Character: Widow Fortune
Show: The Dark Secret of Harvest Home
Episode: Mini-series

I recently watched R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About it with my children and I had an epiphany -- TV was a lot creepier when I was a kid. We didn't watch water-downed kiddie horror. We watched what the adults watched when they obviously didn't know we were watching.

My parents didn't allow me to see scary movies, such as The Amityville Horror or The Exorcist. Yet, somehow they didn't stop me from viewing all sorts of frightening TV, including the The Twilight Zone , Chiller Theater, Salem's Lot, Frankenstein: The True Story, The Dark Night of the Scarecrow, and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

However, it was The Dark Secret of Harvest Home that left the greatest impression on me -- thanks in a large part to Bette Davis in the role of the creepiest senior citizen ever. Davis played the sinister Widow Fortune so brilliantly that almost 30 years later, I still remember it vividly.