Twenty Years After One of Days of Our Lives’ Craziest Reveals Ever, We Take a Look Back at the Moment That Left Us All Asking, ‘Wait, What Just Happened?’

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Picture it: Salem, 2004. A crushingly large number of its residents had been murdered in cold blood, and Days of Our Lives viewers were angry, hurt and pretty much in shock. The killer had been found, the murders avenged, and it had seemed like we were left to pick up the pieces and move tearfully on. Then on May 25, the rug was pulled out from under us in one of the most off-the-wall reveals in soap history: Melaswen Island.

It was payoff (we guess?) after months of watching our favorite Salemites killed off one by one, starting with Abe. The future mayor had been shot dead by a mysterious figure wearing black gloves, the first in a slew of murders that would decimate the town of Salem. After Abe’s death, we lost Jack, Maggie, Cassie, Victor, Caroline, Tony, Doug, Roman — even poor Alice was killed with one of her donuts stuffed in her mouth!

Who was doing this? And why?! We loved these characters!

It wasn’t until Tony’s murder while recovering from a tiger mauling (You can see what Thaao Penghlis had to say about writer James E. Reilly’s tendency to brutally murder his character here.) that we finally learned that the Salem Stalker was none other than Marlena! Our jaws hit the floor. What was going on? Had Marlena turned evil? Had Hattie, masquerading as Marlena, turned evil? Was our favorite shrink possessed? Again?

That last question was actually pretty valid, as the Salem Stalker story was being written by Passions creator and headwriter Reilly. Though he was still very much working on his own show at the time, NBC had approached him in the summer of 2003 to also write for Days of Our Lives and help goose its flagging ratings. The same strategy had, after all, worked before, back when he wrote Marlena’s possession storyline a decade earlier.

And like Satan’s Salem vacation (actually, both of them), the Salem Stalker was winning some strong reactions from the viewers. Actually, it’s probably safe to say they were flipping out. The cute little murder mystery had rapidly gotten out of hand and turned into an out-of-control culling.