Bewitched (1964): 15 Weird Facts You Didn't Know

I am a witch. A real, house-haunting, broom-riding, cauldron-stirring witch. It must be the champagne. It's been more than 60 years since a suburban housewife twitched her nose and an entire country decided that magic was real. Everybody remembers the twitch. Everybody can hum the tune. Everybody remembers Gladys Kravitz peeking through her curtains and Darren shouting, Samantha, across the living room. What almost nobody remembers is how strange, how sad, and sometimes how downright unlikely everything behind that cheerful little nose really was. Bewitched premiered on ABC in September of 1964, starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, Dick York as her mortal husband Darren, and Agnes Agnes Moorehead as her meddling mother in Dora, and over eight seasons it piled up 254 episodes. So which famous trick wasn't what it looked like? Which beloved cast member kept a terrible secret while making America laugh? And what happened when a sitcom packed its bags and drove to a town that had once hanged people as witches? Today we're counting down 15 strange facts about Bewitched Number 1 is the story of a fire, a road trip, and a town that never looked the same afterward. that hardly anybody talks about. And it is a lot stranger than you think. So if you want to hear it, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the notification bell. We have a long road ahead, and there's a bonus fact waiting at the very end. Let's go. We're starting the countdown at number 15. Number 15 The famous nose twitch wasn't really a nose twitch, and its origin story comes with an asterisk. Everybody remembers the twitch, the scrunch, the wiggle, the little xylophone chime, and just like that dinner appears on the table or a nosy relative turns into something unpleasant, it is one of the most recognizable gestures in the history of television. But here's the detail almost nobody knows. Elizabeth Montgomery wasn't really moving her nose. What she did was move her upper lip, quickly, from side to side, and the way it was shot made it look as if her nose was doing all the work. Erin Murphy, who played little Tabitha, has called it a camera trick, and plenty of people who have looked into it believe the film was sped up slightly to sell the effect. The idea belonged to the show's director and producer, William Asher, who also happened to be Montgomery's husband. According to Asher himself, in an interview he gave the Television Academy in the year 2000, he noticed her doing it and realized it could be the signal for magic. He said that when he told her about it, she answered that she'd never done anything like Now, I should be honest with you. That story is repeated everywhere, and nobody has ever independently verified it, so treat it as Erin's version of events. Still, think about the logic of it. Television witches had always waved wands and muttered spells. Here was a heroine who wanted to be ordinary. She didn't want to flourish. She wanted dinner on the table and a quiet life with the neighbors, and a twitch small Small enough to hide was exactly the kind of magic a woman in her position would use. The sound mattered just as much. That chiming xylophone motif is credited to the composer Warren Barker, and the moment you hear it, you can see the nose. And here is the part that makes it even better. The twitch didn't stay with Samantha. Her daughter Tabitha inherited it, even though Erin Murphy has said she never tried it herself, because the producer didn't think a baby witch should. Montgomery wasn't entirely done with it either. In the 80s, she twitched again, in a series of Japanese commercials. Ironically, the one thing everyone remembers most about Bewitched may also be the one thing even its star could never quite explain. Number 14. The theme song Everybody Hums has lyrics, and you've almost certainly never heard them. Go ahead, hum it. That bouncy, tinkling tune? With a little flourish at the end? You probably got it on the first try, and you didn't need anybody's help. But what you're humming is only half of a song. The music was written by Jack Keller and the words were written by Howard Greenfield, two songwriters who were part of one of the great hit factories of American pop, a company called Alden Music. When Alden was sold to Columbia Pictures, the people who owned the songwriters also owned a television studio. And that's how a pair of pop writers ended up writing TV themes. These two were not amateurs. Together, they wrote Everybody's Somebody's Fool and My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own, both number one hits for Connie Francis. Keller co-wrote Run to Him for Bobby V. Greenfield wrote the words to Breaking Up is Hard to Do for Neil Sedaka. So when they sat down to write a theme about a witch, they wrote an actual song with actual words. A vocal version was recorded by Steve Lawrence and another by Peggy Lee. Lawrence's recording turned up decades later on the soundtrack of the 2005 movie, but the version that went out on the air was instrumental, an orchestral arrangement by Warren Barker, the same composer behind the Nose Twitch music. Why? The accounts don't agree. One says the producers simply