Noir Notebook

Shadows on a Shoestring

The show was performed live, with no retakes. Everything aired exactly as it was filmed, forgotten lines and bloopers included, and each stumble had to be disguised in the moment.

The budget was famously meager, reported as only $200 a week. The celebrated portrait of Barnabas Collins that hung in the entryway of the Collins mansion was painted by Frid’s roommate for $75 and a case of beer. At some point, it was stolen from the studio, and a duplicate was made. The original has never been recovered.

Curtis was known to verbally abuse his actors before scenes, stirring them into raw and authentic reactions.

Location, Location, Location

The exteriors of the brooding 40-room Collinwood mansion were in reality the Seaview Terrace (also known as the Carey Mansion) in Newport, Rhode Island. 

The brooding facade that greeted viewers as Collinwood is no painted illusion. It belongs to a real mansion on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island, known as Seaview Terrace, and later as Carey Mansion. Some say it was never merely a set but a house with a restless life of its own.

Construction began in 1907 under the direction of Edson Bradley, a whiskey magnate who commissioned the architect Howard Greenley to design a palatial summer retreat. Bradley spared no expense. He imported entire rooms from European châteaux, determined to conjure an authentic French atmosphere upon the Rhode Island shore. The project would not be finished until 1925, built from the salvaged bones of demolished French and Italian estates. Even in its first stones, the mansion was a patchwork of other places and other ghosts.

When Bradley died in 1935, he left the house to his widow, Julia. The Bradley years were marked by opulence and personal tragedy, and multiple deaths were said to have occurred within the mansion’s walls. Even then, servants whispered of strange occurrences, though their accounts were dismissed as superstition.

In 1949, the Carey family purchased the estate and renamed it Carey Mansion. George Carey, a utilities executive, made it his primary residence, but peace did not follow him through the doors. His family experienced unexplained phenomena almost immediately, including cold spots in the bedrooms that persisted despite the mansion’s modern heating system.

Salve Regina University acquired Seaview Terrace in the 1970s and converted it into student housing called Founders Hall. Generations of students have since slept within its allegedly haunted walls, and the university is said to keep detailed records of the unexplained incidents they report.

Shadow figures are the most commonly reported phenomenon. Witnesses describe human-shaped darkness gliding through hallways and rooms with a will of its own, most often in the Grand Hall and along the third-floor corridor. The shadows sometimes pause, as if observing the living, before continuing their mysterious journeys.

Disembodied footsteps echo through the mansion at all hours. Students speak of heavy boots climbing the main staircase when no one is there. The steps often halt outside bedroom doors, followed by a complete and terrible silence, and door handles sometimes turn although no one has entered.

Objects move without explanation. Books are said to fly from the shelves of what are now study areas. Furniture repositions itself overnight in locked rooms, and personal belongings vanish, only to reappear days later in impossible places.

Cold spots manifest suddenly, regardless of season or thermostat, with temperatures dropping by as much as twenty degrees within a few feet. The chill often drifts across a room as though an invisible presence were walking past, and those caught within it report the unmistakable sensation of being watched.

Phantom music drifts through the ballroom in the late evening hours, melodies that sound like orchestral pieces from the early twentieth century. No source has ever been found, despite extensive searches. It is heard most often in the autumn and winter months, when the nights grow long, and the sea wind presses against the glass.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the producers of Dark Shadows chose this house for their gothic family seat. Or perhaps the house chose them.

For the 1970 and 1971 films House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, the exterior shots were filmed at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York. Additionally, the exterior for Barnabas Collins’ “Old House” in the TV series was the Spratt Mansion (also known as The Colonnades), located next to Lyndhurst, which burned down in the late 1960s.

Inside Collinwood

The earliest episodes were shot at ABC’s TV-2 on West 67th Street. From 1966 to 1971, production moved to ABC’s Studio 16 at 433 West 53rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

TV-2 had been built inside the old riding ring of Durland’s Riding Academy, which opened in 1901 as a riding school and stable. Its ring, roughly 100 by 200 feet, lay beneath long roof trusses and balconies for spectators. Before the academy, the block was part of a late-nineteenth-century ring of stables and carriage houses serving the bridle paths of Central Park.

Close to both studios stood places acquainted with sudden and violent death. Across 66th Street rose the First Battery Armory at 56 West 66th, built in 1901 for the New York National Guard.

St. Elizabeth’s Hospital relocated in 1927 to Washington Heights from 415 West 51st Street, while the founding address was 225 West 31st Street. The hospital’s original name was the Hospital of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. It was operated by Franciscan nuns and opened as a small thirty-bed hospital.

In 1934, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany took over the location as St. Clare’s Hospital to serve Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

Whatever ghostly manifestations haunted the studios could have been the work of the many who lived and suffered on the land before the cameras ever arrived.