Everyday Canvas

About Dark Shadows

Prompt by Megan: Victoria Winters just arrived in Collinsport, Maine. "How does one get to town? she asked. "Broomsticks and unicorns. Welcome Miss Winters to the beginning and end of the world." Burke Devlin Dark Shadows {If you ever watched Dark Shadows, you get this!}
With this in mind, write about the past or somewhere where this may be the case. You can do a fantasy story, poem or whatever you want. Have fun!


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Dark Shadows was a spooky, eerie soap with awkward pauses, bloopers, and made-up, on the spot lines, due to the archaic TV technology of the late sixties. For all that, it felt like live theater from its beginning to the time I stopped watching it.

As for the prompt, I have to ask Burke Devlin, "Is beginning the end or is the end a beginning?" You can only get this, the answer I mean, if you are a nanny who grew up in a foundling home and ended up in a small fishing town in Maine. Poor Maine...One of my favorite states and you have to get there on broomsticks or unicorns!

My pick would be broomsticks since I am quite experienced with those. And the Collins Port Inn coffee shop? If you go there, make sure you skip any coffee drinking. Who knows who put what in that coffee! The beer, however, may be good at the Blue Whale, especially if you are a beer drinker, but be a dark-beer drinker because over there in that town of Collins Port, everything is dark, even more than dark. It is pitch black.

Still, the beginning few months only hinted at the darkness, in comparison to what came later with vampires and caskets and all. I remember feeling bad for Barnabas Collins at first. How could I know into what he would turn later! I also recall the secretive Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the mistress of Collinwood and her brother the cad Roger who once panicked and gripped his sherry glass so tight that it shattered, making me jump in my seat and wake up my baby son who had dozed off in my arms.

This was why. I was watching the soap while my colicky baby needed to be held during the day. Luckily, his colic didn’t last more than the first four months of the soap. I only remember a scene or two, but I liked the dark, gothic atmosphere of it in the beginning. Later on, when I could take a peek, the story had tumbled down into such an excessive supernatural plot that the whole thing felt comical, despite its excellent actors with Shakespearean accents. Sorry, those of you who still foster an enduring, steadfast love for it!

Come to think of it, this soap might have been the forerunner of today’s so-called thriller dramas on cable that bombard the viewers with scandalously creepy, nightmarish stuff. I suspect, nowadays, we viewers might have grown even luckier than we were at the time of the Dark Shadows.