I've discovered who played a role in the judicial process against alleged witches in this region.
It's strange that my early interest in DS, witches, and the like, should be from a viewpoint so completely opposite from these forebears. It's unsettling yet macabrely fascinating.
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That is eerie, because I'd swear maybe I read the same novel...or maybe not. Did it have a house in a swamp, and a phantom hound?
I love reading stories like yours, re-capturing those little moments of connection between ideas.
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Hello, Zahir -
Thanks for your response ...
Yes, I am sure that you read the same book (young adult novel). The title is "The Mystery of the Witches' Bridge," and the author is Barbee Oliver Carleton. I am not very far along in my re-reading of it, but much of it is coming back to me. The 13-year old boy goes to live with his uncle on the New England coast (probably Massachusetts, not Maine), where he arrives by bus (not train - my apologies). The large estate is set on an island in the midst of a marsh, and yes there is a large black dog connected with the legend of evil and of the boy's great-great-something grandfather, who pronounced a curse when he was arrested for witchcraft. It's very atmospheric and the sort of book that settles in one's subconscious memory. Very much like DS in that respect.
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OMG! And there's something about someone playing a violin in the night?
I remember virtually nothing else about it, save of course that I did read it and something about those images stuck in my head. Recently saw a filmed version of The Woman in Black that is also about a house amid swamps (or moors) and that reminded of this same story.
Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. And yeah, even then the YA novel reminded me of DS.
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Yes, though they always refer to it as a fiddle, and a fiddler's fog which is dreaded. The sound of a fiddle is heard out in the foggy marsh whenever someone is doomed. I just realized how similar that is to the "Woman in White" who appears on the grounds of Collinwood just before a Collins dies, in 1841PT.
I began playing the violin the year after I read the book, though I don't think there was a connection ... I do remember wishing that such exciting events would happen in my part of the country, but in books (as on DS) they only happened in New England.
The black dog's name is Caliban - one of JF's favorite roles.
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I'm still amazed I remember as much of that as I do -- AND that after all these years there's someone who read it as well AND is a DS fan AND mentions it at a message board I go to...
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This is a really fascinating thread, with which I am finally catching up. I don't think I ever read that novel, although we got Scholastic paperbacks at school and I remember the excitement of ordering the books and finally having them arrive.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is of course originally a quote from the King James translation of the Bible, and I thought Angelique did quote it in one of the scenes where she was scheming to have Vicki framed as the Witch in 1795. I still don't have the 1795 DVD sets and I gave the videotapes away, so I have no way of checking right now. The scene I remember has Ang going on to gloat that a Witch found guilty will be reduced to "ashes"--or maybe fire--but isn't the scene where she uses spellcraft to create a spectral fire that drives Vicki out of her hiding place and into Trask's clutches.
Philippe, in certain areas of France and Germany, the Witch-craze in the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries reached the point where hundreds of people were accused and tried in the space of a very few years. And I believe it was all heavily localized, as was the case in Massachusetts in 1692-93. So some districts were heavily afflicted by the craze and others had minimal activity. To this day the cause of all of it remains obscure. The study of Witchcraft in early modern Europe has become a MAJOR cottage industry amongst academic historians in the past quarter century, oddly enough.
G.
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Zahir: I knew that someone here had to have read the same book those many years back. [ghost_wub]
Another DS comparison: the family portraits. One is of the boy's ancestor in Puritan garb, looking very cruel - whom the boy at first mistakes for his reclusive, modern-day uncle because they look identical.
I'm beginning to realize how many clichés of the Gothic genre there are, and that DS was only one forum that used them. Since DS was my first exposure to the Gothic tradition, I didn't realize that DS didn't invent the genre and all of these great details!
Gothick: Your description of ordering those Scholastic books at school probably triggered a few other people's memories, too ...
Thanks for the catch that it was Angelique who quoted "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." I did note that in a more recent viewing, and was puzzled because it didn't match my memory of the scene, which I always remembered as the discovery of a Bible laying open on the desk in the drawing room at Collinwood, with a knife stabbed through the pages. Upon discovering this, someone then read the passage indicated by the knife: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." I seemed to remember this as taking place during the present-day Cassandra/Dream Curse story line. When I found the same passage quoted in the book "Mystery of the Witches' Bridge," I thought that might be the answer, but I'll have to read further to see if it comes up again later in the book.
Your points about the witch craze in northeastern France/southwestern Germany are right on target with what I've read. In his research for "The Witches of Lorraine" (2007), Robin Briggs reviewed the records of some 400 trials. And there are many more, many of which have yet to see the light of day; I've come across a couple of these myself. Although Briggs appears to go the route of conflicts between neighbors as an explanation, I agree with you that the causes remain murky. The testimony of witnesses (like my ancestor) isn't easy to explain away or dismiss. I hope to include this and other information on my planned (hopefully within a year) genealogy webpage.