preferred the orchestral sound. Another says Lawrence ran out of time. I can't tell you which is right, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says they can. What I can tell you is that for the entire run of the show, millions of people were humming a song whose words they never heard. And here's the part that makes it even better. Jack Keller died on April 1, 2005, just two and a half months before the movie came out and the statue went up in Salem. According to a tribute on the website Spectropop, his son said he was so excited about about Bewitched coming out. Take a moment to sit with that. The man behind the most famous tune in the series missed its big comeback by a matter of weeks. Number 13. A bronze Samantha landed in the middle of the Witch Trial Capital, and not everyone was thrilled. Very few television characters ever get a statue. Samantha got hers in Salem, Massachusetts, of all places. On a Wednesday in June of 2005, the cable channel TV Land unveiled a bronze Samantha in Lapham Park, at the corner of Washington and Essex streets. She sits side-saddle on a broomstick, grinning, in front of a crescent moon. And the sculptors were a New York studio called Studio EIS. More than a thousand people turned out, and four familiar faces were on the stage. Aaron Murphy, who played Tabitha, Casey Rogers, who played Louise Tate. Bernard Fox, who played Dr. Bombay, and the show's director and producer, Bill Asher. The mayor at the time, Stanley Usavitz, had a polite answer ready for the critics. According to the news reports, he said Salem had a great and rich history that it was very proud of, and there was room in it for contemporary art and modern culture. Those critics were real. The city's redevelopment authority had given only a preliminary approval a few weeks earlier, and John Carr, a former member of Salem's Historical Commission, asked in print how a town that was supposedly trying to change its image could put up a statue of a TV witch downtown. Remember what happened in this very town in 1692. Fourteen women and five men were hanged after being accused of witchcraft, and others died in custody or under stones. That's not a comfortable backdrop for a smiling woman on a broom. Carr was speaking for himself, by the way, not for the commission. And here's the part that makes it even better. Salem today sells witches on every corner, so the real argument was never about whether the town would welcome witches. It was about Bewitched. The statue was one of several TV Land put up around the country. The first honored Ralph Cramden outside the Port Authority in New York, and two years later came Mary Tyler Moore in Minneapolis. Samantha has since survived a fair amount of drama of her own. In June of 2022, a man doused her with red paint, was arrested, and the city cleaned her up. So how did a sitcom about a suburban witch end up in Salem in the first place? We'll get there. It's the number one fact on this list. Number 12. Bewitched began under a dark cloud, and the shadow never quite lifted. Here's a fact that feels like it belongs in a different kind of show. Rehearsals for the Bewitched pilot began on November 22, 1963. If that date rings a bell, it's because it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated. According to the author Herbie J. Pollato, who has written extensively about the series, Elizabeth Montgomery and William Asher were friends of Kennedy's, and Asher had produced the birthday gala where Marilyn Monroe sang to the president. Pollato said it was a very hard time for everybody. Nobody involved forgot that beginning, and the sadness didn't stay in the past. Take a moment to sit with the list. Alice Pierce, who played Gladys Kravitz, died at 48. Marian Lorne, Aunt Clara, died at 84. Agnes Moorehead died of uterine cancer at 73. Back in the 50s, she had appeared in a film called The Conqueror, shot in the Utah desert about 137 miles downwind from a Nevada nuclear test site. When People magazine ran the numbers in 1980, it counted 91 cases of cancer among roughly 200 people who had worked on the movie, and 46 of them had died. Moorehead was a non-smoker, and her mother blamed the film. Scientists say that proving the link in any single case is practically impossible, so we can't say. Dick York died of emphysema at 63. His replacement, Dick Sargent, died of prostate cancer at 64. Elizabeth Montgomery died of colon cancer that had spread to her liver less than a year after Sargent, at 62. To make matters worse, there's David White, the actor who played Larry Tate. His son Jonathan was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a few days before Christmas, and White himself died less than two years later. After Montgomery's death, fans started talking about a curse. Snopes rated that claim false. By any reasonable measure, a cast this large over this many decades is going to lose members. Still, the number of real tragedies behind the suburban laughter gives the show a strange and shadowy afterlife. Number 11. The nosiest neighbor in America was secretly fighting for her life. Gladys Kravitz is the gold standard of the nosy neighbor. Her name is now used as shorthand for an annoying busybody. But the woman who first played her, Alice Pierce, was nothing of the kind. She was a seasoned Broadway veteran who had played Lucy Schmieler in the stage musical On the Town. And when Hollywood turned it into a movie with Gene Kelly in 1949, she was the only member of the Broadway cast to repeat her role. That's the kind of performer she was, and by the time Bewitched started filming, she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She kept it private. During the second season, the weight loss became noticeable. The producer Harry Ackerman said years later that she never admitted the onslaught of the cancer, Although, in his words, it was painfully obvious to everyone on the show. She kept working almost until the end. According to the episode records, one of the last episodes she shot, Baby's First Paragraph, was filmed in January of 1966. She died on the 3rd of March at 48, and that episode aired a week later. And just like that, the neighbor who spied on everyone else was gone. The Academy honored her in May. At the Emmy Awards, she won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy, beating Rose Marie of The Dick Van Dyke Show and her own co-star Agnes Moorehead. Her husband, Paul Davis, accepted for her. Sandra Gould took over the role that autumn, and the character grew sharper-edged than the warm-hearted Gladys of the early seasons. Alice Ghostly reportedly turned the part down. And here's the part that makes it even better. Pierce had been offered a very different kind of role once before. Grandmama in the Addams Family, and turned it down. Ironically, the actress who made her name by noticing everything on screen worked hard to make sure that nobody noticed this. Number 10. The wild cousin everyone loved was the same woman who played the heroine, and the credits had a joke about it. Remember Serena? The cousin with the black hair, the miniskirts, and the mod attitude who could not have been more different from her sensible relative. Plenty of viewers back then never quite connected the dots. Serena was Elizabeth Montgomery, in a dark wig, playing a character who was the opposite of Samantha in nearly every way. She arrived in the episode where Tabitha was born, in January of 1966. In that story, Darren meets a woman who looks exactly like his wife, and takes her for a grown-up Tabitha, as if Endora had aged his baby daughter overnight. Then Serena vanished for almost two years. She didn't come back until the fall of 1967, and in the end, she appeared in about two dozen of the 254 episodes. The problem was, how do you put two Elizabeth Montgomery's in one shot? The answer was a combination of tricks. For some scenes, the crew used a split screen. For others, a stand-in named Melody McCord, who looked a great deal like Montgomery, played one cousin from behind, with Montgomery supplying the voice. Fans have even spotted a seam in one episode where the two halves of the picture don't quite match. And then there's the credit. In some episodes, the closing credits list Serena as played by somebody called Pandora Spock's, a pun on Pandora's box. There was no such actress. It was Montgomery in on her own joke. Who came up with the name and exactly when it began, nobody has been able to prove. So I'll leave that mystery where I found it. According to Pallotto, the original inspiration for Serena's personality was a real cousin of Montgomery's whose nickname was Panda. By any reasonable measure, the double act worked. Montgomery was nominated for an Emmy for playing Samantha five years in a row, from the mid-60s into the 70s, and never won. Ironically, the woman who played two witches couldn't win once. Number 9. Aunt Clara's doorknobs were real, and so was the heartbreak behind her exit. Aunt Clara was the sweetest, most absent-minded witch in the family, always misplacing her spells and her glasses. She was played by Marian Lorne, who was born in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, and made her Broadway debut back in 1905. She married a playwright named Walter Hackett and moved to London, where he wrote plays especially for her. She made her big-screen debut in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, playing the murderer's mother, at an age when most actors have retired. Clara first showed up on Halloween week in the first season, in an episode called The Witches Are Out. Her trademark was the doorknobs. Clara collected antique doorknobs on the show, and the strange part is that Lorne collected them in real life. According to a local newspaper profile, her eccentricities were borrowed straight from her own life, and some of her actual knobs were used as props. Nobody has been able to give me a reliable count of how So, I won't guess. In the spring of the fourth season, Marian Lorne died of a heart attack at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 84, though some sources say 82. Her final episodes had only just aired. Ten days after her death, at the Emmy ceremony, she won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy, beating her own co-star, Agnes Moorehead. Elizabeth Montgomery went up on the stage to accept it. And that's when things get stranger. The producers never recast the part. And never explained where Clara went, she simply stopped