Spooky Holiday Reading: Merry Christmas, or Scary Christmas?

I'm sure you've heard the 1963 song, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Andy Williams croons in his soothing voice,"...there'll be scary ghost stories, and tales of the glory of Christmases long, long ago." Although modern Americans tend to associate ghosts with Halloween, in Victorian England ghosts were associated with Christmas. I suppose this makes sense in some ways. After all, Christmas occurs at the darkest point of the year, which seems like a good time for ghosts to be out haunting. 

In the spirit of a spooky Christmas, here are four things you can read to get you in the holiday spirit. Two of them are even available free online, if you're feeling cash-strapped after holiday shopping. 

1. The Fright Before Christmas: Surviving Krampus and Other Yuletide Monsters by Jeff Belanger

This is the latest book by Jeff Belanger, a local author, paranormal investigator, and host of the New England Legends podcast and TV show on PBS and Amazon Prime. Full confession: the publisher sent me a copy of this book to review, and I've appeared on Jeff's podcast in the past. This is a great book for anyone interested in learning about the spooky folklore of Christmas. 

Me holding my copy of Fright Before Christmas!

I think by now most people are familiar with Krampus, the horned Austrian monster who terrorizes folks at this time of year, but Jeff also writes about many other strange Christmas creatures that are less well-known. For example, have you heard of Hans Von Trapp, the Cannibal Christmas Scarecrow of Alsace, France? Merry Christmas - but sleep with the lights on.

2. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

The protagonist of this novel by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son) is Vic McQueen, a psychic, ass-kicking, biker mama who grows up in Haverhill, Massachusetts (my hometown). The villain is a creepy vampire named Charles Talent Manx III. Imbecilic yet cunning, child-like yet predatory, Manx travels around the country in an old Rolls Royce. 

Armed with gingerbread-scented laughing gas, Manx abducts small children and brings them to Christmasland, a creepy holiday-themed amusement park that exists just beyond the border of our reality. He and Vic battle it out in this book that will make you gasp out "Merry Christmas..." as you slip into a vampiric, gingerbread slumber.

3."The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft (free online)

One of my favorite stories by this Rhode Island master of weird horror.  A young man visits his family's ancestral Massachusetts hometown to participate in its traditional winter solstice celebration for the first time. Although he's charmed by the town's Colonial-era architecture, he's unnerved by its residents' silent, expressionless demeanors. 

He's even more unnerved when he follows a crowd of celebrants into a church, then into its crypt, then down ancient stone steps deep into the earth... Is he really entering a subterranean realm, or just his own fetid subconscious? Either way, he discovers a fungus-filled, maggoty hellscape. You'll scream "Merry Christmas!" before losing your sanity. 

4. The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James by M.R. James (free online)

If "The Festival" sounds too lurid for you, may I suggest the ghost stories of M.R. James? James was an Englishman and Anglican priest who wrote ghost stories every Christmas to entertain his friends. His stories often feature bookish academics or lonely clergymen visiting old historic sites and encountering supernatural evil. 

It's all very proper and British. But while his stories are subtle and heavy on the atmosphere, they often end with shocking violence and death. Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like an undead Satanic nobleman devouring your face. 

Enjoy your holidays, and I hope all your horrors are confined to the printed page this December.  

Vampires, Punk Rock and Local Legends in The Pallbearers Club

I don't often review novels here, but Paul Tremblay's new book The Pallbearers Club is based on an important piece of New England folklore. Tony gave it to me, thinking I might like it. He was right! It's creepy and very steeped in weird local history. 

The Pallbearer's Club tells the story of Art Barbara, a local rock musician, and his friendship with a mysterious woman named Mercy Brown. Art and Mercy first meet when Art is a high school student in Beverly, Massachusetts. He's tall, skinny, acne-ridden, and has a serious case of scoliosis. He's not the most popular kid in school and doesn't participate in any extracurricular activities. In order to beef up his college applications, he starts the Pallbearers Club, a group that attends funerals of people who don't have anyone to mourn them. Other than Art, only two other Beverly High students are members.  

And then Mercy joins. She's older than Art and is a student at Salem State. She introduces him to punk rock and alternative music. She has her own car. She helps him write a paper for a class on local history. The topic: the famous Rhode Island vampire Mercy Brown. 

