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The Dunwich Horror
By H. P. Lovecraft
“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the
Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there
before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else
should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at
all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity
of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older
standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the
same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that
it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period
of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable
insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.”
—Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fears”
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the
Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the
ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and
the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions.
At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered
houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing
why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on
crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and
furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better
to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,
the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical
to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial
clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude
wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of
marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills
chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent
rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper
reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills
among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned
tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their
distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small
village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at
the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of
the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses
are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly
mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge,
yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint,
malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is
always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of
the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward
one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of
horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any
ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists
or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange
forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.
In our sensible age—since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the
town’s and the world’s welfare at heart—people shun it without knowing exactly
why. Perhaps one reason—though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers—is that the
natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common
in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined
mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence
is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests,
and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two
or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general
level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their
names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send
their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom