This is something that I have really enjoyed doing. And uh the fact that this is its fourth year is even more fun than it was last year, the year before, or the year before that. I haven’t gotten the least bit bored with it. >> Have you ever wondered what was really going on behind the scenes of one of television’s most beloved fantasy sitcoms? Bewitched premiered on September 17th, 1964, and for eight seasons it kept millions of viewers glued to their screens, watching a suburban witch try to live an ordinary
life alongside her all-too-mortal husband. But beneath the shimmering spell casting and that iconic nose twitch, lay a world of secrets, tragedy, brilliant improvisation, and stranger than fiction backstage drama that the audience never got to see. Here are 20 weird facts you probably never knew about Bewitched.
Number 20, the creator only wrote one episode and then walked away. Sol Saks is officially credited as the creator of Bewitched, and his name appears on screen in every episode across all eight seasons. Yet, the reality is that Saks wrote only the pilot episode and was never meaningfully involved with the show again after that.
He handed the keys to the kingdom to executive producer Harry Ackerman and director William Asher, who proceeded [music] to shape the show’s DNA for years to come. Despite his minimal contribution to the actual run of the series, Saks continued collecting creator royalties for decades, making his one episode involvement one of the more quietly lucrative arrangements in television history.
He freely admitted in interviews that his inspiration for the pilot came entirely from two films he had seen, the 1942 supernatural comedy I Married a Witch and the 1958 film adaptation of Bell, Book, and Candle. In I Married a Witch, a descendant of men who burned witches at the Salem trials is targeted by a vengeful witch who accidentally falls in love with her enemy.
While Bell, Book, and Candle features a modern witch casting a love spell on a mortal man before genuinely falling for him. Both storylines carry obvious echoes of what Samantha and Darrin’s marriage would become on screen. Saks was not worried about legal consequences because both films were owned by Columbia Pictures, which also owned Screen Gems, the very company that produced Bewitched.
The whole thing was essentially one company borrowing from itself. Number 19, the pilot rehearsals began on the day JFK was assassinated. The timing of Bewitched’s birth as a production is one of the more striking coincidences in American television history. Creator Sol Saks, executive producer Harry Ackerman, and director William Asher began rehearsals for the pilot episode on November 22nd, 1963, the same day President John F.
Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Asher was personally devastated. He had a direct connection to Kennedy, having produced the famous 1962 televised birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden where Marilyn Monroe sang her breathless rendition of Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Filming effectively ground to a halt that afternoon as the nation went into shock.
The grief was not just professional, but deeply personal for Asher, and the fact that one of television’s most cheerful and escapist programs was conceived in the shadow of that national tragedy is something most viewers never knew. Number 18, the first choice for Samantha hated the entire concept. Before Elizabeth Montgomery ever twitched her nose on camera, a completely different actress was set to play the [music] lead.
Tammy Grimes, who had just won the Best Actress Tony Award in 1961 for The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was under contract to Screen Gems in 1964 and was the studio’s primary choice to play the character, who at that point was named Cassandra, rather than Samantha. Grimes was profoundly unimpressed with the concept. She reportedly questioned why a witch with genuine supernatural powers would waste her abilities on suburban housekeeping rather than solving real problems like stopping wars or fixing Los Angeles traffic. When producers refused to
accommodate her objections, Grimes walked away and accepted a role in the Broadway production of High Spirits instead. The character was renamed Samantha and the search for a new lead began. It is worth noting that the first actor considered to play Darrin while Grimes was still attached was a young actor named Richard Sargent who took another job while casting stalled.
Years later, a differently named Dick Sargent would end up playing Darrin after all. Number 17, the nose twitch was not in the script [music] and took two months to find. Few television signature moments are as instantly recognizable as Samantha Stephens nose twitch. Yet, the gesture was not written into the script and nobody arrived on set with a clear plan for how Samantha would cast her spells.
The original pilot script described her magic with nothing more specific than a vague arm gesture. Director William Asher, who was also Montgomery’s real-life husband at the time, was determined to find something more distinctive and more personal. According to accounts from people close to the production, the nose twitch emerged when Asher told Montgomery to do that thing she does when she’s nervous.
Montgomery was not sure what he meant, grew nervous trying to figure it out, and instinctively wrinkled her upper lip and nose. Asher recognized it immediately as the show’s signature gesture. What most viewers still do not know, even decades later, is that the twitch was actually a camera trick.