Wait, what? The Pallbearers Club is presented as a memoir by "Art Barbara," but Art admits that this is a pseudonym. It's not his real name. "Mercy Brown" is not really his friend's name either. Art gives her that name in his memoir because... well, because he suspects she's a New England vampire.  

I've written about New England vampires before, and they're not like the vampires you see in pop culture. In the 19th century, tuberculosis was rampant across this area. No one knew what caused the disease, which was called 'consumption' at the time because it consumed people's lives and health. It often killed entire families, slowly and one person at a time. Some New Englanders believed the disease was actually caused by a dead family member feeding from the grave on the life force of their loved ones.

Artwork from The Pallbearers Club

Mercy Brown is the best-known of the alleged New England vampires. Beginning in the 1880s, consumption began killing multiple members of the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island. The family's mother, Eliza, was the first to die, followed by her daughters Mary and Mercy. When young son Edwin grew ill, neighbors convinced his father George Brown to exhume their corpses to see if any showed signs of life in the grave. Mercy's corpse was undecayed and had blood in its hearts, which according to local folklore indicated she was feeding on Edwin. Her heart and liver were burned to ashes and mixed with water, which was given to young Edwin to drink. This was supposed to prevent Mercy's vampirism and save Edwin's life, but he died two months later. (Michael Bell's book Food for the Dead is the best non-fiction book about New England vampires.)

Is "Mercy Brown" in The Pallbearers Club really a vampire? Art certainly seems to think so and blames her for some unfortunate and unusual events in his life. Mercy vehemently disagrees. The Pallbearers Club is full of notes from Mercy in red pen, offering her perspective on events. Maybe, she suggests, Art is really a drug addict and incapable of moving on from the past. 

Who is right, Art or Mercy? I won't tell you. The Pallbearers Club is a creepy slow burn and keeps you guessing until the last page (and maybe even after). It doesn't have a lot of gore or violence, so when the weird stuff happens it's all the more effective. There are some nice twists, and I definitely was surprised by the ending. This is also very much a New England novel, set almost entirely in Providence, Rhode Island and Beverly. Tremblay lives north of Boston, and his love and knowledge of the region really shines through. If you like New England, weird folklore, and a twisty plot, add this to your reading list. 

The Plymouth Vampire of 1807

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and many people associate the holiday with Plymouth, Massachusetts. This is where the Pilgrims held a feast in 1621 that is sometimes said to be the "first Thanksgiving." That may not really be the case, but it's still a beloved American myth that is remembered every year around this time. 

But why does no one talk about the Plymouth vampire in November?

Most people don't associate vampires with Plymouth, but maybe they should. According to folklorist Michael Bell's excellent 2001 book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires, there was at least one documented case of vampire belief in Plymouth.

Note that I coyly wrote "documented case of vampire belief." There were no real vampires in New England, but according to Bell's research some people did believe they existed. The New England vampires were not like the Hollywood, pop-culture bloodsuckers we know today. Hollywood vampires kill their victims by drinking blood. New England vampires killed people with tuberculosis, and only killed members of their own families. 

Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called in earlier centuries, is an infectious bacterial disease that affects the lungs. People with latent tuberculosis show no symptoms, but those with active tuberculosis are afflicted with violent (and often bloody) coughing, fever, and severe weight loss. About 50% of people with active tuberculosis die if the disease is not treated. Tuberculosis spreads when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or even speaks. It spreads easily in crowded conditions, like prisons, asylums, or small New England farm houses inhabited by large families. 

If one member of a family died from the disease, quite often other members would slowly waste away and die from it as well. People had many false ideas about what caused tuberculosis until Robert Koch identified mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882. In some parts of New England, people believed it was caused by a dead person feeding off their living relatives. If one person in a family died from the disease and then others developed symptoms afterwards, the still-living relatives might blame the person who died. They thought the dead person was feeding off their living family members from the grave. 

Michael Bell documents 18 cases of New England vampirism in Food for the Dead, from 1793 to 1892. I assume there were more that went unrecorded. The Plymouth vampire case occurred in 1807, and was first mentioned in an 1822 Philadelphia newspaper article which was reprinted in a Plymouth newspaper. The author of the article writes about Plymouth as if it were a superstitious backwater:

In that almost insulated part of the State of Massachusetts, called Old Colony or Plymouth Colony, and particularly in a small village adjoining the shire town, there may be found relics of many old customs and superstitions which would be amusing, at least to the antiquary... 

