A recap and thoughts on The Hardy Boys 1977 episode “The Mystery of Witches Hollow”
I’ve been watching and writing about episodes from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mystery Show from the 1970s on my main blog, but I have some different subscribers here on Substack, so I thought I’d share my latest ramblings about one of the episodes here. I plan to share more of this content, in addition to my author newsletters here in the future.
For the first season the show would switch back and forth between The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Last time around, I wrote about a Nancy Drew episode.
Now here we are back to a Hardy Boys episode called The Mystery of Witches Hollow. The Hardy Boys stars 70s teen heartthrobs Parker Stevenson and singer Shaun Cassidy.
We start out with the boys and Frank’s girlfriend, or their dad’s secretary, or whoever she is, Callie, and their friend Chet.
They are all driving in the dark somewhere and Joe says he sees a barn with a hex sign.
It seems like each sleuthing team — Nancy or the boys – have that one friend who is afraid of everything. In the Nancy Drew books it is Bess but in the show they eliminated Bess and gave the fear to George. As someone commented on my Instagram post about the Nancy Drew portion of the show, “They did George wrong in this show.”
I don’t know enough about Chet to know if he was done wrong but in this show the poor guy is afraid of everything and always hungry (yes, like Bess too).
So, we open with the boys driving through Witches Hollow near Salem, Mass and when Joe says he sees a hex sign on a barn roof, Chet fearfully asks what that means.
Callie explains that people in this area of the country are afraid of things that go boo in the night so they place hex signs as a way to ward off evil spirits.
Now Chet is whining that he should have gone on vacation somewhere else and wants to know why they are even going this way when they were supposed to be going camping.
In an info dump, Joe tells Chet that Callie’s Uncle Captain McGuire said there were some strange things going on up here and asked their dad to come up an investigate. As so often happens, Fenton Hardy, Frank and Joe’s dad, seems to be pushing his responsibility off onto his young sons who don’t appear to go to school or have a real job since they have so much investigation time.
When they go to look for Captain McGuire at his house (while it is thundering and lightening, of course), a rather creepy woman answers and says she doesn’t know when the Captain will be back. She’s just there to clean the house, she says.
Frank, always perceptive, sees mail piled up behind her and asks her about it, suggesting it means the captain has been gone for a while.
She says she doesn’t know how long he’s been gone.
Umm….okay. Has she not been cleaning his house everyday?
She does let them in to wait for the Captain, though, and then warns them that there are scary “goings on in these here parts” but says the Captain will never listen to her about them. She suggests the kids “get on out of here before things get worse,” but they decide to stay and wait for the captain. She leaves with a warning shake of her head, and once she leaves they immediately start snooping around. Chet is looking for food and the boys for clues. They notice the mail on the counter is dated about a week back and Callie notices her uncle’s favorite shotgun is missing.
They decide they better call their dad, who, in true Fenton (and Carson Drew for that matter) fashion, blows off their concerns.
Fenton tells them they are simply getting wrapped up in all the haunted and creepy stories of the area. None of it is real, he says, and the captain is known to wander off for days on hunting trips.
While all this is going the camera keeps taking us outside to some man staggering toward the house and no offense to this guy but it certainly has taken him a long time to get to the house. He’s been staggering around out there since the housekeeper was giving her creepy speech and left, and all while the kids were digging through the captain’s mail.
Now, though, he seems to be being stalked by a black panther. I kept help wondering what state these guys are in and if black panthers are actually native to that area.
Eventually the guy finally gets to the house after everyone is asleep and slowly lets himself in to steal some food. The scream of a panther wakes everyone up and the man takes off into the storm, quickly followed by Joe who is then followed by Frank. When Frank finds Joe, he’s fallen over the edge of a ravine and Frank has to help him up. After a heart-to-heart about Frank saving Joe and how much Joe appreciates it, the pair find a empty shotgun shell and decide it’s time to go to the town sheriff and tell him they think something happened to the captain.
The sheriff is none too happy they’ve woken him up in the middle of the night and says Captain McGuire is probably off hunting, which is why he bought the cabin in the first place.
They leave the sheriff without much information. The next day, though, they do find out from the owner of the gas station that there is a man who is also a city slicker who has bought some property near the captain. They find the man man — Donner (yes, I know – foreshadowing much?) — tells the boys he hopes to build a large condominium if a road project goes through. There are some in the area who don’t want the project to go through and many of those people are superstitious, Donner says.
They believe that area is haunted by the ghost of a woman back around the time of the Sale Witch Trials who raised cats, including one very large, black one.
The woman probably raised the large cat, probably a panther, from the time it was a baby, Donner says, but because people in the town believed she just acquired it after it was grown, they labeled her a witch. That would have meant a trial but when the towns people came to get her, she barricaded herself in her house with the cat.
“It’s not a very pretty story,” Donner says.
“It’s not a story at all, without a finish,” Frank counters.
“Well, when she wouldn’t come out, they set fire to the place,” Donner finishes.
And now locals say they hear the woman screaming in the night.
There is something a bit shifty about this Donner guy that we the viewers know already because we’ve seen him in a basement jail holding the captain hostage while a large panther guards him. Apparently, the dude built a cage into his wall for the specific purpose of kidnapping the captain. Why has he kidnapped him? It isn’t yet clear.
Flash forward and the boys finally get their man — the man who broke into the house that is. Only he isn’t a man. He’s a young, mute boy. Not deaf, it appears, but mute.
