I was eight years old, wide-eyed and innocent, when I first encountered the Gothic. My family were on summer vacation, staying in a little family-owned motel at Myrtle Beach that we’d frequented for years. Our annual beach trip was significant for many reasons, but one thing that I especially looked forward to was the blissful promise of 24/7 access to the Disney Channel, since we didn’t have cable television at home.

One night, my parents fell asleep early, no doubt exhausted from a long day of managing my boundless vacation-enhanced energy. Left to consume pre-teen TV programming to my heart’s content, I gobbled up network staples—Hannah Montana, Good Luck Charlie, The Suite Life on Deck, Sonny with a Chance—until 10:30pm, when an unfamiliar title flashed across the television screen.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire: “No parents. No rules. No pulse.”

Lights out, volume turned low, I watched as teenage vampires and their mortal friends battled the spirit of an ancient, vengeful, sentient tree that once served as a site for druid rituals. Furious at having been chopped down, the tree sought its revenge by growing infectious weeds into the local high school’s computer system until a rag-tag group of two nerdy boys and their vampire “babysitter” defeated it by uploading a virus to the network.

My heart pounded wildly in my chest for nearly thirty minutes straight, slowing only during the episode’s requisite commercial breaks. I remember quietly getting up from the queen-sized bed that I shared with my mother, grabbing a hard-backed chair from the breakfast table, and plopping down directly in front of the television set to catch as much of the action as possible. I felt almost naughty—as if I was doing something illicit, watching something that my parents wouldn’t approve of if they’d been awake.

But one episode and I was hooked. My Babysitter’s a Vampire was all I could think about the next day, and I stayed up late that night, too, to experience the thrill again. Faced with the loss of my newfound obsession as we prepared to leave Myrtle Beach, I resolved to use my hard-earned odd-jobs money (I never received a weekly allowance) to buy the series on DVD. By some odd stroke of luck, I managed to find it a week later at Target.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire soon became an integral part of my childhood media experience and certainly played a role in shaping my fondness for all things monstrous and grotesque. After graduating to “adult” horror as a teenager and developing a particular taste for Elvira’s Movie Macabre and anything starring Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci, I completed multiple courses on horror literature while pursuing my undergraduate degree and won a fellowship to study American Gothic fiction writer Shirley Jackson (best-known for “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House) in North Bennington, Vermont in 2023.

But regardless of where the Gothic takes me next—whether I continue to examine horror literature in my graduate studies or elect to turn my attention elsewhere—My Babysitter’s a Vampire will always enjoy its place of honor on my DVD shelf, where it reminds me never to fear the shadows, but instead to relish the stories best shared in the dark.

My first encounter with “the Gothic” was probably when I watched The Addams Family and The Munsters on television in the early 1960s. I enjoyed their macabre lifestyle, especially how they portrayed it as so “normal”. The way other people acted and reacted to contact with members of either family was entertaining each time for me.

Later in the 1960s, Dark Shadows was airing on television. At school I was listening to other school children who were talking about a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, and a ghost child as characters in a television show. I was reading about vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. I was looking for the show on the ABC network when it was airing after a soap opera, The Secret Storm. I was watching the show in 1966 or ‘67.

During that time, I saw the Star Trek episode “Cat’s Paw”. There were witches, spooky castles, a dungeon, skeletons, magic, and a black cat. However Gothic that episode was, I became more of a fan of science fiction the more I watched other episodes of the show.

The Sixth Sense and Night Gallery television shows brought me back to Gothic storylines that involved ghosts and all manner of horrors, both surreal and imaginary. However, an episode of The Snoop Sisters that featured Alice Cooper brought me into the world of shock rock.

Sometime after an Alice Cooper concert (Richmond, Virginia) took me further into the world of shock rock, goth came to America. Puck rock left me uninspired. However, the gothic music and lifestyle that came to America spoke to me in remarkably familiar terms. Those terms were vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghosts. Local and national horror movie hosts played old films that showed me many of these same supernatural creatures played by actors. Barbara Steele was an actor who played characters in some older horror films and a character in a revival of the original Dark Shadows television series. Those films showed characters like Dracula, Frankenstein, witches, and werewolves. Authors drafted stories about such characters and the characters showed up in movies.