There was, fifteen years ago, and is perhaps at this time, an opinion prevalent among the inhabitants of this town, that the body of a person who died of a consumption, was by some supernatural means, nourished in the grave of some one living living member of the family; and that during the life of this person, the body remained, in the grave, all the fullness and freshness of life and health...

The author goes on to explain that in 1807, of a Plymouth family of 14 children and two parents, only the mother and son had not died of tuberculosis - and they were both extremely ill with it. Some neighbors decided to help the family by digging up the grave of the daughter who had most recently died. They suspected she was feeding on her mother and brother. If the sister's corpse looked fresh and alive, this would confirm she was the one causing the illness. To stop her from feeding, they would turn her corpse face down in its coffin. This would prevent her from stealing the vitality of her brother and mother. 

At the appointed hour they attended in the burying yard, and having with much exertion removed the earth, they raised the coffin upon the ground; then, displacing the flat lid, they lifted the covering from her face, and discovered what they had had indeed anticipated, but dreaded to declare. Yes, I saw the visage of one who had long been the tenant of a silent grave, lit up with the brilliancy of youthful health. 

Sadly, the exhumation did not work. The shock of seeing his sister's corpse was too much for the surviving brother - he died two weeks later. The mother lived for a year before finally succumbing to the disease as well. 

A local physician wrote a rebuttal in the next issue of the Plymouth newspaper. He claimed no family of sixteen had died of tuberculosis, and also tried to argue that the people in Plymouth were not superstitious:

During a residence of nearly forty years in the district referred to, and favoured with opportunities of correct observation regarding this subject, the writer of this reply has not been made acquainted, with but one solitary instance of raising the body of the dead for the benefit of the living; and this was done purely in compliance with the caprice of a surviving sister...

You can see why I said he "tried to argue," because he states that at least once a body was exhumed to prevent it feeding on the living. But you know, only once.

That local physician might have found some comfort knowing that the vampire belief in Plymouth was not as extreme as it was in other parts of New England. The people in Plymouth believed simply turning the corpse face down would stop it from feeding. In other places, people believed the vampiric corpse's lungs and liver had to be burnt to ashes, and then ingested by their living relatives. Yes, you read that right. In order to prevent their vampiric relative from sucking their life out, people would eat or drink the ashes of their liver and lungs. 

It sounds almost unbelievable, but Bell has very good documentation in Food for the Dead. If you're interested in the topic I recommend his book highly. It would make interesting reading material before you get together to dine with your family at Thanksgiving.

*****

Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season. Might I suggest buying copies of my new book Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts for the people in your life? It's available wherever you buy books online. 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death: Folk Horror in 1970s Connecticut

It's a classic urbanite fantasy. You'll escape all the stresses of big city life by moving to the country, where you'll live in a big farmhouse, grow crops, and make your own strawberry preserves. Maybe you'll raise some goats and sell artisanal cheese. Your life will be like a never-ending Martha Stewart photo shoot.

It's definitely something I've fantasized about, but I realize I'm probably not suited for country life. I haven't lived less than a ten-minute walk from a subway stop in the last thirty years - how am I going to shear sheep? And who knows what lurks out there in the countryside? After all, that same escapist fantasy is also the premise of many horror films. 

Last night we watched one of those films. Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) tells the story of Jessica (Zohra Lampert) and Duncan (Barton Heyman), a married couple who move from New York City to rural Connecticut. Jessica is recovering from some type of nervous breakdown, and Duncan thinks quiet country living will help the recovery process. Their friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) comes with them to help manage the apple orchard at the old farm they've bought. 

Their move to Connecticut isn't quite the idyll they hoped for. On their way to the farm the trio stops at a historic cemetery for some sightseeing and Jessica sees a feral-looking woman in a white gown. In their new hometown they encounter a group of surly and disapproving old men, all strangely bandaged and wounded, at the general store. And at their farmhouse they discover an attractive bohemian young squatter named Emily (Mariclare Costello) who disrupts the group's equilibrium.

