I can't tell you how excited I was to see this post answering my question from 2009, here:

http://dsboards.com/SMF/index.php?topic=17198.msg141663#msg141663

Title: Dream Curse Story Origin
Post by: Philippe Cordier on March 20, 2009, 07:11:26 PM

At any rate, in "The Dark Shadows Almanac: 30th Anniversary Tribute," there is a page titled "Dark Shadows Sources," and it lists a story by an unknown author, "The Dream Deceivers," as the inspiration for the 1968 Dream curse instigated by Cassandra Blair.

Does anyone know anything about this story? I've done a google search and didn't come up with anything.

- Philippe Cordier


If "The Dream Deceivers" was a published book or short story, Bette and Luciaphil were not able to find any trace of it back in 2002 using their library resources.
Midnite


Thanks, Midnite.

The Dream Curse storyline is the first extended sequence of DS that I remember from childhood, so it has special significance to me. It was so terrifying at that time. Surprisingly, I don't remember too much about it from my viewing of the series in the 1990s on SciFi.

It's interesting to think of the mileage that some unknown author's story got, and he or she has never been properly credited!

- Philippe

..........................

In which post Midnite referred back to the question as previously posed in 2002:

http://dsboards.com/SMF/index.php?topic=1424.msg9971#msg9971

Title: Dream curse question
Post by: kuanyin on June 04, 2002, 04:53:09 PM

22 years is a long time to wait, but I'm glad there's finally an answer!

- Philippe

Perhaps DC and his writers were “inspired” by this particular “Star Trek” episode and they just happened to come up with the concept of “Parallel Time” in 1970?

I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but I wonder if this question has been addressed on this forum sometime in the past . . . I seem to remember some discussion where someone brought up that there had been stories published in SciFi magazines about this time where the concept of parallel time was used, and it may be a case where certain ideas were just "in the air" at the time.

Sad news indeed, especially the familiar names of three in our DS fandom. Thank you for sharing this information. Thoughtful tributes, one and all.

Very interesting post, Bob! I noticed somewhere on the Internet a few days ago that Bill O'Reilly had recently written this book, "Killing the Witches," and it seemed rather surprising material. Having read quite a bit on the Salem witchcraft over the years, and given that I am not particularly inclined towards reading, listening to, or watching Bill O'Reilly, I let it go at that. But from what you write in your post, perhaps the book would be worthwhile. (I wonder what O'Reilly's interest in it was that he wrote a book about it?) The problem I've encountered with more academic approaches to the subject over the years is that historians and professors always have to come up with a new theory to explain the incident, something new that challenges everything previously thought on the topic, and often seemingly stretching their sources to come up with yet another revolutionizing thesis that in the end is less than satisfying. So perhaps a more journalistic overview should be welcomed.

I had never thought of the parallels you make with DS's treatment of witchcraft, especially in the 1795 storyline, but it makes perfect sense. The Reverend Trask's beliefs and actions do bear some resemblance to the Rev. Cotton Mather, though that had never occurred to me -- religious fanaticism in its full glory. And I think I dismissed any comparison of Angelique with Tituba because of the difference in race, and looked no further.

One of the most difficult things to explain in many of the witchcraft cases isn't the hysterical playacting of the girls (in the case of Salem) but manifestations of the afflicted such as disgorging pins, etc. etc.

Which brings me to the supposedly astonishing and hard to explain "possession" of "Roland Doe" in the Maryland - St. Louis exorcism case. Having read a lot on that case, too, it is almost convincing, until you read the truly investigative and groundbreaking journalism of Mark Opsasnick's "The Haunted Boy" in "Strange" Magzine in 1999 or 2000, which punched the first holes in the case (he was the first to track down who the boy really was, where he lived, and interviewed some of the boy's classmates of the time). But it really took the death of "Roland Doe" (not his real name) two or three years ago and some comments made by his common-law wife after his death published in The New York Post to reveal the truth. A couple of quotes (which anyone can probably copy and google to obtain the article): According to Hunkeler’s companion, the man himself never believed that he was the victim of satanic possession and he shunned religion.