The boy tries to sign to them that he only broke into the house for food. I’m guessing he has no family who feeds him, but I don’t know.
The boys have no idea what else he is trying to say to them after they take him back to the house. Callie is no help either but in the less than 20 seconds they all discuss how they don’t know what he’s saying the kid somehow sketches a fully detailed and colored in picture of the panther. The guy can’t speak but he is apparently an art savant of some kind.
No one is sure what this drawing means but they know the kid knows something.
That night they all fall asleep and “someone” (cough..Donner…cough) jams a block into the front door of the house so it can’t be open and then lays something over the chimney so that the smoke from the fireplace comes back into the house. The smell of smoke wakes Joe who breaks a window to get fresh air. I’m really not sure what Donner thought was going to happen since even with the door locked the boys could break a window and save themselves. Joe and Frank decide whomever did it simply wanted to scare them.
By the way, most of this episode Chet is just eating and being useless. He even whines when the boys tell him to remove whatever is blocking the chimney while they go get the sheriff. The boy, Simon, is able to communicate to them that the captain was taken away, which is yet another reason they need to find the sheriff. Apparently Simon can’t write all this out because he can’t write. I can’t remember how they figured out his name was Simon.
Before they get to the sheriff, though, the boy points to the side of the road, to indicate he wants them to pull over. They do and see tracks in the dirt. That’s when the boy begins frantically pointing and they look down over the embankment and see two trucks with large speakers affixed to the top, broadcasting a screaming woman over the area.
Ah, so this is why locals think they hear a screaming woman in the woods at night.
The boys jump onto the back of one of these trucks and find cement that belongs to the contractors who were working to build the freeway. It appears someone is stealing their supplies so they can’t complete the project.
When the boys get back to the house, their dad is waiting for them and was just about to send out a “posse”. I think Fenton thinks it’s 1833 or something.
Anyhow, the boys fill their dad in by saying they think someone is trying to stop the project and that the captain found out about that and that’s why he’s missing.
Fenton says e’s going to get that sheriff to round up a posse and find the captain, but the boys will have to stay at the house, and out of trouble.
“You’re certainly good at poking holes in our balloons,” whines Joe.
“Only when there isn’t enough air in them,” Fenton scolds with a little shake of his head.
During this scene, Joe goes into the next room to “change his shirt” and starts to unbutton it. I’m sure all the teenage girls were hoping for a shirtless scene with this teenage heartthrob, but, alas, it did not help. A few seconds later it appears Joe either has another version of the same shirt or he just changed his mind about changing because he comes out tucking in the exact same shirt. On closer inspection, though, it appears the shirt is the same color but the last one was plaid and this one has stars of some kind on it.
Fenton tells Callie to come with him to get the sheriff because he’s going to need some feminine charm to convince the sheriff to send a posse out to look for her uncle.
When he leaves Simon becomes very animated and draws the boys a picture of a foot, which leads them to the nickname “flatfoot” which is what Donner called the captain when they visited with him.
“What’s that, Simon? Donner is holding the captain hostage?”
Okay, they don’t really say that, but close and Simon nods emphatically, which sends them all rushing out the door, leaving Chet to finish yet another meal while saying, “Here we go again.”
Well, here you go again what, Chet? You’re just shoveling more food in and not going anywhere.
Back we flip to Donner talking to the captain and telling him there is a bill about to pass in the state legislature to stop construction on the freeway pending a study.
First, Donner is clearly an idiot, nothing actually passes in a state legislature and if it does, it is many years after it needs to and by then the bill is completely pointless.
Second, I completely lose Donner’s reasoning at this point. Something about killing the captain and throwing his body at the construction site will delay the project even further. Why does the guy want the project delayed? He stands to get a lot of money from the construction of condominiums and other structures.
Finally it clicks when he says that other business owners will panic when it looks like the freeway is going to be scraped and will sell to him for a dirt cheap price to get out of what looks like an area that isn’t going to bring their businesses any money. Then, when the project is back on again, he’ll own all that land to mow over the little mom and pop stores and build his more expensive tourist traps.
Donner gives the captain his “final meal” before leaving the basement cage. That meal which includes a steak, but that doesn’t seem very smart of Donner because before long the boys arrive to save the captain and are able to use that steak to distract the wildcat from attacking them.
They then break into the cage and free the captain who bolts from the basement and chases after Donner. The previously useless sheriff shows up at just the right moment, though, and arrests Donner, without even hearing the entire story that the boys only learned after their dad left, I might add.
Maybe Chet told them what was said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. I have no idea.
I will say that this episode, though a bit cheesy, was much better than The Mystery Of the Diamond Triangle with Nancy Drew.
I bet you didn’t know that there is a Hardy Boys Fandom site, but there is, and here is a bit of trivia from it:
“This is the only episode in the entire run of the 1977 show to be adapted from an actual Hardy Boys book, in this case #41 The Clue of the Screeching Owl, with the opening scene at the circus and the sub-plot dealing with Bobby Thompson and Mystery the beagle & the dog-napping ring being deleted, and a few relationships being changed. An example of a changed relationship, in the book, Captain Maguire is a friend of Fenton Hardy, the boys father; in the TV episode Captain Maguire is the Uncle of Callie Shaw (Callie, while mentioned in the book, never made an actual appearance).”
If you would like to watch the episode for yourself, you can find it here:
I also wrote a post about The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Haunted House and Nancy Drew: The Mystery of Pirate’s Cove.