The witch craze in Lorraine and Saarland ended by the early 1600s, about 80 years before Salem Village. A fairly high percentage of men were among the accused.
My comments have probably run their course as far as being relevant to DS ... thanks to the mods for not giving me the nudge [ghost_rolleyes]
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Actually, if you ever get a chance to read Varney The Vampire from the 1840s (all 200+ chapters of it [hall2_shocked] ), you'll find the old portrait-of-the-vampire there in his ancestral home. Plus a lovely young girl he's half-way in love with, coupled with the secret dungeon no one knows about, a melancholy vampire looking for a bride who will free him from his curse, etc.
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I came across my cousin's copy of "The Witches Bridge" when I was moving out of my house back to my childhood home last January and decided it was a keeper, but haven't come across it as I've been unpacking. I did find another Barbee Oliver Carleton book," The Secret of Saturday Cove," 1961. I read it the other day and it takes place in Maine which is her home state, although she later moved to Boston when she married. The story is about a boy named David and his sister Sally who along with their clever friend Stokes are looking for the family treasure that was buried during the Revolutionary War by an ancestor who lived in the family's now abandoned old house. The ancestor's name was Jonathan. I kept thinking that maybe she had a premonition. I also kept thinking that someone on Dark Shadows must have read this book.
My cousin and I used to get the Scholastic books also and only because my mother and my uncle liked that if you ordered so many you got free books.
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For many years, I have tried to remember the name of this novel I read around 1970 that seemed as if it was meant to be at least in part an artfully handled send-up of Dark Shadows. The familiar plot involves a young governess coming to live with a family (in New England? I'm vague on just where the book was set) in a gloomy old mansion. The family proves to be very odd and members include a "courtly" vampire uncle who is cleverly said to rise from his coffin most days around 4 in the afternoon (the air time during the latter four years of DS in most areas of the US). I think there was also a werewolf, and a very Quentin-like fellow named Damion who the heroine winds up wedding at the finale.
I've tried a number of authors over the years but never was able to find it. If this rings a bell for any of the readers of this thread, I would really appreciate it if you could supply full bibliographic details of this novel--would love to read it again!
cheers, Gothick
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Gothick, I'd love to read that book! If nobody here knows the title, would you have any objection to my posting your description of it in the "Name that Book" chat group of www.librarything.com?
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Gothick, could the mansion have been an Irish castle? And the vampire uncle only fed on the British, so he was rewarded by the locals (good Patriot that he was) by having access to their cattle?
If so, does this look or sound familiar?-- http://www.librarything.com/work/2229488 (Though the girl's name wasn't Jane; one of the reviewers seems to be confusing her with that better-known governess.) The earliest publication date I'm finding for it is 1970.
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Wow, Midnite, you're a genius! I think that just may be it!
I'll grab it off one of the vendors offering it on various venues and report back...
Happy Halloween!
G.
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Yay! Good luck!!
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David, that's so funny, because several years ago I had set aside some other favorite childhood books in an enclosed bookcase, and last week I noticed that one of these was "The Secret of Saturday Cove" by Barbee Oliver Carleton, a hardcover from the Weekly Reader Children's Bookclub. I hadn't realized that I had another book by the author of "The Mystery of the Witches' Bridge." I finished "Witches' Bridge" a few days ago, and leafing through "Saturday Cove," I didn't notice anything very similar to "Witches' Bridge" (not to mention DS) but after what you said, I may want to re-read this one, too. I don't remember any more what it was that made me set it aside a few years ago as I have no memory of the book now.
One of the things I remembered from my childhood reading of "Witches' Bridge was that there was actually nothing supernatural behind the events. That may have disappointed me at the time, especially since this was during the era when DS was first influencing our lives. Re-reading it now, I have a new appreciation for it. If you read it, the scene at Lamie's island is remarkably "deep" ... the earlier chapters reminded me rather of "Jane Eyre." And from the first scene to the last, I pictured the hired man character as JOHN KARLEN. He would have been perfect for playing this character. (Incidentally, I found that someone is writing a screenplay of "Witches' Bridge," so let's hope for a good result.)
The quote "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" did recur toward the end of the book, but was definitely not the source of my "memory" of the DS scene that apparently never happened.
The website for tracking down old books is a good resource that I also came across recently. Hope that the book turns out to be the right one, Gothick!
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My copy of The Curse of the Concullens arrived last night and I began reading it on my morning commute today. It's definitely the novel I recall from way back when! It's a fun read for anyone who enjoys spoofs of the Gothic literary genre. So far, the character of Dimitri has just come onstage, and seems every bit as Quentinesque as I recalled!
G.