I first saw Let's Scare Jessica to Death on TV when I was a kid, and rewatched because I'm in the mood for some New England atmosphere. The movie was actually filmed on location in Connecticut in the autumn of 1970 and it makes the most of the setting. There are shots of an old 19th century farmhouse shrouded in fog - real fog, not smoke machine fog. Jessica traipses through a field of blooming goldenrod and an orchard whose trees are covered in red apples. When someone drives down the road I saw a maple tree that had just lost all its leaves in the background. The characters visit an antique store in a barn, a common sight across the area.

Seeing these scenes is like comfort food for me, particularly now, but it's a horror movie, not a video promoting tourism. The antiques dealer tells them the house they bought might be haunted. A young woman named Abigail Bishop drowned on the property, he says, but her body was never found. Local folks say she now roams the countryside as a vampire, eternally frustrated because she never got to marry and wear her wedding gown. Needless to say, the legend of Abigail Bishop doesn't sit too well with the still fragile Jessica.

Image from this excellent review. 

Abigail Bishop's vampiric ghost is at the heart of Let's Scare Jessica to Death and is open to many interpretations. Maybe she's just a figment of Jessica's imagination, something the movie hints at repeatedly. Abigail might also be symbolic of the characters' unspoken sexual needs and fears, particularly as they explore the new social norms of the late 1960s.

The movie was made when America's hippie counterculture was still strong, and although the main characters are too old to be true hippies they are clearly toying with the hippie lifestyle. Instead of a traditional car they drive an old hearse with a peace sign painted on the door, and their move "back-to-nature" is straight from the 1960s counterculture playbook. Abigail's ghost is the dark side of that counterculture, the footloose Manson girl who'll party with you and then quite literally drink your blood. 

Image from this great review.

She might also represent the spirit of the land itself, a grim genius loci who doesn't really approve of outsiders. Abigail Bishop is rooted in the town's history, in its lakes and coves, its orchards and old cemeteries. Her ghost is often shown in beautiful natural settings. The local old-timers have learned to live in harmony with their town's rapacious spirit, but the newcomers find out there's more to country life than sing-a-longs and antiquing. 

There really were cases of alleged vampirism in Connecticut. Folklorist Michael Bell discusses three of them in his excellent book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires (2001). They weren't the seductive sexual predators we see in movies, but rather were victims of tuberculosis who died. When their relatives also became sick they thought the recently deceased person was feeding on them after death. The only way to stop the "vampire" from feeding was to unearth the corpse and burn its heart. It sounds unbelievable, but Bell has evidence that the practice continued up until the 1890s. This type of vampirism is very different from what's portrayed in Let's Scare Jessica to Death but it serves as a reminder that beautiful rural landscapes often have unpleasant histories. 

Venture Smith's gravestone rubbing. Screen cap from here. 

The movie alludes directly to one of those histories early on, when Jessica visits a cemetery to make some gravestone rubbings. The scene was filmed in East Haddam's First Church Cemetery, and Jessica makes a rubbing from a real gravestone, that of Venture Smith, a former slave who died in 1805. In 1798, Smith wrote a narrative of his life and as you might imagine it is full of violence and abuse. In the movie, Jessica decorates the bedroom of their new home with graverubbings, and Venture Smith's is taped right above the bed she shares with her husband. To her Smith's life is a charming relic, an attitude showing she and her friends are unfortunately clueless about the real history of their new home. 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death has a minor cult following, and several people have tracked down the various locations where it was filmed. The farmhouse in Old Saybrook where many of the exterior scenes were shot is now a decaying ruin. The house was surrounded by wide open fields when the movie was made in 1970. Now, fifty years later, the woods have reclaimed the land and will probably reclaim the house soon too. 

The house today. From DreadCentral. 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death isn't a perfect movie, but it's an interesting one, and definitely worth watching if you want to experience some unsettling New England folk horror vibes.

A Case of Consumptive Vampirism in Plymouth

Today I was researching an old story about a witch's curse, but came upon something so gruesome I thought I'd share it this week. The witch's curse will show up next week.

