I like Magnus's idea that the box was lost in 1897 and ended up at Collinwood in the 1960s without anybody knowing its history, but it doesn't account for what the box was doing in the Old House in 1795. Searching through my Watching Project posts, I found that it was episode 396 in which I noticed the box there:
And now Angelique has lost control of the entity, with nothing to say why. I keep wondering if it has something to do with the Hand of Count Petofi, the box for which was on a shelf in the bedroom today, I noticed.
The story on Count Petofi, if I remember correctly, was that the gypsies cut the hand off him 100 years before the 1897 action, which would make it 1797, i.e.
after the box was seen at the Old House. But my impression was that Petofi had never been to Collinsport before 1897, and that the hand was cut off in the Forest of Ozhden (or however it was spelled). And Magda went on about how special the box was. Sometimes I would just about kill for a chance to have been a fly on the wall at the Dark Shadows studio and to hear what the actors said at the time about the lines they were given.
Taeylor, my understanding is that the inanimate objects that get referred to as “she” are moving vehicles that can be driven or piloted around – cars, boats, planes. That makes it not a Southern thing but a Sexist thing. I remember when I bought my first car and named it Willie, after Willie Loomis. The guy from whom I bought it expressed surprise that I had not given it a feminine name. I told him no, the car was masculine, so I could dominate it.
