I have been meaning to post about this every October since I have been putting my mundane thoughts on the web some 15 Halloweens ago. As Halloween nears lots of listicles are coming out now with things to read, watch, wear. eat, and numerous other verbs. Most of them are being generated by Ai scraped out and plopped in your feed like so much pumpkin guts…or brains… When the pumpkin becomes a head the guts become brains…Anywho, this isn’t about pumpkin innards; it’s about a mysterious beast in Scotland (not that one) and a curse.

I’ve been experimenting more with writing these in pieces instead of all at once. It fills downtime better and allows me to have a few going at once that I can finish and schedule to post on meaningful days. Like today, which is several days away from now. But it’s important as it was October 19th, 1987 that Ducktales aired “The Curse of Castle McDuck.” Woo-OO. I am scheduling it to post at 3:30 which is when it would have aired on my local station.

I remember watching this when it aired, and it’s always been one of my favorites–and I say this as someone who isn’t fond of the Webby episodes.

Now, a brief interlude for the purists out there, in 1987 I don’t think I had ever seen a Ducktales comic especially not the original runs that some of these episodes were based on. In fact it’s only in the last few years I’ve been able to find them. There are plenty of other bytes extolled on the virtues and vices of these episodes that I’ll leave you to peruse at your leisuré. I’ll also mention those original stories below after covering the more recent incarnations.

This was one of the first ones that I remember seeing that dealt with anything of Scrooge’s past. Like most children you just assume adults arrived that way and were never forced to have endured a childhood. Some of them still show no signs to argue that fact, but that’s another matter. We had an early shot of Scrooge’s room which had more toys than would be expected for poor farmers wanting to start over. It’s also the first of the kilt jokes. “Whatever it’s called I hope you stayed out of the wind.”

We’re caught up on Scrooge’s family curse via exposition of Scrooge’s mother’s story of the Ghost Hound after several villagers flee after Scrooge introduces himself. (You’d think he owed me money!”

Of course the boys want to explore the castle as soon as they get sight of it from the back balcony of Cottage McDuck.

The Ghost Hound couldn’t cross water (or so Scrooge was told) and so the old McDuck’s destroyed the bridge to the castle.

Scrooge slips on the way over but finds a convenient change of clothes in an armoire inside the old castle.

Scrooge promptly changes clothes and appears more or less like a beardless Silas McDuck whose portrait still hangs in the castle’s main hall. There are some other details in the shots of the entryway that will be important to the plot, but they are introduced quickly and subtly. Scrooge’s outfit sets up the funnier of the two kilt jokes and it still makes me laugh. Scrooge asks the children what they think and says that “all the McDucks used to dress this way” to which Huey deduces “No wonder dogs kept chasin’ ’em.”

Silas is Scrooge’s great-great grandfather and the builder of McDuck Castle. Scrooge tells them that with the first shovelful of dirt a druid came out of the forest and cursed the castle and family should he continue to build there.

“Balderdash and hooey” turned into a visit from the Ghost Hound on the day celebrating the completion of castle McDuck. Scrooge recounts that on that day “the hound appeared, it came right out of the ground, glowing like molten fire, howling as if to wake the dead.” It chased the McDucks across the moors and the family split up.

Soon they discover that the druids have taken over Castle McDuck, with Scrooge concluding that the druids chased out the McDucks and robbed him of something more important than the castle –“Your top hat?” Webby asks– “My heritage; my roots!” Scrooge replies. Louie suggests charging them back rent.

Scrooge sets out on a plan to get his castle and his heritage back. When trying to get som supplies the local shepherd family at first refuses saying that it was McDuck’s family who brought the hound down on them. To this day I remember what he told Scrooge: “All the rope in Scotland can’t hold a Ghost Hound.” This is where Webby comes in convincing a shepherd’s young lamb back to eating which leads the shepherd to loan some supplies to Scrooge and Scrooge proclaiming that “they can’t fool the McDuck’s… at least not for more than 150 years or so.” The traps are set and eventually prove successful.

When Scrooge confronts the head druid, not with his hood down in defeat he tells him to give up his castle, and property. That his great grandfather built the castle and placed every stone. The druid says “Not every stone. Just look around you, this place was a druid meeting place long before Silas McDuck came to this valley. He built his castle right over our stone circle. He robbed us of our treasured past; our heritage” echoing what Scrooge said about his own heritage earlier.

Why would Silas build there? To save on building costs.

Scrooge and the Druids come to a deal allowing the Haunted Castle to be a tourist attraction during the day while the Druids held their ceremonies there at night.

Fast forward 22 years and I am on a conference trip to England visiting another well known stone circle. While in the country for the first ever Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference held in the “Old World” my mentor professor and I took a side trip down to Salisbury Plain to see Stonehenge. I cannot honestly say that I did not think about this episode when we got there.

