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.

Does anyone have any favorite ghost stories they like to read during the Holidays?

Though reading ghost stories at Christmas is an English and not an American tradition, it's one that DS friends can appreciate!

For some reason, I just recalled today an excellent short story, published in book form in the 1970s, that I still have in my bedroom bookcase. It's a suspenseful and ultimately inspiring tale that reads like a "true life" ghost story by suspense thriller author Frederick Forsythe, called "The Shepherd." It's about a Royal Air Force (British, of course) pilot flying home solo in his small plane from Germany to England on Christmas Eve who becomes lost in bad weather, set in the late 1950s, I believe. Copies are not easy to find and tend to be expensive, so I'm glad I still have my original hardcover.

Alternatively, are there any original DS episodes that anyone thinks are especially enjoyable at Christmas? Too bad they never did much of anything with a Christmas theme on the show, though.

I've had a little rare free time recently that has allowed me to catch up with viewing some of my DVD collection. Two movies I watched in the last week offered reminders of DS - and both movies are from 1967, perhaps not surprisingly . . .

The first of these is a movie I never forgot from childhood, and which instilled a childhood fascination with the guillotine (rather a leap from my earlier childhood obsession with hourglasses, a la "The Wizard of Oz"): "Two on a Guillotine." At a climactic revealing moment, a Julia Hoffman-type character (unrequited love and devotion to a mysterious stage magician) blurts out to the deluded magician (and his stunned daughter, played by Connie Stevens), that his wife, who everyone believed had left her husband and young daughter, was in fact dead (I won't say how) and the Julia-type character says "I buried her in the woods behind the house." Now the house in question is an old mansion, and a simple insertion of the word "old" would probably have made this line identical to more than one circumstance occurring on DS.

The second reminder of DS came only last night when I viewed another movie on DVD, a French film with English subtitles, the final film of a famed director (so I have read online) Julien Duvivier called "Diaboliquement vôtre" ("Diaboliquely Yours," the English title). The thriller, starring the handsome/lovely and talented Alain Delon and Senta Berger, is set at a French chateau, where the husband seeks to regain his memory following a car crash but finds that things don't add up, and he begins to doubt he really is who his wife and friend tell him he is ... No, it's not the plot per se that reminded me of DS (although as I think of it now, one can't discount some surface similarity to the storyline where Barnabas holds Maggie Evans prisoner in the Old House trying to convince her she is Josette Collins.

No, it's not the plot that reminded me, but the setting - specifically the chateau, that I mentioned. You will have to view the attached photo to see. The chateau in question where the movie was filmed is Château de Théméricourt in the beautiful Val-d'Oise department just northwest of Paris.

Anyway, I can recommend both movies as entertaining and suspenseful "flicks".

Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley movie tonight is "Hollow Triumph" starring Joan Bennett and Paul Henreid from 1948. The screening is at 11:30 CST, but check your local listings. TCM's dailly schedule lists this time, but there is a discrepancy in that the Noir Alley section of TCM's web page instead lists something called "The Glass Wall" and says something about Noir Alley "Every Saturday at Midnight." However, I happened to watch last week's film (not sure what time it started), and the host announced the Joan Bennett movie (naming her) as this weekend's choice. His commentary is always quite extensive both before and after the film, so it will be interesting to hear what he has to say. I've never seen this movie!

I've been thinking recently about that crew of cutthroat pirates who manned "The Java Queen" under Gerard Stiles (or whatever his name might have been, I think he had bee called "Ivan Miller" or somesuch at one point). I think the ship is first mentioned in the Summer of 1970 and when David waves the green flag from the tower room window of Collinsport, it's a signal for the pirate crew to rise out of their graves and begin marauding Collinsport at the end of 1995 as a prelude to 1840 (if I have my storylines straight)!

What I'm wondering is how the DS writers came up with this idea. I've never heard of any source story where that this might have been taken from.

This has gotten me to thinking further about Gothic fiction, which I'm surveying in my spare time. I can't find any examples of the dead rising from their graves in any old Gothic novels I've read about --the Gothic genre begins with "The Castle of Otranto," and then there's "Melmouth the Wanderer," "Vathek," the Ann Radcliffe novels, and so one. But unbelievably, I can't find any examples of the dead literally rising from their grave. Now, there are ghosts, there are vampires, and there are zombies. I suppose the DS pirate crew were closest to being zombies, but I'm not sure if they were exactly that.

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts about sources / origins / early gothic fiction that presents such a scenario? "Frankenstein" is quite different, since the creature is a creation, not a resurrected person. Stories of necromancy go back to the Old Testament, but that seems possibly another sort of thing since a sorcerer of some type is involved. And vampires have been transformed into a different undead creature of the night. Maybe something called "revenants"? Or maybe Gerard Stiles in this case could be deemed a "necromancer"?

I was very pleased to have received the Dark Shadows/MPI Snow Globe for Christmas (though I placed the order myself, so it didn't come as a surprise). I will say that at least it's glass - well, acrylic, probably - but not plastic. So it's heavy and the quality seems quite good. I've seen some snow globes recently where the globe was a soft plastic that actually gives if you pick it up by the globe. I like the Collinwood replica although it is very tiny - I should look at it more closely with a magnifying glass. I have not spotted for sure what architectural departure the model has from the real house. It's fun to see Collinwood under snowfall when you shake the globe. I have mixed feelings about the greenish tinge to the snow, though. And the music plays really, really loud. As someone commented elsewhere, I too would have preferred a mechanism music box, but it seems that digital chips are the way many are made now, at least the inexpensive ones. It was the music that brought back memories, though. When I heard "Quentin's Theme," many memories of the show came flooding back.