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Erin Murphy, who played the Stevens’ daughter Tabitha, has confirmed that Montgomery was moving her upper lip and mouth rather than her nose itself, and that close-up camera work completed the illusion. The search for that one small gesture reportedly took around 2 months of rehearsals before it was locked in. Number 16, the magic was all stage hands and cut film.
In an era long before CGY, the entire visual vocabulary of Bewitched’s spell casting had to be achieved through practical ingenuity, and the methods were more chaotic than glamorous. Whenever Samantha needed to magically tidy a room or make objects disappear, Elizabeth Montgomery would freeze in position with her arms raised while the director called cut.
Stage hands would then sprint onto the set, rearrange the furniture, remove props, or reset the scene entirely, and filming would resume precisely where it left off. The edit between the two takes created the illusion of instant magic. The show’s special effects team, led by Dick Albain, developed a range of clever mechanical tricks for other magical moments.
One frequently cited example is Samantha’s self-operating vacuum cleaner, which was fitted with a reversible motor in place of the standard brush mechanism and controlled remotely by technicians operating switches just off camera. The overall effect was seamless enough to convince millions of weekly viewers, which is remarkable given how low-budget and entirely analog the methods were.
The production team’s ingenuity in making practical magic look believable on a shoestring budget remains one of the more underappreciated technical achievements in classic television history. Number 15, Agnes Moorehead was cast after a chance meeting in a department store. The role of Endora, Samantha’s imperious and frequently hilarious witch mother, became one of the defining performances of Agnes Moorehead’s long career, but the casting came about through pure coincidence rather than a formal audition process. Elizabeth Montgomery
and William Asher happened to run into Moorehead at a Bloomingdale’s department store, recognized her immediately from her formidable body of film and stage work, and realized on the spot that she was exactly what the character required. Moorehead agreed, and the role became her most recognizable part by far.
What made Moorehead’s casting particularly interesting is the extraordinary career she was pivoting from at that moment. She had appeared in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane in 1941, received four Academy Award nominations across her career, and worked extensively in radio, stage, and film. She had co-hosted the Academy Award ceremony in 1948, the first woman ever to do so, and had also appeared in The Twilight Zone.
By the time Bewitched came around, she was already one of the most respected character actresses in Hollywood. She was also, by her own later admission, somewhat ambivalent about the role, reportedly telling interviewers over the years that she felt professionally trapped by Endora’s flamboyant image, even as it made her a household name with an entirely new generation of fans who had not grown up watching her more serious work.
Number 14, the actors were wearing their own clothes for hours. Television budgets in the 1960s were nothing like what they are today, and Bewitched found ways to cut costs that would be considered deeply unusual by modern production standards. Most of the supporting cast members were asked to supply their own wardrobes for the show.
One week before filming each episode, they would bring their personal clothing to the studio, where the wardrobe department would clean and press everything before it appeared on screen. Kasey Rogers, who played Larry Tate’s wife Louise from 1966 onward, confirmed this arrangement in interviews. The practice had an unintended upside.
It gave the supporting characters a degree of authentic individuality that a standard wardrobe department might not have achieved. The most memorable personal garment of the entire run was one that Agnes Moorehead never handed over to wardrobe at all. She wore a starburst brooch set with 8.5 carats of old mine diamonds throughout her appearances as Endora, and the piece was entirely her own.
Elizabeth Montgomery admired the brooch openly and repeatedly. When Moorehead died in 1974, she bequeathed it directly to Montgomery in her will. Number 13, two actors won posthumous Emmy Awards for their roles. Bewitched holds a somewhat melancholy distinction in television history. Two of its supporting performers won Emmy Awards for their work on the show after they had already died.
The first was Alice Pearce, who played nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz during the show’s first two seasons. Pearce had been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer before Bewitched even began production, but she kept her illness completely secret from the cast and crew, appearing on set and performing as if nothing was wrong.
She passed away on March 3rd, 1966, and was awarded a posthumous Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series 2 months after her death. The second posthumous Emmy went to Marion Lorne, who played Samantha’s loveably bumbling Aunt Clara in 28 episodes across four seasons. Lorne died of a heart attack on May 9th, 1968 at age 82 in her Manhattan apartment.