What I came upon was a newspaper account of consumptive vampirism in early 19th century Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Consumption, or what we now call tuberculosis, was an untreatable scourge at that time. The article states,

It is well known to those who are acquainted with that section of our country, that nearly one half of its inhabitants die of a consumption, occasioned by the chilly humidity of their atmosphere, and the long prevalence of easterly winds. The inhabitants of the village (or town, as it is there called) to which I allude, were particularly exposed to this scourge; and I have seen, at one time, one of every fifty of its inhabitants gliding down to the grave, with all the certainty which characterizes this insiduous foe of the human family.

The article, which appeared in an 1824 edition of a Philadelphia publication called The United States Gazette, goes on to describe a large family in an unnamed village which suffered particularly hard from consumption. There were fourteen children in the family, but by 1809 all members except the mother, youngest daughter, and one burly son had died from the disease. The daugher, who was sixteen, died later that year and her brother soon contracted consumption as well.

Many New Englanders of the time believed that the corpse of someone who died of consumption would feed on a living family member, giving that person the disease while the corpse remained fresh and vibrant in the grave. Several villagers came to the mother and expressed their fear to her - that her dead daughter was feeding on her remaining son.

I should have added, that it was believed, that if the body thus supernaturally nourished in the grave, should be raised and turned over in the coffin, its depredations upon the survivor would necessarily cease. The consent of the mother being obtained, it was agreed that four persons, attended by the surviving and complaining brother, should, at sunrise the next day, dig up the remains of the last buried sister. 

The author of the article seems to have accompanied the son and the four villagers to the dead daughter's grave, because he relates what he saw when they opened the coffin:

Yes, I saw the visage of one, who had been long the tenant of a silent grave, lit up with the brilliancy of youthful health. The cheek was full to dimpling, and a rich profusion of hair shaded her cold forehead, while some of the richest curls floated upon her unconscious breast. The large blue eye had scarcely lost its brilliancy, and the livid fullness of her lips seemed almost to say "loose me and let go."

Although they apparently turned the sister's corpse face down, this ritual action had no effect on the brother's illness. The shock of seeing his sister was more than he could bear and he died two weeks later. The mother survived for only another year before she too died from the disease. The author notes that the family's fourteen graves were often shown to visitors.

We now know that tuberculosis is caused by bacteria, but I think it's interesting that the author of the article thinks it is caused by damp New England weather. He calls the villagers superstitious even though his explanation of the disease is equally wrong.

Turning the corpse face down or is an ancient tradition found around the world. Murderers and other criminals were often buried this way, and I think the symbolism is obvious. By pointing the face downwards, the community is directing the dangerous dead person to go down into the land of the dead and leave the world of the living alone. Unfortunately for this Plymouth County family it didn't work.

Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell has an entire book about New England vampirism called Food for the Dead. In some parts of New England, people believed that turning a corpse over was not sufficient to stop it from feeding on a relative. Instead, the living person suffering from consumption needed to incinerate and eat their vampiric dead relative's heart, lungs, or liver. Yikes! It seems hard to believe that something like that happened here, but Bell documents dozens of cases. Sometimes the good old days weren't that good.

Ephraim Gray, the Immortal Man of Malden

Tony and I have a lot of friends who were either born in Malden, Massachusetts or live there now. On Friday we saw three friends - one was born in Malden and two live there now. On Saturday, we met a group of people out at a bar, and there were at least five Maldonians there.

Malden plays a significant role in my life, but oddly I don't believe I've ever shared any Malden lore on this blog. To rectify this, here's the story of Ephraim Gray, the immortal man of Malden.

*******

Ephraim Gray was a reclusive man who lived in Malden in the 19th century. He lived in the center of town in a big house, which he seldom left. Whenever his neighbors did see Ephraim he never looked them in the eye, and just grunted when spoken too. Ephraim didn't have any family, and lived only with a single manservant. The manservant would handle all the complex interactions with the outside world, like shopping and paying the bills.

Ephraim lived quietly for many years, until one day his neighbors noticed foul odors emanating from his house. Occasionally they would see the manservant open the windows to let out plumes of noxious, chemical-scented smoke. A modern person would suspect that Ephraim was cooking meth, but Ephraim's neighbors just chalked the fumes up as another one of his eccentricities.

The strange odors went on for many years as well, until one morning in 1850 Ephraim's manservant appeared at the police station. Ephraim Gray was dead.

