I Almost Said No to the Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary Reunion
Two weeks before I turned 65, something shifted in me. I couldn’t have told you exactly what it was if you’d asked me that day. It wasn’t a single moment, more like a slow turning, the kind that sneaks up on you while you’re doing something completely unrelated, like folding laundry or waiting for coffee to brew. But somewhere in there, I started noticing a pattern I hadn’t paid much attention to before. How often I said no to things. How quickly I talked myself out of ideas before anyone else even heard them. How easily “that’s not really practical” shut a door before I’d even looked through it.
So I made a quiet decision. Not a resolution, not something I announced to anyone. Just a small private agreement with myself. I wanted to start saying yes more. I wanted to get back in the water, literally and otherwise, and remember what it felt like to be excited about my own life again. After years of caregiving, and my own health struggles and just aging in general, I was ready to rebuild a more active life.
Since last summer, I’ve said yes to so many fun adventures. The latest adventure is what I’m about to share here.
The Gift That Started It
If you know my husband at all, you know he takes birthday gifts seriously. He’s not a last minute, gift-card kind of guy. He plans. He thinks about what will genuinely surprise me, what I’d never think to ask for myself, and then he quietly works on it for weeks without giving anything away. So when my 66th birthday was coming up, I knew something was brewing. I just had no idea what.
What he came up with this year was a Cameo, a personalized video message, from Kathryn Leigh Scott.
If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, let me back up. Kathryn Leigh Scott played Maggie Evans and Josette on the original Dark Shadows, a gothic soap opera that first aired on ABC back in 1966. I watched this show as a little girl, hiding partly behind a couch cushion because it genuinely frightened me, completely captivated anyway. Kathryn Leigh Scott was one of the faces I grew up watching. And now, six decades later, my husband had found a way to put her directly in front of me, wishing me happy birthday by name.
I sat there watching that video with my mouth actually open. It felt surreal in the best way, a little out of the blue, like something from an entirely different corner of my life reaching into this one.
But she didn’t stop at a birthday message. In that same short video, she started telling stories, little behind the scenes details from the show, the kind of thing you only get from someone who actually lived it. She mentioned that her ringtone, to this day, is Josette’s theme song, and that people are always a little startled to hear it go off. She told me about Jonathan Frid, who played the vampire Barnabas Collins, and how he actually needed a small step stool to get in and out of the coffin prop between takes, since it wasn’t nearly as effortless as it looked on screen. She told me about lying in that same coffin herself for a scene, and how much it rattled her, how she had to go sit down afterward just to steady herself. And she told me about David Selby short-sheeting her bed right before a live scene where her character was waiting to be bitten, knees pulled up toward her shoulders, no way to fix it once the cameras started rolling, because this show was shot live and there were no do-overs.
I sat there soaking all of that in, laughing, completely charmed. And then, almost as an aside, she mentioned one more thing. She was going to be at a Dark Shadows event the following month. The Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary Reunion, in Los Angeles.
I watched that cameo again. And then a third time. And somewhere around that third viewing, a thought slipped in that I couldn’t quite shake. What if I went.
Talking Myself Into It
If you’ve ever had an exciting idea and then spent the next twenty minutes systematically arguing yourself out of it, you already know exactly what happened in my head next.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, I told myself. What is a 66 year old woman going to be doing flying cross country by herself for a television show reunion. That’s not a reasonable use of money. That’s not a reasonable use of time. Somebody your age doesn’t just decide to fly across the country alone on a whim.
I know that voice so well. I think most of us do. It shows up right on cue whenever something exciting and a little outside our comfort zone appears, fully prepared with a list of perfectly sensible reasons why not.
But underneath that voice, something else was also happening. I kept turning the idea over anyway. What if my husband could get a few days off work and come with me. What if I called my sister, who’s usually my partner in crime for exactly this kind of adventure, and we made it a girls’ trip.
I talked to my husband first, mostly just thinking out loud the way you do when you’re testing whether an idea can survive being said out loud to someone else. He told me he couldn’t get the time off, but that I should absolutely go anyway, by myself. Then I called my sister. She was already committed to a family trip of her own and couldn’t come either.
For one moment right there, I almost let that decide it for me. Nobody could go with me, so maybe this just wasn’t going to happen this time. That would have been the easy, quiet way out.
But then I sat with the disappointment for a second, and something else pushed back against it. I actually love doing things by myself. This isn’t new for me. I moved to Hawaii alone before I was ever married. I’ve moved all over Florida alone. I go out to eat by myself without a second thought. I went to Aquatica solo not that long ago. Independence has never been the problem.