She won the same Emmy category the following year. The character of Aunt Clara was never mentioned on the show again after Lorne’s death, a silence that felt conspicuous given how prominent she had been. Number 12. Dick York collapsed on set and never came back. The story of Dick York’s departure from Bewitched is one of Hollywood’s more painful behind-the-scenes tragedies.
York had suffered a catastrophic back injury in 1959 while filming the movie They Came to Cordura, tearing the muscles along the right side of his back when he unexpectedly lifted the full weight of an extra who grabbed onto a railroad hand car he was operating. The injury never healed properly, and surgeons at the time had no procedure that could correct it.
York was prescribed increasingly powerful pain medications and spent years on the Bewitched set quietly managing an extraordinary level of physical suffering. He managed [music] through four complete seasons and into the fifth before the situation became unmanageable. During filming of a scene in the episode “Daddy Does His Thing”, York was working on a scaffold 15 ft in the air with co-star Maurice Evans when a combination of the hot studio lights, physical exhaustion, and his medications triggered a seizure. He was rushed to
the hospital and never returned to the set. He later recalled leaving in an ambulance while in severe pain, but said he never regretted the decision to leave. York died in 1992 from complications related to his spinal injury and emphysema, having spent his final years in poverty. Number 11, Agnes Moorehead made Dick Sargent cry on multiple occasions.
When Dick Sargent stepped in to replace Dick York as Darrin Stephens beginning in season six, he walked into a situation that was considerably more hostile than the show’s light-hearted premise might have suggested. Agnes Moorehead had developed a deep professional bond with York over five seasons, and she made no secret of her feelings about his replacement.
Moorehead reportedly told colleagues plainly that she did not like change, and she expressed her displeasure not just in words, but in behavior towards Sargent on set. According to accounts from people who were there during filming, Moorehead was so cold and dismissive toward Sargent that she made him cry on several occasions.
The irony of this is striking given that Moorehead’s character Endora spent most of the show’s run making Darrin Stephens’ life as miserable as possible. In this case, the animosity required no acting at all. Sargent brought a noticeably different interpretation to the role anyway, playing Darrin as someone who had long since made peace with having a witch for a wife, which made the character considerably less reactive than York’s version had been.
Number 10, the real Darrin was originally set to be a different Dick. The casting of the Darrin Stephens character followed a winding road that involved several famous names before Dick York claimed the role. While Tammy Grimes was still the intended lead, the producers had focused their attention on a young actor also named Richard Sargent for for part of her husband.
Sargent had to take another job when the production stalled during the search for a new Samantha, and so he dropped out of consideration. Next on the list was Richard Crenna, who had recently spent several years playing Luke McCoy on the long-running CBS Western The Real McCoys and was not eager to commit to another extended television series immediately.
Crenna passed. Dick York then entered the picture, bringing with him an impressive list of film, television, and Broadway credits. The circularity of the situation is genuinely strange. The actor who was bypassed in 1964 eventually circled back to play the same role from 1969 to 1972. Dick Sargent, the replacement Darrin, was the same actor who had nearly been the original Darrin before the whole project had even been properly cast.
Number nine. Elizabeth Montgomery played two characters under two names. Viewers of Bewitched were generally aware that Elizabeth Montgomery was pulling double duty as both Samantha Stephens and Samantha’s free-spirited mischievous cousin Serena, a darker-haired character who favored short skirts and a considerably more chaotic approach to life.
What many fans did not realize is that the show’s credits went to remarkable lengths to maintain a fictional separation between the two roles. Starting in season six, the role of Serena was officially credited to an actress named Pandora Spocks, which was an inside joke constructed by Montgomery and William Asher, the name being a play on the phrase Pandora’s Box.
The ruse worked well enough that the fictional Pandora Spocks received genuine fan mail from viewers who believed she was a real person. Montgomery reportedly found the whole situation hilarious. On at least one occasion, she and Asher left the set together at the end of a filming day without Montgomery changing out of her Serena costume and makeup, and the two checked into a motel still in character, so to speak.
Number eight. Tabitha was played by seven different children before Erin Murphy took over. The character of Tabitha Stephens, the Stephens’ magical daughter, who was born in the second season episode, And Then There Were Three, on January 13th, 1966, was played by a rotating cast of child performers before the role settled into one consistent performer.