being mentioned. And here is the part that makes it even better. According to a local newspaper in Pennsylvania, the Emmy statuette itself is missing. In 2025, the West Pittston Historical Society was still hunting for it. A new witch, Esmeralda, arrived about 16 months later in the fall, played by Alice Ghostly, a character created to take over Clara's job of fumbling magic. But as fans keep saying, nobody ever matched Marion Lorne. Quick pause right in the middle of the countdown, because even a witch needs a breather before the next spell. If you're enjoying this, hit the like button, subscribe if you haven't yet, and ring that notification bell so you don't miss the next trip back to the shows we all grew up with. And tell us in the comments, who is your favorite Bewitched character? Samantha? Endora? Aunt Clara? Uncle Arthur? Or the woman across the street with her eyes glued to the curtains? Alright, back to the countdown with number 8. Number 8 In its first year, Bewitched was the second most-watched show in America, and by its last it had fallen off a cliff. Let's put numbers on it. In the 1964 and 65 season, Bewitched was the second most-watched show on American television, with an average rating of 31.0. Only Bonanza on NBC did better, at 36.3. Gomer Pyle came in third, at 30.7. For ABC, long the third-place network, that was a stunning result, and the TV Ratings Guide has called it an unprecedented second place for the network. The show aired on Thursday nights at 9, in black and white. It stayed in black and white for two seasons, 74 episodes. The remaining 180 were in color, starting in the third season. And the problem was, it couldn't hold that height. By 1969 and 70, after Dick York left and Dick Sargent arrived, Bewitched had slid by more than a dozen places in the rankings. We don't know that the actor change caused it. Nobody has proved that, but the numbers moved the way they moved. In the last season, ABC shifted the show from Thursday to Wednesday, then in January to Saturday night, and the show finished 72nd, with a rating of 11.3. From second place to 72nd. Take a moment to sit There's one more number worth remembering. I Dream of Jeannie came along a year after Bewitched, widely seen as a response to its success. And, according to the ratings tables, Bewitched never lost the head-to-head race with it. So why did it end? Here the story gets murky. ABC reportedly still had the show under contract and was ready to keep going. According to Herbie Pilato, Montgomery had agreed to a ninth season and then changed her mind. Erin Murphy remembers it differently, that the cast was never officially cancelled, and that they learned the show was over from letters after the summer break. The final episode aired in late March of 1972. It wasn't a finale at all, there was no big goodbye, no wedding, no farewell. Ironically, a show about a woman who could do anything ended without a word. Number 7. The Stevens family home was a hollow shell, and it later turned up in a Marvel series. The charming suburban house at 1164 Morning Glory Circle never existed. That address was made up. The exterior was a facade standing on a studio backlot in Burbank, California, called the Columbia Ranch, which later came under the ownership of Warner Brothers, which is why many people call it the Warner Ranch. The house was a mirror-image copy of the house from the movie Gidget, and the interiors were not inside it at all. The rooms were built on a soundstage, Behind the front door there was lumber and wallpaper. That same street hosted a whole neighborhood of famous TV houses. The Kravitz house later reportedly became the Partridge family home. Gidget, Hazel, the Monkees, and the Waltons all filmed on that lot. And so did the Griswold house in the movie Christmas Vacation. The old ranch also suffered one very bad day. A fire that destroyed 17 sets and caused about $2 million of damage. We'll hear more about what that fire did did to Bewitched in number 1. And then, decades later, the house had an amazing second act. In the Marvel series WandaVision, the exterior of the Stevens house played the home of Agnes, the nosy neighbor who turns out to be the witch Agatha Harkness. And that's when it clicked for a lot of viewers. A nosy neighbor in a bewitched house. It was a wink at Gladys Kravitz, and the whole series paid its respects to television history, Including an episode that copies the Bewitched opening titles. And here's the part that makes it even better. The house didn't survive long after its Marvel comeback. In October of 2023, the wrecking crews came for the bewitched house and the rest of the backlot to make way for new soundstages and offices. As one television writer put it, houses don't last forever. By any reasonable measure, the most famous house in sitcom history spent its entire life pretending to be a home. And it was never one. Number 6 Bewitched got a spinoff about a grown-up Tabitha, and it vanished almost without a trace. Bewitched was still a hit in reruns when ABC decided the time had come for a spinoff. The result was Tabitha, which ran on ABC from September of 1977 to January of 1978. Tabitha was suddenly a grown woman, a young witch working as a production assistant at