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 |