What I finally admitted to myself was that the strange part wasn’t the solo travel itself. It was that I’ve spent the last 26 years as half of a couple, and somewhere in those years, going and doing a big thing entirely on my own had quietly started to feel unfamiliar again, even though nothing about my actual capability had changed one bit.
Once I named that feeling, the rest came together fast. I looked up the cost, flight, hotel, and the cast luncheon as an add on ticket. It landed around $1,200. That’s real money, not something to brush off. But here’s the thing, I’d been saving since the summer before, specifically for adventures like this one, without knowing yet what the adventure would even turn out to be. My husband encouraged me to go, no hesitation. And that same night, cameo still fresh in my mind, I sat down and booked the whole trip. Flight, hotel, luncheon ticket, all of it.
Then I went to bed. And I remember waking up the next morning thinking, oh my goodness, what did I actually just do.
Meeting the Cast
I had a month to plot and plan this trip and I knew I wanted to do a few other things while in LA besides the conference. Half the fun is planning and anticipating the trip. I bought a few items I needed. Sister gave me a new suitcase that’s small and easy to travel with and no need to check luggage at the airport. I could keep it all with me in the plane. Perfect.
Once I checked into the hotel, the whole thing started to feel real. There were people everywhere who grew up loving this exact show, just like me, milling around the lobby, wearing lanyards and Dark Shadows shirts, easily thirty and forty years into their own love of this strange little gothic soap opera. It was such a specific kind of comfort, being surrounded by people who understood immediately why this mattered to me.
I got settled in and immediately went to the pool. It’s where I do my best thinking. I plotted and planned now that I knew the layout of the hotel, how I was going to find Josette. I had the evening free, and I was in California, I think I need to go to the beach and see the water. So I caught an Uber and headed to Manhattan Beach Pier.
Found a nice little dive bar and settled in for a quick bite before sunset. I always come back to the water. It’s just everything. Beautiful place to unwind after a long day of traveling.
Caught an Uber back to the hotel, and completely worn out from the trip, but excited to see what was in store at the conference tomorrow, I went to bed.
I actually caught my first glimpse of Kathryn Leigh Scott completely by accident, at breakfast the next morning. She walked right past my table, and I fumbled to get my phone up in time for a quick photo before she sat down a couple of booths away. I sat there afterward feeling like a complete fangirl, whispering to myself, oh my gosh, that’s her, that’s actually her, the woman from the cameo, the reason I’m even here.
Later that day, I had the chance to actually meet her and talk with her directly. I told her about the cameo, about my husband surprising me with it, about how special the whole thing had been. And I told her the thought that had been running through my head since I first watched that video. Josette, her character, was the long lost love of Barnabas the vampire. So in a way, I told her, it felt like Josette herself had invited me to this event. How could I not go, if Josette was the one asking. She laughed, and it turned into this warm little moment between us, her repeating the line back to her husband standing nearby, the two of us sharing this small joke together like old friends rather than a fan meeting a childhood idol. I got a photo with her, a real conversation, a few unhurried minutes that I’ll hold onto for a long time.
I also had the chance to meet Jerry Lacey, who played Reverend Trask. I told him how much I’d always enjoyed his work, and he thanked me so warmly for coming out to something like this. And then, in the most human way possible, I completely ran out of things to say. There was this long little pause where my mind just went blank, and it felt genuinely awkward. I thanked him and I walked away a bit embarrassed about it afterward. But honestly, looking back, I wouldn’t trade that awkward moment for a smoother one. It was real, unpolished, exactly the kind of thing that happens when you actually put yourself out there instead of staying safely in the audience. I was surprised with myself this whole weekend, I’m an introvert and am very content with watching and not really going that extra mile and actually speaking to somebody, especially somebody I consider famous. And here I was talking to celebrities like it’s what I do every day!
Beyond those two conversations, I was in the presence of so many more original cast members throughout the weekend. Jim Storm, who played Gerard the ghost who stood in the shadows and was very scary. Sharon Smyth, who played Sarah a ghost of the 10 year old sister to Barnabus. Donna Wandrey, who played Roxanne, a love interest of Barnabus and later a vampire herself. Terrayne Crawford, who played Beth, the faithful housekeeper who was in love with Quentin. Roger Davis, who played both Peter Bradford and Jeff Clark. Watching them sign autographs, laugh with fans, tell stories decades old like they happened last week, was its own kind of magic.
