St. John's Cemetery

Just a block north of the Shunned House, between Benefit Street and North Main Street, is St. John's (formerly, King's) Churchyard, a cemetery dating back to the early 1700s. Lovecraft wrote to a friend about feeling some vampiric presence and seeing a corpse light in the cemetery, experiences that recall the "almost luminous vapor" emanating from the cellar floor of the shunned house: "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 & 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!"

Text © Dr. Michael Bell