I have the Ben Cooper 1968 Barnabas Collins Halloween costume, complete and in the original box, size medium (8-10). I won it on ebay. It was expensive, and a fight to the finish to get it, an exciting auction! In the Dark Shadows Collectibles Book by Craig Hamrick, it says the whole suit is extremely rare today and only one copy is known to be in the hands of a collector. I didn't think I would ever find one! I have a huge Dark Shadows collection with other rare items.
Congrats on your newest DS collectable Cheryl!! The Barnabas costume is indeed one of the more rare pieces of memorabilia associated with the show. I was lucky enough to acquire one in 1995 after a local paper ran a two page feature on my DS collection. A day or two after the article had run in the paper I received a message on my answering machine from a woman in a nearby town who mentioned she had seen the article and asked me if I knew of anyone who might be interested in buying a Barnabas Collins Halloween costume.
I had mentoned in the article how rare the costume was, so I initally thought one of my friends had read the article and was playing a joke on me. I called the number she had left on my machine and got her husband, who said she would be home from work in an hour. She called me later that day and described the costume. We arranged to meet at her place the next day. When I arrived at her home she immdiately went over to a closet and pulled a box down from the top shelf.I nearly fainted when I saw the words 'Barnabas Collins' on the side of the box.
NOTE:The box my costume came in was one of the old Ben Cooper spooky town boxes with the cobwebs and spiders on the box.At that point I knew I wasn't leaving that house without the costume, regardless of what she wanted for it.
NOTE:In the newspaper article I had mentioned how valuable the costume was, so I knew she would want a premium price.When I asked her how much she wanted for the costume, at first she was hesitant, saying she was having second thoughts about selling it. I thought to myself, "please don't change your mind".
NOTE:About a year earlier, a friend of mine who had the only Barnabas costume that I had known to exist at that time, had sent me a photo of his costume. From that photo I burned a screen of the design and made adult size t-shirts of it. I had one of those costume design t-shirts with me, and told the woman I would include it in with whatever price she wanted for the costume. This way she would still have something with the design on it. Well, she agreed and told me what she wanted, and I was surprised that it was far less then I had expected to pay.
When I got home I couldn't wait to contact my closest DS friends and tell them about my wonderful discovery. It wasn't long till my good luck had spread to some of the more serious collectors of DS memorabilia, and I started receiving queries as to whether or not I would be interested in selling it.
This was pre-internet days for myself and many other fans, so I decided to hold a phone auction, where whomever wanted to bid on the costume could call between a certain time frame and the highest offer would get the costume.
NOTE: Cheryl, what I eventually got for my costume makes what you paid for yours seem like a blue light special at K-Mart, as mine sold for around 6 times what you paid for yours.
Before parting with it, I took it to a Halloween shop in my area and had a mold made of the plastic mask. From that mold I had replica masks made of rubber, which is much more durable then the old plastic masks. I then had those rubber masks hand painted to look exactly like the original. I also updated my t-shirt design by screening the actual costume and capturing every detail of the design, something I wasn't able to do from the earlier photograph. From there I had an adult version of the costume made, and with mask, wore it to the 1996 Collins Associations Halloween party at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion in Norwalk,Conn.
The original Ben Cooper costume design 'glows in the dark' so I decided to have the design on my shirts and costume glow as well.I purchased a pint of white screening glow paint(for $100.00 at the time OUCH) to complete that process.
Below is a photo of myself with the original costume & mask, as well as photos of myself with Sharon Smyth and Charles Randolph Grean at the 1996 Halloween party.
For those not familiar with Mr. Grean, he recorded: Quentin's Theme, #1 at the Blue Whale, Josette's Music Box, and Back at the Blue Whale on 45 RPM records, amongst many other t.v. related themes in his illustrious career.
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