I also sat in on a few tribute panels honoring cast members who’ve since passed, hosted by people who knew and loved them best. Jonathan Frid’s manager shared stories about him. John Karlen’s son spoke about his father, who played the beloved Willie Loomis. Grayson Hall’s son spoke about his mother, who brought Dr. Julia Hoffman to life. Even without those three actors physically in the room, you could feel how present they still were, through the people who carried their memory there for all of us.
I also met random people while waiting in lines who knew the actors and shared their own personal stories of meeting them and how sweet and warm they were in real life. It was a theme to hear that these actors felt like friends to their fans.
There was a costume contest that night too, full of fans dressed as their favorite characters, wigs and capes and Collinwood-worthy gowns, everyone clearly having the time of their lives.
The Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary: They’re Calling It the Last One
These festivals have been meeting together since at least 1983. Nearly every article covering this Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary reunion used some version of the same phrase. The final Dark Shadows Festival. The last official cast Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary reunion. A nostalgic send off, sixty years in the making, closing the book for good.
I want to be honest about something, though. Being there in that room, surrounded by these actors and this crowd of devoted fans, I didn’t feel a sense of finality. The cast themselves weren’t talking about it that way either, at least not from what I heard directly. Nobody stood up and declared this a true goodbye. If anything, it felt like a joyful sixty year celebration, not a closing door. So while the press releases may be calling this the last one, I’m not convinced that’s the whole story. Time will tell. But sitting in that room, it didn’t feel like an ending.
Where to Watch (and What I Started Watching After I Got Home)
If any of this has you even a little curious about the show itself, the good news is it’s easy to find. The full original series streams on both Tubi and Amazon Prime Video right now.
Here’s something worth knowing if you go looking, though. Prime’s main listing tends to pick up a bit later in the story, closer to when Barnabas Collins actually arrives in Collinwood. If you want to start truly from the beginning, before any of that, Tubi carries those very first episodes as their own separate listing. I didn’t fully understand that distinction until after this trip.
Growing up, I only ever caught the show during its earliest run, somewhere around 1966 to 1968 were the years I was able to watch. It genuinely scared me back then, the way only a vampire show on a small black and white television can scare a kid. Back then, there were no re-runs. If you missed an episode, tough luck. So now-a-days having the old series streaming is amazing! It wasn’t until the last five years or so that I decided I wanted to go back and watch the entire series from start to finish, all the way through, as an adult this time.
It has been such a completely different experience watching it now. What used to frighten me now makes me laugh out loud. The acting is wonderfully over the top in the best possible way. And because this was shot live, you can actually watch it happen in real time when an actor forgets a line, that little flicker of panic crossing their face, eyes darting toward the teleprompter just off camera, before they gather themselves and push forward. There’s something so endearing about watching that now, knowing these actors were doing something genuinely difficult, live, with no safety net, and somehow pulling it off scene after scene, day after day.
It is a big commitment. We’re talking well over a thousand episodes here. But it has been so worth every single one.
I found real help along the way from an old fan blog, Dark Shadows Everyday, which I want to point you toward if you ever decide to take this on yourself. Whoever built that site put together a post for almost every single episode, complete with a recap, photos from that day’s show, and a blooper list of things to watch for. I’d watch an episode and then read that day’s post right afterward, and it made the whole experience so much richer. I caught things I would have otherwise completely missed.
My usual pace was somewhere between one and five episodes a session, though some weekends turned into a full day binge, working my way through as many as I could manage. I made it all the way through the entire series once, and a few months after finishing, I actually found myself missing it enough to start over again from the very beginning. That’s exactly where I was in my rewatch when that birthday cameo showed up out of nowhere.
And now, since coming home from the Dark Shadows 60th Anniversary reunion, I’ve gone back even further, into that very first season on Tubi, watching the earliest black and white episodes before Barnabas even enters the story. It’s a whole different show in those early days, and I’m genuinely enjoying discovering that version of it too.
So, What’s On Your List?
I’m so glad I said yes to this. I’m glad I didn’t let the cost, or the idea of going alone, or that small stubborn voice telling me it was a silly thing to spend money and time on, stop me from getting on that plane.
So I’ll ask you exactly what I asked at the end of the video. What’s on your list? What’s the thing you’ve thought about doing, maybe more than once, and then quietly talked yourself out of before you ever said it out loud to another person?
If you decide to go do it, I would genuinely love to hear how it went. I might just add your adventure to my own list.
Come float with me.
Want to read how I got started with this crazy idea to start a blog and a YouTube channel? or How moved to Hawaii and was Afraid of the Ocean.