During the second season alone, five different babies portrayed Tabitha at various stages. First, Cynthia Black in the birth episode, then twins Heidi and Laura Gentry, and finally twins Julie and Tamar Young. When season 3 arrived, fraternal twins Erin and Diane Murphy took over the role. The twin arrangement was necessary to navigate the strict child labor laws governing working hours for young performers.
Erin ultimately became the dominant Tabitha, appearing in over 100 episodes, while Diane gradually phased out as the two girls grew older and began to look less alike. Diane later returned to the show in other small roles, rather than as Tabitha. There was also a behind-the-scenes dynamic that made the transition natural.
Erin thrived under the studio lights and genuinely loved being on set, while Diane reportedly cried when brought in to film, making the gradual handover an organic one. Number seven. The show’s opening animation was made by Hanna-Barbera. The animated opening credits sequence of Bewitched, [music] which showed a cartoon Samantha riding a broomstick and casting spells before transforming into to suburban housewife, has become one of the most nostalgic title sequences in television history.
Most viewers assume it was produced by the show’s studio, Screen Gems. In fact, the animation was created by Hanna-Barbera Productions, the same company responsible for The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo. Hanna-Barbera produced both the black and white version of the sequence used in the first two seasons and the color version introduced when the show transitioned to full color in season 3.
The connection between the show and Hanna-Barbera went beyond the title sequence. Some of the toys visible in Tabitha’s room during various episodes were recognizable Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters and several Bewitched cast members went on to provide voices for Hanna-Barbera Productions with Agnes Moorehead voicing the goose in the 1973 animated film Charlotte’s Web.
Number six, the names of almost all female witch characters end in the letter A. This is one of the stranger patterns hiding in plain sight throughout the entire run of Bewitched and it appears to have been entirely deliberate. Nearly every female supernatural character in the show’s mythology carries a name ending with the letter A.
Samantha, Endora, Esmeralda, Clara, Tabitha, Hagatha, and Enchantra all follow the pattern without exception. The names of Samantha and Endora have a specific biblical origin. The first book of Samuel contains the story of the witch of Endor, a figure Saul consults in order to commune with the deceased prophet Samuel and the writers drew directly from that source to establish the witchcraft lineage within the show’s fictional world.
The naming convention was extended consistently across both major and minor characters throughout all eight seasons, creating a subtle internal mythology that viewers rarely noticed consciously, but which reinforced the sense that the witches of Bewitched belonged to an ancient and coherent supernatural tradition. There are a small number of exceptions among minor characters, but the adherence to the pattern is striking enough that it reads as a firm creative decision made early in the show’s development.
Even the name of Samantha’s daughter Tabitha follows the rule, which matters given how much narrative weight the character eventually carried. The consistency is particularly impressive when you consider that the show ran for eight seasons and cycled through multiple writing teams along the way. Number five.
The show premiered as the second highest rated program in America. Bewitched did not build its audience gradually. It arrived on ABC already enormous. In its first season, the show finished as the second highest rated program on American television, trailing only the NBC Western Bonanza in the national ratings. It held a top-10 ranking for its first three seasons and maintained 11th place in both seasons four and five.
The show was ABC’s number one series in its debut year and the top-rated sitcom across all three major networks. Its Thursday night time slot at 9:00 p.m. placed it between My Three Sons and the soap opera Peyton Place, forming a programming block that became ABC’s strongest ratings anchor of the entire season.
In 2002, TV Guide ranked Bewitched number 50 on its list of the 50 greatest TV shows of all time. In 1997, the same publication placed the second season episode Divided He Falls at number 48 on its list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time. These are remarkable distinctions for a show that was essentially a comedy about domestic squabbling dressed up in supernatural trappings, and they speak to how deeply the series embedded itself in American popular culture from the very beginning.
Even after the ratings declined following Dick York’s departure and replacement by Dick Sargent, the show still commanded a substantial audience and remained a meaningful part of the ABC schedule well into its final seasons. Number four, the show ended without anyone knowing it was over. The final episode of Bewitched, titled The Truth, Nothing but the Truth, So Help Me Sam, aired on March 25th, 1972.
The storyline involved Endora placing a truth-telling spell on Darrin and was so unremarkable as a conclusion that it was essentially a remake of the season 2 episode Speak the Truth. Nobody involved in making it appears to have treated it as a series finale and for good reason. That is because at the time of filming, nobody knew it was one.
