The scalding water etched third-degree burns into her skin, melted the hair on her head and fused her eyelids shut. She lost her balance and grabbed onto the handle of the cast-iron pot, pulling it over on her. An accident that occurred when 18-month-old Cassandra was home alone would later, ironically, turn out to be “one of the best things to ever happen to me.” The toddler had dragged a kitchen chair over to the stove to inspect eggs her mother was boiling for Easter. Cassandra Peterson would become famous worldwide as “Elvira, Mistress of Dark.” But before that, she was a rebellious teen from Kansas (inset).īorn in 1951 in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra’s parents were farmers in the neighboring, smaller town of Randolph. “I had to wonder how many of those women actually consented to having sex with him,” writes Peterson. “When a 7-foot-1, 300-pound man has his hand wrapped around your neck, there’s really not a lot you can do,” she writes of the athlete, who boasted in his 1991 memoir “A View From Above” that he had slept with 20,000 women in his lifetime. Now, in “Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark” (Hachette, out September 21), she details her trick-or-treat life in a candid memoir revealing her 19-year romantic relationship with a woman - a female whom she only identifies as “T” - as well as encounters with some of the celebrity world’s biggest names - among them late basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, whom she claims forced oral sex on her. The woman behind the Elvira brand, Cassandra Peterson, now 70, spent four decades building her iconic macabre persona into an international cult icon.

She beckons the late-night viewer to come closer before launching into a vintage Saturday midnight movie “crème de la crap” horror film, as she calls it, many of which were shot low-budget in Mexico or Italy. In the dark doorway of a faux haunted house with lightning striking and coyotes howling in the background, the undisputed Queen of Halloween and Mistress of the Dark, Elvira, appears on the TV screen with her witchy long black hair, heavy makeup and deep cleavage. ‘Jurassic Park’ star reveals treatment for blood cancer: ‘Possibly dying’ Paris Hilton reveals her parents’ ’emotional’ reaction to her new memoir Prince Andrew’s rumored autobiography is a last resort to fix reputation: report

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Elvira autobiography signed