The servant explained that for many years Ephraim had been trying to create an elixir that would grant him immortality. Unfortunately, even though he had quaffed many test brews, Ephraim had lost his race against time and died before he perfected the formula.

However, the servant also explained that he believed Ephraim's experiments would preserve his employer's body perfectly. Ephraim Gray was therefore to be buried immediately with no embalming or other mortuary preparations. The servant was quite firm on these conditions because he would only inherit Ephraim's estate if they were fulfilled.

Ephraim Gray was buried in a small crypt in a cemetery in the center of town. The servant lived in Ephraim's home for a few years before he too passed away. But the stories about Ephraim's quest for immortality lived on, and in 1870 reached the ears of two Harvard medical students. The students were curious to see if the rumors were true, and traveled out to Malden one dark night and broke into the crypt.

Olde Time Malden!

When the students pried the lid off Ephraim Gray's coffin they were amazed to see that his body was perfectly preserved. Ephraim Gray had not decayed at all in the last twenty years! Their curiosity satisfied, they resealed the coffin and returned to Cambridge.

Well, at least that's what they told people. In 1900 the cemetery needed to be relocated to make room for a new road, and all the bodies were moved to a new location. But when the workmen came to move Ephraim's body, they were surprised to see that his coffin was empty. No trace of his body could be found and it has never been located to this day.

Hard-headed skeptics claimed that the Harvard students had stolen the body to dissect, but other people in Malden whispered that perhaps Ephraim's immortality formula had really worked. Maybe it had just taken decades for it to kick in, and that he had finally awoken from his dormant state. Since he was a loner, he probably just walked out of the graveyard without saying a word.

*******

I have a few thoughts on this story. It appears in quite a few books, including Joseph Citro's Passing Strange and Weird New England, and Ceri Revai's Haunted Massachusetts.  Joseph Citro also mentions that Edward Rowe Snowe wrote about Ephraim Gray in the middle of the twentieth century. I can't find any record of the story that is older than that, but if someone knows where it originated please let me know.

I searched through Births, Marriages and Deaths of Malden, Massachusetts, 1649 - 1850 which is on Google books. There were records for a few people named Gray in it, but nothing for an Ephraim Gray. Maybe he was born someplace outside of Malden, which could explain why his birth is not listed. Maybe his death is not listed because he never really died!

Last week I wrote about Harvard students raising the Devil. This week it's Harvard students robbing graves. What will those kids get up to next?

Lovecraft, Poe, and Ghosts in St. John's Churchyard

Last week while we were down in Providence we stopped by St. John's churchyard. Because it was a beautiful day and we all like visiting cemeteries we had a nice time. But if we went at night it seems like I might be telling a different story.

St. John's dates back to the early 18th century, and it's reflected in the gravestones. Rather than the grim skulls you see in older New England cemeteries, the monuments here are decorated with smiling cherubs, urns, and weeping willows. Providence was a well-established commercial port by the 1700s, and people were feeling a lot better about life (and the afterlife).

However, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) reports having a different experience. He wrote the following to a friend:

"About the hidden churchyard of St. John's - there must be some unsuspected vampiric horror burrowing down there & emitting vague miasmatic influences, since you are the third person to receive a definite creep of fear from it ... the others being Samuel Loveman and H. Warner Munn. I took Loveman there at midnight, & when we got separated among the tombs he couldn't be quite sure whether a faint luminosity bobbing above a distant nameless grave was my electric torch or a corpse-light of less describable origin."

Lovecraft also admitted to a friend that he once sat on a tomb in St. John's to write rhyming acrostics of Edgar Allan Poe's name. What's the Poe connection? Well, Poe lived in Providence in the late 1840s while he was courting the poet (and Spiritualist) Sarah Helen Whitman, whose house was behind the cemetery.

Lovecraft wrote in another letter, "...Poe knew of this place, & is said to have wandered among its whispering willows during his visit here 90 years ago." Although the willows have been replaced by a giant beech tree, St. John's is still an evocative place, rich with history and literary tradition. Oh, and maybe something emitting "vague miasmatic influences," if you're into that type of thing.

Next week I won't be posting about H.P. Lovecraft, but if you want to learn more about him be sure to  check out NecronomiCon, a convention dedicated just to this master of horror! I think the word "miasmatic" will be used often.  It take place August 22 - 25 in Providence and passes are still available.