The show had been renewed and was expected to return for a ninth season, and the episode was written and produced as a standard installment with no attempt at closure, no farewell moments, [music] and no resolution of the show’s central premise about the tension between magic and mortal domesticity. Elizabeth Montgomery ultimately chose not to continue.
ABC had offered a ninth season on the strength of ratings that were, by that point in the show’s run, the highest the network had ever delivered. Montgomery declined, wanting to pursue other work, and the show ended without a proper goodbye. The absence of a farewell left the Stevens household and all of its magical inhabitants simply suspended in mid-story.
Endora still casting spells, Darrin still complaining, and Samantha still trying to hold everything together with grace. Number three, Dick Sargent came out [music] as gay decades after playing television’s most straight-laced husband. Dick Sargent spent three seasons playing Darrin Stephens, a man whose defining characteristic was his conventional heterosexual domesticity.
He played a devoted husband so committed to suburban normalcy that he refused to let his own wife their home. The irony of that casting became publicly clear in 1991 when Sargent came out as gay in a high-profile announcement made alongside Elizabeth Montgomery who had become a devoted AIDS activist. Sargent joined Montgomery at a national coming out day event in Los Angeles and spoke publicly about his identity for the first time.
Montgomery’s support was both genuine and unwavering. Sargent had kept his sexuality private throughout his decades in Hollywood which was common for gay actors of his generation given the industry’s culture at the time. He died of prostate cancer on July 8th, 1994 at the age of 64. His willingness to speak publicly before his death and Montgomery’s visible friendship and support throughout his illness gave his later years a dignity that his exit from Bewitched had not fully provided.
Number two, the show had a habit of replacing characters without acknowledging it. One of the most unusual creative choices in Bewitched’s production history was the show’s repeated decision to replace major characters without offering viewers any explanation whatsoever. The most famous instance is the Darrin switcheroo in which Dick York simply did not appear in season six and was replaced by Dick Sargent with no on-screen acknowledgement that anything had changed, no explanation offered, and no allusion made to the substitution in
any subsequent episode. The same approach was applied to the role of nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz, played by Alice Pearce until her death in 1966, and then by Sandra Gould with no comment from the script. Darren’s father Frank was alternated between actors Robert F. Simon and Roy Roberts across different seasons. Again, without explanation.
Louise Tate, Larry’s wife, was played by Irene Vernon from 1964 to 1966, and then by Kasey Rogers through the remainder of the run. The cumulative effect was a show in which the human characters were treated as interchangeable in a way that the magical characters were not, which created a quietly surreal undertone that the production team never seemed to consider worth addressing.
Interestingly, this approach may have actually worked in the show’s favor. Audiences accepted the changes without significant protest, which suggests that the strength of the performances and the storytelling was sufficient to paper over the inconsistencies. The Darrens in particular remain a subject of debate among fans to this day, with opinions divided between those who preferred York’s reactive bewilderment and those who found Sergeant’s weary acceptance more relatable.
Number one, the show was ranked among the greatest ever made. While its stars were dying in obscurity, the legacy gap between Bewitched’s cultural standing and the fates of the people who made it is one of the sadder footnotes in the show’s history. The program was eventually ranked among television’s greatest achievements by TV Guide, continued to air in syndication around the world, and remained a touchstone of American pop culture long after its network run ended.
Yet, many of its central figures spent their final years in circumstances that bore little resemblance to that legacy. Dick York left the show in pain and poverty, eventually needing to clean houses for income after bad investments depleted his savings. Agnes Moorehead, despite four Oscar nominations and decades of acclaimed work, said she felt professionally confined by Endora for the rest of her career before her death from uterine cancer in 1974.
Elizabeth Montgomery died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 62, having spent her post-Bewitched career in television films and advocacy work. At the show’s 50th anniversary in 2014, only three of the 23 actors who had appeared in 10 or more episodes were still alive. Bernard Fox, who played Dr. Bombay, and the Murphy twins, Erin and Diane, who had been born the same year the show debuted.
The magic, it turns out, outlasted almost everyone who made it. If this story captivated you as much as it did us, we want to hear from you right now in the comments section below. Which of these 20 facts surprised you the most? Did you already know about the Pandora’s Box alias, or did that one genuinely catch you off guard? Do you think the show was ever properly appreciated for the extraordinary amount of chaos that went on behind those cameras? Drop your thoughts below because this is exactly the kind of conversation we live for. And while you
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