There were modern druids set up around the perimeter of the gates, fences and gift shops with banners calling to leave the ancestors in peace. One leaning on the fence held a striking resemblance to the leader of the druids living at castle McDuck.

Now, lets move the calendar ahead some 31 years when the 2017 reboot of Ducktales airs “The Secrets of Castle McDuck” in 2018 (August or October depending on the channel you had). This one seems to be more in tine with the original setting of Castle McDuck in Dismal Downs.

There’s far more than a Ghost Hound druid curse on this particular castle. It’s still inhabited by Scrooge’s Parents. Scrooge attests that this is due to the fact that he used druid stones to rebuild Castle McDuck. His parents are blessed/cursed with immortality and the Castle (and Scrooge’s parents) only appear every five years when the mists of Dismal Downs clear enough for it to be seen. A very Doctor Who esque setup which is fitting as David Tennant voices Scrooge in this iteration. I read that they wanted to get Alan Young, the original Scrooge, in to voice his father but he passed away before they could.

Oh, and this castle holds the treasures of the Knights Templar hidden by Simon McDuck who was the treasurer of the Templars. This is why Scrooge visits on the 5 year appearances. The boys (and Webby) also find the Demon hound here, too.

This one glows due to actual supernatural effects and not “a very special flea powder.” As there are far (FAR) more aspects of the super (and supra) natural in the 2017 series. Luckily the ghosts of the McDuck ancestors reside in this version of the castle and aid the children in chasing off the hound.

There are a lot more clues and reveals in this version but you have to remember that a LOT more is going on in this particular McDuckiverse and the 2017 series was written with large overarching arcs feeding into each other and not the single adventure episode we had in the 80s. It was a wild ride itself, and if you can get past the angular animation and the re-covered theme song it’s worth catching if you can.

The beginnings of the McDuck’s Canine hauntings come from the 1959 (printed 1960) original hound in The Hound of the Whiskervilles. This particular flavor ended up a costumed villain. The premise for this timeline’s Scrooge’s visit to McDuck castle was to find an original piece of the McDuck Clan’s tartan.

Of course all of these hounds spring forth from the famous inhabitant of Dartmoor, Devon and not Scotland. Arguably one of the most famous stories of modern times Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles has seen remake after remake and retellings in all sorts of media. In addition to the Scrooge stories here, there is the Hound of the Arbuckles.

Here Garfield reads the story to trigger a dream sequence in which he is Watson to a separate Holmes and Jon has lost his “small yellow and brown dog with an annoying bark who slurps.” Holmes notes “No clue shall escape my trained eye” while Watson (Garfield) reveals “He couldn’t find a hippotamus in a hot tub.”

This particular episode was the 9th episode in season 3 and aired on October 13, 1990.

If you haven’t already, perhaps this year is the year you’ll read that book. You should. It was originally a serial in The Strand in 1901/02 with each installment (chapter) ending in a cliffhanger.

It’s a great story. The third of the first four of the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I’ve read it was the success of this story that led to the more permanent revival of Holmes after the end of The Final Problem. The frontispiece depicts Watson investigating a hut on the moor with suspiciously familiar stone work. (And you thought this was just a tangent about hounds).

This one is a great story to ready around Halloween and seeing how much it and other great literary works shaped and pervaded the media of my youth, it’s more than nostalgia that brings me back to these shows and keeps me sharing them with my son who’s now more removed from the 1987 cartoon than I was from the original comic with the cartoon aired. Stories like this hold up and when produced well are timeless.

It you want other halloween faire from Ducktales there is also the Sphinx for the Memories episode with mummies and ghosts, but I talked about it in another post specifically about mummies . Doyle’s hound is a wonderful read but it isn’t my favorite Doyle tale. I’ll reveal that one in my next post as it’s more thematic there. It was originally going to be part of this one until it expanded with the other bits of McDuck lore.

PS: If you want to stay in Scotland with the castle theme you can also track down the Real Ghostbusters episode “Bustman’s Holiday” wherein Ray inherits a Scottish Castle from am Uncle he’s never met in Dunkeld, Scotland (a real village by the way). It originally aired on November 3, 1987 just two weeks an a day after “The Curse of Castle McDuck.” We really were spoiled for content back then.

The haunting was more complex in Dunkeld than it was in the other locations.

The month before there was an episode about a haunted Irish castle, but that one was brought to New York City and rebuild in the park. They also brought the ghosts and the titular Bird of Kildarby over.

A lot of tropes crossed properties because the same writers were working on different shows submitting scripts to different story editors across networks and genres. One thing I can say for it all though is that the men and women who were writing for the shows like those mentioned here and others of their vintage were incredibly well read and we’d do well to get back to the studios and producers letting their writers pull from such creative sacks and also letting them do their jobs and stop working under the assumption that children are too young to “get it.”

“Have fun storming the castle!”