I got my information for this post from Michael Bell's Food for the Dead, and from Dark Destinations.

The Shunned House: Facts As Strange As Fiction

Tony and I were in Providence visiting our friends Bill and Ed, and we decided to stroll down Benefit Street. If you've never been it's a worth checking out for the beautiful architecture.

Look at this photo of 135 Benefit Street. It's such a charming, well-maintained, historic house. Since it's near Brown University, you can also bet it's worth a lot of money.

That wasn't always the case for this particular property. Providence has definitely gentrified in the past few decades, but before that some of these beautiful 18th century homes were downright wrecks. Here's how H.P. Lovecraft describes this house in his story "The Shunned House":

In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders.

Lovecraft's short story relates how a prosperous merchant named William Harris builds the house in the 1700s, but he, his family, and his servants slowly sicken and die. Strangely, his wife goes insane before dying and raves wildly in an obscure dialect of French - a language she never learned. Perhaps even more strange is the giant human-shaped patch of phosphorescent mold that grows on the damp cellar floor, which everyone seems to take for granted. Shouldn't they try to remove it? They didn't have dehumidifiers back in the 1700s, obviously.

Virgil Finlay illustration for "The Shunned House" in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.Thank you Wikipedia!

One maid employed by the Harrises, a Rhode Islander from someplace wonderfully named Nooseneck Hill, thinks all the suffering might be caused by a vampire of some kind. In her part of Rhode Island people exhume, burn and then consume the hearts of suspected vampires, but the tasteful merchant family fires her for expressing her crazy ideas. They should have listened to her. All the mysterious deaths give the house such a bad reputation that no one, even the indigent, is willing to live there. The house becomes abandoned. 

Don't try to go inside - the house is private property and someone's home.

 In the 1920s, a professor named Elihu Whipple and his nephew decide to investigate the house's unsavory history. They find that a Huguenot (French Protestant) family lived in the same spot in the 1600s. The Huguenot family, who were occultist descendants of an accused werewolf from the French town of Caude, were slain by a mob of their angry Providence neighbors and buried in unmarked graves near their home.

Professor Whipple and his nephew, armed with the latest 1920s scientific devices, decide to spend the night in the shunned house's cellar. I won't give away the final ending of the story, but since it was written by Lovecraft you can bet someone turns into a puddle of slimy yellow grease.

Lovecraft's "The Shunned House" is fiction, but given the sensational nature of this story it's surprising to learn much of  it is actually based on fact. OK, maybe some of those facts are a little legendary...

Convenient street-level access to a cellar haunted by vampiric mold.

 FACT: According to Charles Skinner in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, there was indeed a human-shaped mold that sucked the life out of people. It seems likely Lovecraft used Skinner's story as an inspiration. Breathe easy, Providence. The vampiric mold was actually found in a house on Green Street in Schenectady, New York and is no longer malevolently active.

FACT: Up until the 1890s, many New Englanders thought consumption (tuberculosis) was caused by the recently dead feeding on their surviving family members from the grave. The cure was to burn and eat one or more of the vampire's internal organs. There were many documented cases of this alleged vampirism in Rhode Island, including most famously one Mercy Brown. The best book about this practice is Michael Bell's Food for the Dead. He also devotes a chapter to "The Shunned House."

FACT: There is a village called Nooseneck in Rhode Island. I hope they sell t-shirts!

FACT: There was a werewolf from the French town of Caude. Jacques Roulet was accused of transforming into a wolf and murdering a young boy in 1598. He was convicted and sent to an insane asylum. As far as we know, none of his ancestors moved to Providence.

FACT: A family graveyard was located at 135 Benefit Street before the Harris House was built. All the remains were moved to the North Burial Ground, but legend claims a few bodies were left behind, including those of a French Huguenot couple. 

FACT: The house on Benefit Street was inhabited by a merchant named Harris, but his real name was Stephen, not William. According to Quahog.org, the Harris family did suffer some bad luck after building the house, including poverty, infant deaths, and the insanity of Mrs. Harris. Mrs. Harris was known to shout wildly in French - a language she had never learned.

