Boston is an old city, one of the oldest colonial settlements in the Americas, and it has long been fertile ground for superstition, myth and folklore. The woods of New England and upstate New York have a certain reputation for having been haunted by devil-worshippers, witches or creatures of the night during the time of the pilgrims and the later colonies (the Headless Horseman, for instance). But the strands of fate binding the region aren’t all bad. The city did spawn the Boston Tea Party, which helped to create a new nation dedicated to freedom and liberty. The city also saw the Salem Witch Trials. It’s the city where Ben Franklin grew up, and the place where the infamous Strangler stalked. In other words, it’s a place of potency. New things are created daily at MIT, while Harvard graduates figure out how best to steer the course of society. Boston is a city of secrets, layered with history. Buried under the weight of the past, secrets from Boston’s pre-colonial and colonial history promise profits and threats to visitors. The Massachusetts woods creep over forgotten ruins and strange colonies. Boston proper is a layered city, where the sediment of past cultures pack into a bedrock that isn’t easily dislodged by the passing fads of the 21st century. Europeans came here with agendas that were variously devout, venal, hopeful and strange. Once Boston was a revolutionary city, full of ideas and promise. Its possibilities have been fading, lost in a mire of apathy and the frantic pace of too-rapid change. What legacies continue to reach forward, out of history, to continue to affect the present? These legacies not only give Boston’s past an identity but also serve, through means both mystic and mundane, to define its future. Along lonely roads, in deep woods and on the grounds of isolated and ancient houses, strange things lurk. Boston and its surroundings have long known the tread of those who walk in other realms – centuries-long hauntings, spirits both benign and malevolent and creatures unknown to either science or superstition, just to name a few. Let’s take a look at the city of Boston and its environs with all its old, witchy New England atmosphere .
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H P Lovecraft
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The Dunwich Horror
The Dunwich Horror was written by H P Lovecraft in August 1928 and is considered one of the core tales in his Cthulhu mythos. There are several significant literary influences on the tale. The central premise – the sexual union of a ‘god’ or monster with a human woman – is taken directly from Arthur […]
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At the Mountains of Madness
At the Mountains of Madness is a novella by horror writer H P Lovecraft, written in 1931 and first published in Astounding Stories. The story is a summation of Lovecraft’s lifelong fascination with the Antartic, beginning from the time when he had followed with avidity reports of the explorations of Scott, Amundsen and others in […]
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Lovecraft and the Bard of Auburn
I’ve made mention before of the Lovecraft Circle, the group of visionary young American writers who, in the early years of the 20th century, contributed their horror stories to pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Black Cat. Whilst Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft himself would go on to become the most famous […]
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The Horrors of H P Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, where he also lived for most of his life and eventually died in 1937. Despite his relatively short life and modest literary output – three short novels and about sixty short stories – he left an indelible stamp on the field of supernatural […]
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