I've also given thought to Magda, Sandor, and the werewolf curse over the past six months, as I have worked almost obsessively nearly every moment I could on trying to find the gypsy ancestor that my DNA results revealed for the first time. Since then, I have found additional SNPs from India (the origin of the Roma people) in my DNA as well as two rare European SNPs associated with the European Roma. Surprisingly these latter two appear in Sweden and Finland, my mother's heritage, and not my father's French line, as I had expected. Since my mother had agreed some time back to having her DNA tested, I have been able to find conclusively that the Roma/Romany heritage is in her ancestry. One of my testing companies allows me to filter all my DNA matches by specific regions or nationalities (for example, Ashakenzai Jewish, Sephardic Jewish, North African, Southwestern Asia (Iran/Iraq), India, etc.). With this company I have 11 matches with Roma people, all of them in Finland (and all with 25% or greater ancestry from India). That proved conclusively that this was on my mother's side. Interestingly, she has matches with 32 Roma in Finland (called Kaale or Romany there). So a lot of DNA has been lost just between her generation and me. We also have some much weaker links with Romanichal in the U.K. What has taken the most effort, though, is the historical genealogical research since I found only one possible clue in church records around 1800 that I'm still not sure about - and it would mean Romany ancestry in a different line of my mother's family. Where the paper trail intersects with DNA matches goes back to two gypsy families living just north of the Arctic Circle in Lapland in the 1600s. It's little known that gypsies were that far north at that time (one online poster in Finland confidently - but mistakenly - stated that the gypsies didn't get that far north until the railroads went in in the 1800s). But Thesleff, one of the great researchers in the matter, shows in his maps and diagrams that the gypsies were in that area as early as the late 1500s as they made their way from Sweden to Finland over the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia. Others came from the South and Russia, and the family name of one of my two families translates as "Russian." According to one researcher, they had lived originally in Armenia. So all of this is very far back and distant, 400 years ago. And knowledge of their existence in my family tree would never have been known were it not for DNA testing. Though interestingly, my grandmother had written a poem about Roma travelers she had seen growing up and a couple of other stories about them had been passed down in the family.

I'm posting this because if any of my friends might appreciate this, it would be Dark Shadows friends. I've met with only the mildest (to zero) interest from family members with the exception of my mother, who isn't actually affected by it. The subject of gypsies has come up many times on this forum, but I never dreamed I would have a personal connection to the Roma people. It's in the much distant past and I wouldn't want to overstate the case, either.

My genealogy pursuits in recent years have been supplemented by genetic genealogy, i.e. DNA testing. I'm no expert but I have given presentations and co-presented to genealogy groups on some basic aspects. Some results from testing have remained puzzling and it's easy to brush them off. One of these were filtered tests of my data that showed Spanish ancestry. Confident that I have no Spanish ancestry, I didn't pursue these curious findings for several years and only took another look at these results recently. They showed Basque, Andalucia, La Mancha, and a handful of other regions of Spain near the Bay of Biscay and along the French border. In my searches for what Haplogroups and subclades (more precise subcategories) these might include, I came upon an article from 2007 from a journal of genetic research that outlined 12 subclades that define the genetic profile of the Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) Roma.

Almost in a spirit of following a lark, I began searching my data for each of these clades/SNPs (there is only one testing company that provides this analysis). Each one I checked for, it turned out I had – but the clincher was a specific subclade originating in northern India. For someone with Nordic and French heritage, that is hard to fathom. The administrator of this Haplogroup writes that in European ancestry, this subclade is found only in those with Roma heritage. So, yes, I have a gypsy ancestor somwhere, and more specifically one from Spain.

I've learned a lot about the Roma in the past several weeks, but have also found how much of their history remains a mystery – including in France. The DNA results indicate an ancestor within the last 450 years. Sounds like a long time, but my most likely ancestor was one from Auvergne in south central France who later migrated to the northeastern France of my great-grandfather. My seventh-great grandfather, he lived in the late 1600s and early 1700s. In the late 1580s, Spain decided to rid the country of the gypsies, and many likely fled into France. Within a couple of miles from my ancestor's home in the Clermont-Theirs region was a an area that seems to have been a refuge for the Roma. It is still found on some maps, and called "Bohemia," but in the Occitan form of the local language. A canon of the church living at the time of my ancestor and in the same city was also a poet who wrote sympathetically of the "Baumians," and I believe that this was an area where gypsies were safe for a few generations.

What has this to do with me today? Well, I still have a trace of his DNA. We don't have DNA from every ancestor – by 400-500 years we have too many ancestors to still carry DNA from each one. So I have inherited something from a Roma forebear - DNA, yes, but also a sliver of a heritage I never would have expected I had.

I was watching the Travel Channel's "Mysteries at the Museum" last night (one of my favorites). There was a segment on Max Factor's development of "Pan-cake" makeup, a big advance over the makeup used in black and white movies. Although there must have been some color movies prior to this, the movie "Vogues of 1938" (released in 1937) was the first movie where the actresses used the new "pancake" - and the makeup became a sensation with women everywhere, apparently a big improvement over previous makeup. A poster for the film was shown, and I noticed Joan Bennett on the poster.