by Jo Ann Curl
I was all of maybe twelve when a commercial appeared on the television set which caught my attention immediately. It touted a new daytime television show coming to the American Broadcasting Company, and it had this odd and scary sounding music with a very pretty lady with long dark hair, no bangs and wide innocent eyes. Wow, they had a show that was just like me: odd, spooky and a pretty girl that I could be too. So, the best part was it would be on at 2:30 in the afternoon, after school was out for summer. So I began to count off the days to when it would air.
When the day finally arrived on June 28, 1966, I ran to the living room, sat down in front of the black and white console television, waited and watched, enthralled. There it was: the spooky music, the ocean waves crashing over huge rocks by the sea and the scripted words Dark Shadows. The deep base-toned voice announcing the show made it appear more gothic and scary than I could imagine at the time.
I watched the lovely young governess on the train coming to this small sea-faring town on the wild coast of Maine, which, by the way, I did not even realize existed—Maine that is. Well, I knew but was not interested in the state it was way on the east coast and at that time the songs all bragged about the west coast and west coast girls. So, being young and impressionable, I wanted to be a west coast girl. (I eventually moved to the west coast.)
​
Every day I would sit entranced by the show and its gothic, romantic feel with intrigue and a hint of something about to jump out and grab you. When the thirty minutes were over, I would sit and sigh, softly wishing it had gone on a little longer. Then one day something changed, something that made me scream out and alarm my mother, who had been in the kitchen doing laundry. She ran to the living room to see what had made me scream. I was so excited, my eyes lit up and I gushed out, “The ghost of Josette came out of her picture and she danced across the screen!” My mother was about to ground me for a month but something else caught her irritation; it usually was one of my brothers.
After that day, when Josette walked down from her picture and she twirled across the screen, I was hooked. I sat entranced, hoping this would be the day we would see Josette appear. Alas those days were soon numbered and the next big rumor that hit the airwaves was a vampire was coming to Collinwood and I was in love. Sadly, school restarted and I did not get to see Willie unleash Barnabas nor did I get to see him pursue the lovely Maggie Evans, but I did manage to get sick and got to watch him suddenly switch gears after Maggie tried to kill him and transfer his attention to Victoria.
Oh my goodness, was that a thrill for me. I identified with Vickie Winters, I wanted to be Vickie Winters, I emulated her with my hair style and my clothing, I even wanted a coat like hers but at the time my father worked at Whirlpool, which was threatening to go on strike, and money became tight. So, I had to make do with my imagination, and that is when I began to write my own Dark Shadows stories with the handsomely corrupt Barnabas chasing after the pure Victoria to be his Josette. I can safely say that I have
been writing fan fiction for Dark Shadows for over forty-seven years but never had the courage to publish it until the advent of the computer and then the Internet.
To this day, I am still writing my fan fiction and I even started a group page called My Dark Shadows on Facebook. There I write the ongoing life of those that live in Collinsport and, yes, I did the unthinkable: I turned Collinwood, the Old House and Rose Cottage into a vacation spot for a bed and breakfast. Every time someone joins the group, I give them a job and make them a resident in the ongoing stories of vampires, demons, werewolves, zombies and dark evil icky things that want to devour the residents of Collinsport.
So, this is my story of how I became a fan and fanatic for Dark Shadows. I enjoy it so much that currently I am writing three new stories for Fanfiction.com for the continuation of the story of Collinwood and Collinsport with all our favorite characters.