| abstract
| - When she was younger, Abigail nearly married. The reason she didn't was not clear, but Joshua thought the man was a fortune hunter. Naomi Collins was of the opinion that being an old maid was what made Abigail's life meaningless and why she appeared to get her only pleasure out of the misery of others (434). Abigail was a spiteful woman and a religious fanatic; it was she who was responsible for making the accusations of witchcraft against Victoria Winters in the year 1795 (367). She also testified against the girl at her trial (427). Abigail died by fright when she saw her nephew, Barnabas Collins, whom she thought to be dead, rise as a vampire (432). Reverend Trask used Abigail's death to try to add a charge of murder at Victoria Winters' trial, accusing her of causing Abigail's death, even though the doctor declared her to have died of a heart attack (433). After she died, Barnabas used her visage (441) and voice to lure Trask to his death at the Old House (442). When David Collins first showed the Collins family history book to Willie Loomis in 1967, it reported Abigail, not Naomi, to have been the "legendary Collins beauty" who had a romance with a pirate who gave her the Collins family jewels (208). If the pirate story were true of Abigail, then we could assume the pirate was the man she almost married and somehow the jewels passed out of her hands and became part of the family estate. This might further explain her bitterness. After Abigail's death, her sister-in-law Naomi referred to it as "a senseless death, following a senseless life."
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