Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires

9. Ghoulish, Wolfish Shapes

Ghoulish] olonial houses on Providence's Ben~~rStreet are like casseroles at a church supper: too much of a good thing. Yet, the yellow colonial house across the street from my office attracts attention. The door, at street level, opens directly into a stone-lined cellar. Since the house is set gable end to the street and built into a steeply rising hill, the main entrance is approached by climbing a flight of granite steps, then entering the yard through a gate. On the gatepost, four signs, in neatly lettered French, seem to warn of the wirehaired terriers, whose yapping muzzles bob above the low picket fence as if attached to yo-yo strings. Attention Chien Bizarre Chien Fort Mechant etPou Nourri Chien Oubliez Ie Lunatique Chien Attention au Maitre Fans of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and they are legion in Rhode Island, know the house at 135 Benefit Street as the "shunned house," the title of one of his short stories. I don't believe the signs are there to warn unwary strangers about the hyperactive dogs; rather, I think the owners of the house are sharing an inside joke with Lovecraft devotees who enjoy tracking down the places that he insinuates into his tales. The hidden meaning of their signs-directing visitors to beware of a 178 Ghoulish, Wolfish Shapes bizarre, undernourished, mad dog, then instructing them to forget the dog and heed the master--is plain to those who have read "The Shunned House" (1937). Lovecraft fans come in several varieties. I'm the casual sort who appreciates his embedding of history, local landmarks, and genealogy into outrageous fantasies. Lovecraft's subtle transmutations offactual material glide by unchallenged, unless one seeks esoteric conversations with like-minded fans. Ordinarily, I'm not up for the task. Having read "The Shunned House," though, I knew that Lovecraft alluded to the Mercy Brown event, stopping short of naming names. I didn't think much about it until I began to follow a trail of entries in Ernest Baughman's Type and Motif-Index if the Folktales if England and America. Under the heading "Vampire sucks blood ofvictims (usually close relatives) by unknown means," I found references to vampire stories collected in Rhode Island,Vermont, and New York. I put the last two on hold to follow the Rhode Island trail, which revealed some links that the word "fascinating" only begins to portray. Vampires and werewolves and ...Tillinghasts? Oh, my! I picked up the trail at Baughman's reference to Charles M. Skinner's Myths and Legends if Our Own Land (1896). Skinner tells readers that his entries were"gathered from sources the most diverse: records, histories, newspapers, magazines, oral narrative --in every case reconstructed."Alas, Skinner "reconstructed" the tales (which I take to mean that he took the liberty of rewriting them in his own words), and he did not provide his sources. Still, Skinner's two-volume collection is, in itself, a valuable source for legends. In his tale "The Green Picture" (the one Baughman cited as a vampire story), the Mercy Brown incident from Exeter seems to function as a sort of explanatory device, saying, in effect, "there are people in this region who actually believe in vampires." In a cellar in Green Street, Schenectady, there appeared, some years ago, the silhouette of a human fonn, painted on the floor in mould. It was swept and 179 Food for the Dead scrubbed away, but presently it was there again, and month by month, after each removal, it returned: a mass offluffy mould, always in the shape of a recumbent man. When it was found that the house stood on the site of the old Dutch burial ground, the gossips fitted this and that together and concluded that the mould was planted by a spirit whose mortal part was put to rest a century and more ago, on the spot covered by the house, and that the spirit took this way of apprising people that they were trespassing on its grave. Others held that foul play had been done, and that a corpse, hastily and shallowly buried, was yielding itself back to the damp cellar in vegetable form, before its resolution into simpler elements. But a darker meaning was that it was the outline of a vampire that vainly strove to leave its grave, and could not because a virtuous spell had been worked about the...