a television station in Los Angeles. How did she age so quickly? The show never really explained it. Samantha and Darren were nowhere in sight. Adam, her younger brother in the original series, was now her older, mortal brother, who scolded her whenever she used magic. A brand new aunt named Minerva, played by Karen Morrow, showed up to encourage her. Her boss was a producer named Marvin Decker, played by Mel Stewart, and her love interest was a smug talk show host named Paul Thurston, played by Robert Urich, who flirted with absolutely everybody. There were two pilots. The first, in the spring of 1976, starred an actress named Liberty Williams, and the network passed. A second pilot, with a young singer and actress named Lisa Hartman in the lead, aired in May of 1977, and that one got a series. There were old friends, too. Bernard Fox came back as Dr. Bombay, and George Tobias and Sandra Gould returned as Abner and Gladys Kravitz. It was Tobias' last role, and he died a few years later. And here's the part that makes it even better. The opening titles brought back the little Tabitha of the original series, the Murphy twins, who had shared the role as children. The problem was, not enough people tuned in. On Saturday nights, the show faced The Bob Newhart Show and The Bionic Woman, and after it moved to a Friday night in January, it ended with only 11 episodes. By any reasonable measure, it was a flop. It ranked 81st out of 104 programs, but the people involved landed on their feet. Robert Urich went straight to the hit series Vega Dollars. Lisa Hartman went on to Knott's Landing and later married the country star Clint Black, and the two of them had a number one country duet in 1999. Number 5. The magic was just somebody yelling freeze, and the secret was a lot of patience. How do you make a living room full of people stand perfectly still while a witch walks in? Easy. You tell them to freeze. When Endora made one of her grand entrances, the crew stopped the camera, everyone in the scene held perfectly still, and Agnes Moorehead stepped into the frame. Then the camera started rolling again. That stillness became magic. Dr. Bombay, by contrast, made his entrances in clouds of smoke from smokepots. The rest of the tricks were just as inventive. According to a 1964 profile in the New York Times, as retold by a modern article, the effects man, Dick Albane, floated suitcases on wires that the crew painted out of the shot. A vacuum cleaner that rolled across the room by itself was a modified machine with a reversing motor. A light bulb that glowed without being plugged in was powered by a 12-volt battery, with the wires running up Samantha's long sleeves. A champagne glass that shattered on cue was shot with a pellet from an air rifle, with plywood angled to send the shards away from the cast. The same article says Albane always had a backup plan for every effect in case the first one failed. The producer Danny Arnold was asked in 1964 to reveal the tricks and declined. We have gone to extreme lengths to create illusion, he reportedly said. So why destroy them? William Asher later talked about doing special effects on a relatively small budget for a television show. To make matters worse, the freezing was hard on Dick York, whose back was in terrible shape. For the first two seasons, the crew built him a slanted board to lean on between takes. We'll get to his story in number two. And I could find no Emmy nomination for the effects work. The only technical nomination I could find was for makeup. Moorhead, meanwhile, was a serious actress, an Oscar nominee, and a veteran of Orson Welles' theater company. She was nominated for an Emmy six times for playing Endora, and never won for the role. Her only Emmy came for a guest part on The Wild Wild West. Ironically, her best-known role came from a show she reportedly felt trapped by. 4. The Most Daring Episode of Bewitched was written by a 10th grade English class. A fantasy sitcom about a suburban witch is not where you'd expect to find one of the most outspoken hours of television of its day. But on Christmas Eve 1970, Bewitched aired an episode called Sisters at Heart, and it was something else. The story was created by 26 10th graders at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles. Their young teacher, Marcella Saunders, had written to television studios, hoping to use favorite shows as teaching material. By one account, Only Bewitched answered. Many of her students were struggling readers, and by her own account, nearly half of them read at a third grade level. The class wrote a story, and reportedly gave the script, wrapped as a Christmas present, to Elizabeth Montgomery and William Asher. Montgomery and Asher invited the whole class to the set and paid for a bus. A professional writer, Barbara Avedon, polished the script. She would later help create Cagney and Lacey. The plot? Tabitha makes a friend, a black girl named Lisa, played by Vanetta Rogers. A racist client of Darren's, assuming that Darren's family must be mixed, takes his business away. When another child in the park says the girls can't be sisters, Tabitha casts a spell that turns each girl's polka dots into the skin color of the other. And that's when Samantha