Dark Shadows 50th Anniversary Fest (Tarrytown!) (Lyndhurst!) (Angelique!) (David Selby!)

I hadn't attended a Fest since 2004 which was, as it turns out, at Tarrytown, just like this year's.  I was excited to spend time at Lyndhurst; I love both House and Night of Dark Shadows, mostly because that house is so damned beautiful ... and haunting.  My husband attended as well, because he is patient and wonderful (and he can actually say things like, "Hey, that's the Hand of Count Petofi!" and "Is that [insert crazy expensive thing I want to buy in the dealers' room] really worth that much?") and agreed to pose with me in pictures with Lyndhurst in the background.  We had a great time, and I wasn't even Dark Shadows-ed out (Ryan  might have been, just a little).

These are some of the photos I took, enjoying docents with plenty of information about the history of Lyndhurst, pissing off one very specific woman with my comments about the paintings in the gallery and their lack of internal consistency, and fleeing the very cranky docent who continued to hiss, "Don't touch the walls; don't touch the walls!" long after we were gone.

(Plus I got to tell David Selby the story of the time when, as a first year PhD student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I fielded a phone call from Mr. Selby declining to attend the SIUC theatre department's 40th anniversary gala, and, later, how I discovered his dissertation in the dissertation room; he got a huge kick out of the story, as you'll see, and was subsequently very nice to my mother.)

 

My husband and I in a scene from the forthcoming movie, Dudes of Dark Shadows.

Those fans keep away ghosts. Probably. But not possession though.

And because I am a giant nerd, this spooky statue of the creepy little girls reminded me, yes, of the creepy Grady girls from The Shining, but the first thing I thought of was the vampire twins from an ancient computer game I used to play as a child, called The Last Half of Darkness.  Observe:

 Right down to the bows.

"I want to commission a dog head statue, but it has to be eating a duck. Or some other bird. Yes, the bird -- or the duck, whatever -- should be dead. No, it shouldn't be fighting back. I'm going to put it in the foyer, by the way, so it's the first thing my guests see. Yes, I want to put it there deliberately; am I paying you to sculpt or to decorate?"

 

Come see how the vampires ... DO IT ...

 The beautiful blue tile. Mrs. Johnson broke one in HODS because she couldn't keep her shiz together; come on, she works at Collinwood, after all; you KNOW that isn't the first dead body she's stumbled over.

 

Close enough.

 

 

That ceiling though.

Angelique Collins. Hanged as a witch in 1810 (about fifty years before the house was actually built; neat trick, that).

 

The ruins of the old Spratt Mansion, used ...

...as the exteriors for the series' Old House.

 

Angelique Bouchard Collins Blair Collins DuVal DuBois Rumson Collins Collins.
 

 

Yours truly and the painting for which I obviously modeled.

And meeting the gallant David Selby, a true sweetheart and fellow Saluki.