was born. Writer Art Wallace developed Curtis’s vague idea into a 91-page series bible entitled
Shadows On The Wall. This bible became a gothic soap opera, wherein slightly oddball orphan Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke) came to work in the town of Collinsport, for the charming yet unsettling Collins family, at the big old house of Collinwood, high atop Widows Hill. This was
Dark Shadows.
Hollywood star Joan Bennett got top billing as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the loving but somewhat distant matriarch of the family. Her rather caddish brother Roger was played by Louis Edmonds, her daughter Carolyn by Nancy Barrett. Roger’s troubled son David, for whom Vicky was hired as a governess, was David Henesy. Rounding out the main cast were Kathryn Leigh Scott as waitress Maggie Evans and Mitchell Ryan as Burke Devlin, a local man with a vendetta against the Collins family. The show premiered in June 1966.