User Reviews

Why MeTV didn't show The Ghost Story episode when Richard Thomas was still employed as a Walton and it's almost Halloween I'll never know. That was really eerie with the little boy visiting the Waltons in hopes of joining his father when he found them a place. The boy's mother has died and her spirit has come with him in the form of floral aromas and other unexplained phenomena to watch over him.

Instead they give us this really badly written episode that is total unbelievable. I thought Elizabeth's head was going to start spinning and have super strength. All very silly and Michael Learned acted like she hated the script. Listening to Ike recite Shakespeare with a western drawl was just totally crazy. He has a good speaking voice. I never saw this episode in all my Walton watching years and wish I missed it. Yes, Elizabeth's friends at the party were so over the top it was like the director said 'just keep screaming.' This episode should have been shelved.

Elizabeth is getting ready to turn 13 and like other adolescents, has mixed feelings. Part of her wants to be more grown up, and part of her wants to go back to simpler times when she was a little girl.

As her birthday approaches weird things are happening in the household. The phone rings but no one is on the other end. The piano will play by itself. A vase falls to the floor by itself and breaks, and a picture on the wall tilts by itself. It's made obvious that Elizabeth is responsible (at least to the viewing audience). Every time something happens, the wind blows and her hair blows behind her. Elizabeth then becomes terrified and screams and cries until someone comes into the room but of course no one else sees anything.

Cora Beth makes a suggestion that it could be a poltergeist, which of course Olivia, being the good Baptist, totally dismisses. Yet, later, she goes to a library and gets a book on the subject, and (totally against character) starts to believe it.

The final straw is at Elizabeth's slumber party, the poltergeist really acts up and scares Elizabeth and her friends. The acting by the little girls of being scared is laughable as it wavers between being over the top, and looking very fake. The only thing that stops the poltergeist is Olivia and John, telling Elizabeth that only she can stop it and it does.

The subplot of Jason getting a radio advice show for the love-lorn is another illogical plot twist. How any radio management could think that this 19 year old boy could give adequate advice is just ludicrous. The scenes of Cora Beth trying to follow 'Cousin George's'advice is supposed to add some humor, but just ends up with both her and Ike looking pathetic

All in all, the level of acting by everyone in this episode is either wooden, or totally ridiculous. Maybe this episode was originally released around Halloween and was trying to be spooky, but it just comes across as silly.

House becomes haunted due to adolescent angst! Seriously!?!? I was hoping for it being a prank or a dream. I should have been hoping for an Exorcist!

I'm watching The Waltons in sequential order for the first time in my life. I've really been enjoying it, until now. This is the first episode that I would truly say "jumped the shark." Elizabeth's puberty triggers a poltergeist? Surely not. It completely took me out of the realm of what this show exists to do. It's a quiet, comfortable, predictable show about family and home life. I'm not into horror-esque entertainment or stories about the paranormal. At least not from The Waltons.

I'm not sure what the point was here, but it missed the mark entirely. I kept expecting her to wake up from a nightmare, which would have only been slightly better. Just... why???

When I was about to turn 13, I was also haunted by my own budding teen angst in the form of a poltergeist that floated stuff around, elevated furniture, and blew my hair dramatically every time I got upset. I am so glad that this show, which is ostensibly set in the real world, decided to bring attention to this as it really happens in the real world to every kid who is stressed about growing up!

All sarcasm aside, I can't figure out what the producers, writers, and director of this episode were smoking when they decided this story was a good idea. The episode where there is a hint of the ghost of a boy's dead mother that manifests itself in the form of the faint scent of flowers and the like was actually believable, this looks more like The Exorcist than The Waltons! I kept expecting it to be a story Elizabeth was writing because it was entirely supernatural and a childish supernatural story at that! That would have made sense without the extremely awkward scenes with Jason's starring in a Dear Miss Lonely Hearts radio program leading to Ike and Cora Beth reading the most painful Shakespeare I've ever heard to each other. Another reviewer mentioned the show "jumping the shark" with this episode and I think they pegged it pretty correctly!