"He said he wasn’t possessed, it was all concocted," said the companion. "He said, 'I was just a bad boy.' "

It's surprising that this prosaic expose has not made a dent in the popular online accounts and books that continue to appear. People want to believe in something extraordinary that defies all logical explanation.

Finally, all this reminds me how I discovered a couple of troubling things in the course of my geneaological research over many, many years. Given my own attraction to stories of the supernatural, witches, vampires, and the like, since childhood, it has been disconcerting to come across documentary evidence of ancestors who were more on the Trask side than that of the witches (though I can counter that with a great-grandfather's water divining ("water witching") and great-grandmother's interpreting signs in nature as supernatural (a black bird's landing on the gable of a house and her comment "someone in that house will die soon," as reported to me by a late aunt of mine). But the other discoveries include a soldier ancestor in the early 1600s duchy of Lorraine (which later became part of France) who testified against a woman accused of witchcraft whom he had discovered doing some strange practice in the woods), and a more recent discovery in a line of clergy ancestors (which I was unaware of previously) extending from Finland into Sweden, and in the church biography from the 1600s of this renowned Swedish clergyman it is mentioned how as ecclesiastic judge (the church was the state) he brought a notorious witch to trial (her recitation of a spell at the trial is in the record) and had her thrown in prison. The outcome of the case isn't given.

I came across an audio interview with Lara Parker last week where she mentions having a rather "Dickensian" childhood, something I had never heard before. She doesn't use the tern "Dickensian" herself, but I think it fits when she tells of having spent several years in a boarding school because her mother didn't have time to raise her. I noted a catch in her voice for just a moment; in fact, she sounded extremely tired and unguarded throughout the interview. She talked about a large, oversized woman who would always seize a child to use as a living cane or walker and dig her claw-like fingers into the child's shoulder and lean on the child to walk (Lara was one of her victims). Lara said she wrote about her boarding school experiences under the guise of her character Victoria Winters in her last DS novel, "Heiress of Collinwood." She said everything she wrote about really happened to her.

I am considering ordering this novel if only to read that section. You can read a preview of the opening of the novel on amazon, and her writing is very good, though I didn't care for many of the ideas she came up with for "Angelique's Descent," so I never read any of her subsequent novels (though I think I bought the second one).

As someone mentioned on this forum during one of DS's runs on the Scifi channel, it must have been around 1998, Reverend Trask's Worthington Hall in the 1897 storyline is modeled after the boys' school Dotheboys Hall in Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby."

If anyone reading this has read Lara's book, I would be interested to hear your comments about this aspect of it.

The interview with Lara was nearly an hour but I found was well worth listening to. She mentions (in a bemused way) Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall as being theater snobs. Her comments on Joan Bennett show she had both respect and sympathy for Miss Bennett with respect to the latter's somewhat chagrined attitude about working on a daily soap opera.

I'm guessing that the two "most famous" Poe stories you have read are probably "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" . . .  Those are the first two I remember reading. I remember reading Poe's first tale of detection ("ratiocination" is the term he uses), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in my junior high school library. There's also "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter." Some would include "The Gold-Bug" and others include "Thou Art the Man" among Poe's detective works.

It's harder to find complete information about Mark Twain's forays into detective fiction. There are a couple with a faux-medieval setting, but the best of Twain's that I've read is the rather dark "A Thumb-Print and What Came of It," which is the first work of fiction in which a fingerprint is used in solving a crime.

Here are two links you may find helpful:

http://www.telelib.com/authors/T/TwainMark/prose/lifeonmississippi/lifeonmississippi31.html

"A Thumb-Print and What Came of It" (Mark Twain)

https://www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0305.htm

"Thou Art the Man" (Edgar Allan Poe) (The murder of Barnabas Shuttleworthy)

Interesting . . . depending on state regulations, almost anyone can call themselves a "psychotherapist," so I was a bit skeptical - until I saw that she does have a Ph.D. It sounds like her acting career has primarily been in the theater.

I do vaguely remember the few scenes with Oberon and Haza but haven't seen that segment of DS in maybe 25 years (unbelievable!). Perhaps I should revisit instead of always going back to my favorite, 1840. I remember the "previous time period" storylines in greater detail, but my childhood viewing seemed to be pretty much the contemporary storylines.