The Dunwich Horror movie introduced me to H. P. Lovecraft. This author’s stories represented a different kind of invasion. This alien invasion of Earth came without spaceships in modern times. These aliens came long ago and appeared after a long time from somewhere under the sea or in a mountain. The idea of an alien that appeared so unlike anything people had seen before was not new in fiction. However, their appearance caused the loss of sanity in people who looked at them in some cases. These creatures were the stuff that nightmares were made of.

Compilations of songs on Cleopatra Records gave me an idea of what goth music was. Local bands Valentine Wolfe and Bella Morte gave me an idea of what goth music was in their performances at a local Edgar Allan Poe-inspired convention called RavenCon.

As a student of electronic music, I listen to music with the intent of a performance of it someday. I believe listening to gothic music is the main thing to a gothic lifestyle. Whether the performance of gothic music covers turns me into a musician is anyone’s guess.

Growing up on a small reservation in the States, it was almost impossible to pinpoint when I first encountered the Gothic. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly encountered it at my university, where I took an independent ‘Gothic Literature’ course; however, upon reading works like The Monk, The Castle of Otranto, and A Sicilian Romance, I realized that perhaps I had been far more familiar with that eerie and anxiety-inducing affect than I had initially thought.

Spending all of my childhood and teenage years on a rez (Indian reservation) that stretches 4,267 mi² (11,051 km²), I always had a childlike curiosity about what lay in wait on the dark plains, and sometimes my own imagination ran amok with what could be watching and waiting.

On the rez, one becomes accustomed to marking out distances for survival but also for potential help; for example, being bitten by a poisonous rattlesnake when the nearest hospital is 40 miles (64 km) away and the closest thing to cell service reception is 20 miles (32 km).

The rules and regulations of the land bend for no one, and while having a landline can certainly aid the hospital in preparing the serum, your quickest way to get there is not by ambulance but through your own rez-beater (a rusty car, often found on the rez, with many dents and an unmentionable amount of rust and dirt, as well as missing numerous key elements like a license plate and tags). One just has to make sure your trusty rez-beater can hightail it on the dirt roads without running into a deer, hitchhiker, cow, or something else.

But driving on the rez isn’t just about practicality—it is also about navigating the land’s unseen forces. There’s an unspoken awareness that the land holds memories, and that not every presence you encounter is entirely human. The isolation of the rez stretches beyond physical distances; it carries an eerie quietness, a sense that something lingers just beyond your headlights.  Given that the reservation is so vast and isolated, driving becomes second nature wherein an 80-mile (128km) drive can seem like nothing to most. Herein, lies my perception of where I can first remember encountering something akin to the Gothic.

On a long night drive home from town, my aunt shared with me and my sister the complications of driving alone and to never stop for a hitchhiker we did not know. On the rez, everyone knows everyone. It is unlikely you’ll encounter someone you are not related to or someone your family does not know, thus encountering a stranger is often unheard of. She warned us early to not pick up hitchhikers, but she also inspired a sense of awe in us when she revealed that we as young women should expect to be protected by the spirit of Deer Woman.

Deer Woman’s origins are often drawn to the Great Plains of North America, but her story stretches farther than most realize and can be found in various forms of Indigenous storytelling. My aunt then recounted that a young man, a bad one at that, once drove the same road as we were driving when he spotted an old woman walking on the shoulder at night. He pulled over and questioned if she needed a lift, to which she gave no response other than simply opening the car door and stepping in.

The man continued his drive, attempting to conversate with her, but she gave no responses. He tried to look at her features but a shroud was covering her head and much of her face. Continually peeking at her, he then noticed to his horror that where her feet should have been were in fact deer hooves. Jerking his eyes back to the road, he barely had time to stop the car when a herd of deer crossed over the road. The animals began running down the barbed wire fence line, and when he turned to look at the old woman—she was gone. He was all more horrified when the end of the herd came by and the woman’s face was on one of the deer’s, her eyes looking straight into his.

Make no mistake, Deer Woman is no monster. It is here where I see a separation between the Gothic and what could be horror. Instead, Deer Woman is an entity of protection and restorative justice, specifically for women and children.

“So, what happened to the man?” I remember questioning my aunt.

She laughed and said that the man who had often targeted young women traveling alone never did again after his encounter with Deer Woman.

Stories vary when it comes to people’s individual encounters with her, with some being bloodier than the next, as can be seen in the Hulu series Reservation Dogs. However, it can be said that even on the isolated, dark frontier of the Great Plains, one is far from ever truly alone.