steps in, making the client see everyone around him, including himself, as black. He apologizes, and he comes to dinner. The episode's sponsor, Oscar Mayer, reportedly gave its blessing. Critic Hal Erickson described it as refreshingly free of the patronization that usually attended racially sensitive television episodes of the period. Montgomery called it her favorite episode, saying it was created in the true spirit of Christmas. By most accounts, it earned a special governor's award at the Emmys the following year, though the Television Academy's own website doesn't list it, so I'll leave that one with a question mark. Some critics today find the ending too simple, and the story still has its limits. But a class of teenagers wrote it, and the episode is still celebrated for it. Take a moment to sit with that. Number three. The cartoon on the opening titles of Bewitched came from the studio that made The Flintstones, and Samantha moved in next door to Fred. You remember the opening titles. A cartoon Samantha zooms across the sky on a broomstick, twitches her nose, and flies home to her husband. That animation was done by Hanna-Barbera, the studio behind The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, and Huckleberry Hound. Both Bewitched and Hanna-Barbera cartoons were made under the umbrella of Screen Gems, the television arm of Columbia Pictures, and the character designer Ed Benedict drew the original broom sketch in 1964, a pencil drawing about 10.5 by 12.5 inches, Which today sits in a private collection. Benedict was the man behind the look of Fred Flintstone. So the witch and the caveman shared an artist. And here's the part that makes it even better. A year later, the studios returned the favor. On October 22, 1965, a Flintstones episode titled Samantha aired on ABC. In it, Samantha and Darren Stevens move in next door to Fred and Wilma. Fred and Barney run off on a camping trip without their wives, and Samantha helps Wilma and Betty follow them into the woods. Samantha even twitches her nose, in cartoon form. Some listings credit Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick York as guest voices, while others name the show's regular voice cast, so take that with a grain of salt. The Flintstones had been the first animated series in primetime, and it also aired on ABC, so the two shows were practically neighbors. Back in the real Bewitched House, there are more cartoon connections. According to one book about the series, stuffed Hanna-Barbera characters like Ricochet Rabbit and Peter Potamus can be seen in Tabitha's room, and a Pebbles Flintstone doll sits on her shelf. By any reasonable measure, that's a pretty tidy bit of brand management. The same studio made the opening, the closing credits, and a cameo. And just like that, a witch from the suburbs wandered into the Stone Age. Ironically, the cartoon Samantha was the one Samantha whose nose really did the twitching. 2. They changed husbands in the middle of the marriage and nobody ever explained why. You know the moment when a series swaps an actor and hopes nobody notices? Bewitched did it with the most important man in the house. Dick York played Darren Stevens from the pilot through the fifth season. But York was in pain. In 1959, on the set of the Western, They Came to Cordura with Gary Cooper, he was lifting a hand car when an extra grabbed the handle and York suddenly lifted the man's full weight. He said later that the muscles along the right side of his back tore, and that was the start of it all. He took painkillers, and over the years, the pain, the pills, and the addiction swallowed his career. For the first two seasons of Bewitched, the crew built him a leaning board between takes. By seasons three and four, Darren was suddenly out of town on business a lot. According to the episode list, York missed several episodes because of his back. Then came the day everything broke. While filming an episode called Daddy Does His Thing, York was running a fever of 105 degrees. He was sitting on scaffolding while the lights were set for a special effect when he passed out and bit a hole in his tongue. Afterward, William Asher asked whether he wanted to leave the show. York replied, If it's all right with you, Billy, and that was it. York spent about 18 months in bed on painkillers and later reportedly quit them cold turkey. He started a charity called Acting for Life, helping the homeless and needy, and made fundraising calls from his own bed. He died in the early 90s of emphysema, at 63. Take a moment to sit with that. His replacement, Dick Sargent, debuted in September of 1969 in an episode called Samantha and the Beanstalk, and the change was never explained on screen. Who should have been Darren from the start? Sargent later said the role had first been offered to him in 1964, but he was committed to another series. Asher said, decades later, that York was always the first choice, so you can choose which version you believe. As for Sargent himself, in 1991 he came out publicly, calling himself a retroactive role model. The next June, he and Montgomery served together as Grand Marshals of the Los Angeles Pride Parade. When he died of prostate cancer, at 64, she called him a great friend with