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.
