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.