remarkable courage. Number 1 A fire sent a sitcom to the town that hanged people as witches, and the town became something different. At the start of 1970, ratings for Bewitched were sagging. And then, on January 30, a fire swept through the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, destroying about 17 sets and costing around $2 million. The set of The Stevens House was being rebuilt. Here's where the story gets slippery, so listen carefully. According to regional accounts, the fire and the sinking ratings are what pushed the producers to look for something dramatic, and they approached the city of Salem, Massachusetts. The historian Robert Weir writes that the production company, Screen Gems, told Mayor Samuel Zoll it would put $100,000 into the local economy and that the mayor extended an enthusiastic welcome. The crew began arriving in Salem on June 20. They filmed at the House of the Seven Gables. They stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel. They shot in nearby Gloucester. The result was an eight-episode story arc that opened the seventh season, and it was the series' big location shoot outside Hollywood. The Salem episodes began airing that fall, and according to local accounts, the mayor declared a bewitched day that same week. Some residents protested, worried that the show would dishonor the people who died in 1692. And that's when you have to understand what Salem was then. It was a worn-out port. When the playwright Arthur Miller visited in the early 50s to research The Crucible, he found almost nobody willing to talk about the trials. And then came a cheerful television witch. One local resident told the Boston Globe, decades later, that because of those episodes, Salem has the tourism it has today. The year after the filming, a woman named Laurie Cabot moved to town and opened the first witch shop In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis named her the official witch of Salem. The Salem Witch Museum opened a couple of years after the filming, and in 1982 came Haunted Happenings, the October festival. Today, roughly a million people visit Salem every October. As one local historian put it, Samantha was the most palatable witch you could imagine for mainstream America. By any reasonable measure, a sitcom about a housewife helped turn a place of sorrow into one of the most visited Halloween destinations in the country. Is that a tribute or a problem? Honestly, people in Salem still disagree about it. Bonus fact. A show about a witch changed what American parents named their babies. Before Bewitched, almost nobody in America named a daughter Samantha. According to the Social Security Administration's data, only about 73 baby girls got the name in the year before the show premiered. In the year it premiered, the number jumped past 400. A year later, it was nearly 2,000. And Samantha had leapt to number 179 on the national list, a climb of nearly 300 places in a single year. She never left. The name has stayed in the top 200 ever since. And in 1998, it peaked at number three among girls' names in the country. Take a moment to sit with that, and here's the part that makes it even better. The same thing happened to her daughter. The year Bewitched premiered, only a couple of dozen baby girls in America were named Tabitha, and the year after, fewer than 40. Then, in the year Tabitha was born on the show, the number leapt past 300, And within a few more years, it passed a thousand. A name nobody used had become one of the fastest risers in the country. The husband's name followed the same curve. Darren went from around 300 baby boys a year before the show to more than 3,000 the year after it premiered, which made it the 102nd most popular boy's name in America. Even Andorra, the mother-in-law nobody would wish on anyone, was given to nearly 30 baby girls in the year after the premiere, a name that hadn't even registered in the years just before. No one can prove it was all because of one sitcom, and I won't pretend anyone can, but would you call that a coincidence? Millions of parents decided, consciously or not, that the name of a witch sounded like the name of a happy child. And there you have it, 15 strange facts about Bewitched, a sitcom that began on one of the darkest days in American history, hid a heartbreaking secret behind its funniest neighbor, and ended up reshaping a real town From a nose twitch that was really a lip, through a statue in the town of the witch trials, and a house that was never a home, to a class of 10th graders who wrote an episode, and a fire that sent the cast to Salem, it was never as simple as one little twitch. So be honest and tell us in the comments which of these 15 facts surprised you the most, and whether you first met Samantha on television as a kid, in reruns, or later on. And do you remember trying to twitch your nose in the mirror? If you enjoyed this trip back to the magic of the 60s, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the notification bell so you don't miss the next trip back to the shows and movies that defined a generation. Until next time, keep your curtains open, keep your questions strange, and remember, sometimes the best magic is just a twitch and a little patience.