Dr. Samantha Oh

*"My... What a creepy, kooky, spooky old house... I love it!" - Dr. Samantha Oh*

**Dr. Samantha Oh** is a brilliant and educated doctor and psychiatrist from the Duffy Medical Center in Albany, New York. Beautiful, intelligent and whimsical with a dry sometimes sarcastic sense of humor, she always managing to enchant or intrigue everyone around her.

Born to Japanese-American parents in Boston, Massachusetts, her mother's side of the family were doctors while her father often worked in construction as a contractor. She had an eidetic mind for details and was incredibly intelligent in her youth, making her a prodigy at eight-years-old. In her teenage years, she learned to develop an eccentric puckish sense of humor to downplay her intelligence around her classmates in order to keep from being alienated.

Attending Harvard Medical School, she was a colleague of Dr. Paul Kirkwood and Dr. Angela Harker, but she was progressing so fast in her studies that her students had her sign up for other fields such as psychiatry, serology and pathology to slow down her progress. Graduating in 1990, she did her residence at Boston Medical Hospital.
During her residency, her parents encouraged her into a relationship with James Hoffman, a restauranteur from another Chinese-American Family, and they soon got married. However, Jaime wanted to start a family, and Samantha was driven by her career. They divorced just after a year; carrying business cards with her married name for several more years. Samantha soon took a job at the Duffy Medical Center in Albany, New York. While there, she became intrigued by a degenerative blood disease occurring in Ashford Falls, New York. The patient was Lindy Benson, the assistant to businessman Carter Hedison, and after she died, Carolyn Woods of Thornewood Hall also started showing symptoms. To treat Carolyn, Dr. Oh moved on to the estate. There were a few more cases, but none so virulent as Carolyn's cousin, Barclay Woods, who she helped treat with the help of Dr. Geoffrey Overall. Even after saving Carolyn's life, she stayed around to treat Barclay, and in doing so, became indispensable to the family, particularly Elizabeth Woods, who saw her as a friend she could confide in due to Samantha's abilities as a psychiatrist. However, Dr. Oh remain intricately fascinated by Barclay, becoming his personal physician as well as the Woods Family for several years.

Through her time with the Woods family, Dr. Oh became involved in several of their disputes and family problems. Among them was Victoria Luckweather, Barclay's estranged wife, who presented herself as an ally rather than a rival for his attention. Her appearance preceded a period of extreme anxiety, restlessness and irritability in the family accompanied by nightmares that even Dr. Oh fell prey to, forcing her to relive the negative events of her childhood years but she still persevered. Liz, however, was most affected by this spell, and she accompanied her to Ardmore Sanitarium in nearby Winchester for rest and relaxation.

Completely rational and logical, Dr. Oh became baffled by the seeming hauntings of of the ghost of Sara Wood, the sister of one of the family's ancestors. A year after her appearances, the family started seeing the ghost of Quentin Woods, a relative from the 1890s, and Bridget Collins, a former housekeeper from the same period, who seemed very interested in both David Woods and Amanda Hackett, the younger sister of Chris Hackett, the boyfriend of Carolyn Woods. To help the family, Dr. Oh contacted Professor D. B. Moore, a history professor and folklorist from the University of Albany she had met several years before. The efforts to restrain the activity, however, only made the activity more pronounced, and the family temporarily vacated the estate for Barclay's home at the Woodbury House nearby. Working with Barclay and Professor Moore for some months, Dr. Oh was somehow able to seemingly exorcise the ghosts or at least decrease the velocity of the activity under unknown means for the family to return to Thornwood Hall after five months.

With the family, Dr. Oh met and encountered Quentin Woods in 1997, a descendant of the first Quentin Woods. During this period, Barclay and Samantha became close friends and acquaintances. Victoria returned a few times as well looking for a reconciliation and apparently to defuse any romantic inclinations she had with Barclay.

However, at some point in the past, Victoria had married businessman Lionel Barrett and lived with him in his home in Cutter's Cove, Rhode Island. When Quentin requested that his ancestor's portrait be restored to Thornewood Hall, Dr. Oh helped him to track it down, learning that the artist who had painted it had family that lived in Cutter's Cove who had sold off his work over the years. She further tracked it down to Barrett's island estate where she found Victoria, who advised her not to reveal her marriage to Barclay.

Unfortunately, Victoria soon learned that Lionel was tied to the cult known as the Children of the Sun and that in addition to moving into top roles in the local government they were starting to delve into the dark arts. Terrified of them and Lionel, she contacted Barclay for help and with Dr. Oh and Quentin, they enlisted former member Jeff Hodges in shattering the cult and scattering its members.

Shortly after these events, Dr. Oh started noticing another phenomenon in the Woods family estate where different versions of the family members and new relatives that didn't exist were appearing and disappearing. Some of these individuals had knowledge of events that were foreign to her or treated her as if they didn't know who she was. Even parts of the estate were changing or altering themselves. Professor Moore theorized the property was overlapping and getting confused with the same location in alternate timelines or realities. While he was trying to research the phenomenon, Dr. Oh vanished from the estate for several months and the family tried finding her. After Professor Moore explained his theory to Barclay, he too disappeared for several weeks in search of her while reportedly on a business trip up north, the two of them suddenly appearing in the drawing room of the mansion with James Cassidy, a struggling writer and artist.

After Barclay and Victoria re-married once more, Dr. Oh departed Thornewood to pick up her job at the Duffy Medical Center in Albany once more, but she came back when Barclay and Victoria's infant son was born struggling to breath. Coming back to the estate, she worked in alliance with local physician, Dr. Paul Kirkwood, to save the child's life, remaining at the estate at Barclay's behest to keep his son alive.