Horseshoe Magic: Secretly Pleasing to the Devil?

A few years ago I purchased an iron horseshoe in a neighborhood botanica. There is a decent-sized Santeria community in Boston, and the horseshoe is an attribute of Ogun, the orisha (spirit or deity) who governs iron, the military, and physical strength. Don't mess with Ogun!

I don't practice Santeria, though; I just bought the horseshoe because I've always heard they're lucky. I'm not sure where this idea originated, but it's been found in New England for a long time. For example, in the late 19th century farmers in western Massachusetts told folklorist Clifton Johnson the following:

1. Nailing a horseshoe above the door of your house brings luck.

2. Nail it so the opening points upwards. Otherwise, all the luck will run out!

3. In the old days, horseshoes were used to repel witches from the house.

The first two are still commonly held beliefs, but I don't think many people in the 21st century use horseshoes to protect themselves from witches. If I am wrong please let me know.

Those 19th century farmers were quite correct that their ancestors thought a horseshoe would keep witches out of the house. Richard Godbeer provides a great example in his book The Devil's Dominion, which examines witchcraft and magic in early New England.

The story goes something like this. Goody Chandler of Newbury Massachusetts became quite ill in 1666, and thought her sickness was caused by her neighbor Elizabeth Morse, who was unpopular and therefore considered a witch. Goody Chandler was determined to keep Morse out of her house, and nailed a horseshoe over the door. Apparently it worked because Elizabeth Morse refused to enter once the horseshoe was put up.

This probably would be the end of the story if an uptight neighbor named William Moody hadn't gotten involved. William Moody was opposed to any kind of magic, and he thought putting up a horseshoe was just as bad as witchcraft. He knocked down the horseshoe, and once again Elizabeth Morse began to come into Goody Chandler's house under the pretense of being neighborly.

William Moody was not alone in condemning all forms of magic as witchery - it was the official platform of the Puritan church in New England. Cotton Mather himself, the leading minister in Massachusetts, wrote in Wonders of the Invisible World that,

"The Children of New-England have Secretly done many things that have been pleasing to the Devil. They say, That in some Towns, it ha's been an usual Thing for People to Cure Hurts with Spells, or to use Detestable Conjurations, with Sieves, & Keyes, and Pease, and Nails, and Horse-Shooes... 'Tis in the Devils Name that such Things are done."

I suppose William Moody thought he was being helpful, but he comes across as a pious busybody. And his actions certainly didn't help Goody Chandler, who just got sicker and weaker. She finally convinced another neighbor to nail up the horseshoe again (she was now too weak to do it herself) but William Moody took it down and this time carried it away. Elizabeth Morse was able to enter the house, and Goody Chandler died soon after.

It's an interesting story. Who was to blame for Goody Chandler's death? Elizabeth Morse, William Moody, or natural causes? I say natural causes (and I hope you do too), but her contemporaries had other ideas. Elizabeth Morse was brought to trial and eventually convicted of witchcraft, but even the judges must have had some doubts since she only served one year in jail.

A horseshoe could also be used to keep a dead witch in his or her grave. As I've noted in an earlier post, the people of Hampton, New Hampshire staked the heart of suspected witch Goody Cole after she died. To make double sure she stayed in her grave they tied a horseshoe to the stake.

Although the horseshoe is considered lucky and magical across Europe and North America, it's not quite clear why. The writer Robert Means Lawrence devoted an entire book to this topic (The Magic of the Horsehoe, published in 1898). Is it because its shape is reminiscent of the horns of a ferocious animal? Is it because it resembles a crescent moon? Or perhaps it's because it's made of iron, and supernatural creatures (such as fairies) fear iron.

I'm actually a fan of the iron theory, since other metals have the power to repel magical monsters (like silver against vampires and werewolves), and the defining lines between supernatural creatures are blurry. Witches can transform into animals, including wolves, and sometimes they return from the dead to cause trouble, like vampires. In the British Isles, witches often were accused of cavorting with fairies, and peasants nailed horseshoes over their doors to keep fairies out of the house. So I think it all boils down to this - if you have trouble with a supernatural creature, use some metal.

The next question is "Why does metal repel monsters at all?" but my blog is limited, and a question like that would probably lead me on an infinite regression into mankind's distant and murky past!