I managed to get access to a card reader, so let us begin the early blog padding!
First up, The Cat:
And, yes, that is a reproduction of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker behind him in the first four pictures. I bought it in a Providence junk-shop in 1993. What the hell it’s doing in the living room is a question I can’t answer.
Some things flourish. Others die. Within the Warwick City Park is a shrine that inverts the equation. It first appeared roughly twelve years ago as an on-the-site memorial to a teenaged girl who died after being flung from a truck. I can’t remember the details, but I believe alcohol was involved. Warwick is small enough for someone to have called me on the very night that it happened. Neither of us knew the girl.
The shrine was initially small. Over the last two years it’s gotten huge. Concerned that the park authorities might dismantle it, I decided to take pictures. While doing so, I was surprised to discover that it’s no longer single-death shrine, and appears to have become an all purpose memorial to the recently dead.
The footprint of Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Rhode Island is surprisingly shallow: a plaque on the campus of Brown, a headstone & not much else.
But the discerning eye will find many traces of the gent from Angell Street. Often it happens with your knowledge– like returning home as a new Ulysses and being offered Lovecraft’s apartment at 10 Barnes Street and instead taking the one where Donald Wandrei wrote part of The Web of Easter Island. Other times, you find out years later– like discovering that your high school was on the same grounds as Lovecraft’s grammar school.
It accumulates over the years and then there’s nary a thing Lovecraftian you haven’t seen or done.
But there’s always more. We had, in particular, focused on the Dark Swamp of Chepachet, RI, the hardest to find of all Lovecraftian locations. In the summer of 1923, Lovecraft and the Eddys hunted for the swamp and could not find it– this mystery resonates through the letters and the first wave of remembrances & grows into a thing discussed in whispers and scholarly articles. For years I tried to uncover its location– but it wasn’t until USGS Topographical maps became easily searchable that I was able to find and pinpoint its very location.
USGS maps only tell one thing: where a place is, not how to get there. I had given my erstwhile chum, Andrew Harrison, a Google Maps location of the swamp’s GPS coordinates– he’d printed out some half-assed directions, but these were useless. So we drove around Glocester, RI desperately trying to get there from here. We trespassed private property. We mistook White’s Pond for the swamp. At last, we found a Department of Fish & Wildlife topographical map posted to a board and realized exactly what we, as men, had to do: drive the car down a dirt path, find a place to park, and then walk a mile in the woods.
And then, finally, we were there: the dark swamp. Dark because it’s wooded. Light hardly penetrates the dense canopy. A swamp because it’s disgustingly wet and covered in a large moss bed that attacks every living thing around it. It kills trees. It grows mushrooms. We saw no monster. But we had done it; we had gone to the most randomly inaccessible Lovecraftian location that we could– and only one jackass had fallen in the muck.
Me.
Update: Go here for directions to the swamp.
More on the Dark Swamp.
Here’s a quick illustrated map. Find the Southern half of Willie Woodhead Rd (3), which is paved but then becomes a dirt trail. (Incidentally, this was marked on the Dept. of Wildlife & Fish’s topographical map as Dark Swamp Road.) Follow the trail north until one sees a very wide and noticeable dirt clearing on the left (1). There’s room enough here to park your car. Walk into the clearing, and follow the leftmost trail into the woods. You’ll go down a hill. This gets you to the woods before the Dark Swamp. These lands are protected by the Federal & State governments, which in theory means there’s no issue of trespassing. There are orange flags tied to trees, marking the land, but the forest is dark enough that the flags aren’t visible until you stumble into one. Continue walking in the general direction west. You’ll get to the Swamp (2).
It’s very possible that there’s darker swamp than we found. A useful tool would be a GPS coordinate thingy; the actual location of the Swamp is 41.89070, -71.76260.
Although the area looks smallish on the map, when you’re on the ground, it seems giant and the woods are very, very thick and very, very dense. Try not to get lost. Or lecture your friend regarding a Fortean Times article that you’d read about the etymology of the word Panic being related to the feeling induced by the Great God Pan while one is lost in a wood.
Found: pictures taken as a high school student. These are of Thayer Street in Providence, RI, and its attendant environs. Based on certain visual cues and simple math, I’m dating these to Spring of 1994, probably April. In those days, Providence was a strange place– still reeling from the Bush I recession & packed with freaks and anarchists as far as the eye could spy. I’m not sure exactly when the city started changing– somewhere towards the end of the decade– but I remember returning from Distant Locales in the Summer of 2001 and being completely and utterly flabbergasted. It was so clean. I moved back in 2003 & it was good times, mostly, but it’s no surprise that it didn’t take. Like the cliché says: you can’t really ever go home again.
Unlike many of the photographs proffered on this very website, these have a certain historical resonance; a combination of awful 90s clothing (was any decade ever so horrid?) and buildings and views of Thayer Street that have disappeared forever. I question the idea of photography as an art, but there’s no denying that every photo becomes interesting after ten years. The archival, representative nature predominates.
As we are wont to do, me and Andy Harrison got together and opted to journey towards one of the increasingly rare instances of Weird Garbage in Rhode Island which neither of us had previously visited; this turned out to be Hanton City in Smithfield. Directions from the Internet were awful and seemingly authored by drunken half-wits and cut-rate Englishmen, but we managed a sense of our intended destination.
As of this writing, the satellite image on Google Maps is older than that of Live Maps. Thus, it lacks any trace of the dominant feature of my helpful illustration: the enormous new road and construction that has been driven straight through the woods. It is quite possible that this has eliminated much of Hanton City. The construction is visible here, sort of, but what we found was far more advanced and complete.
Our first mistake was in ever being born. Our second was in visiting the area on the hottest day of Summer. We’re talking about 99 to 101 degrees and me and Harrison wandering around in the woods, looking for a Spook City that may not even exist; it’s unclear if we found anything. There were a few walls and apparent foundations, but they were so covered in debris and tree branches that it’s difficult to ascertain if they represented the real Hanton City, or were just old stone fences left over from Halcyon Dayes of Yore. The low point of this sweating exhaustathon was, as may be inferred from my illustration, when I got the car stuck; we’re talking full on stuck, with me revving the engine and Harrison pushing the stupid thing and the wheels not getting traction on the gravel. There was a snow shovel in the trunk, so we managed to dig our way out of the predicament; again, this was in 100 degree heat. Madness set in and we wandered around for another two or so hours, finding little but trash.
The function of this post is twofold: to provide a better reference for people seeking out Spook City, and to reflect on how incredibly strange Rhode Island remains, even after decades of being in its thrall. It’s hard to imagine a place outside of early 80s computer RPGs where a person can hunt for a ruined city hidden in the woods while being three minutes away from relatively populated civilization and about ten from the state capital. Though some unsatisfactory attempts have been made, the remains an amazing book to be written (by someone other than me) that is a Weird New Jersey-esque tour up and down the Ocean State’s weird places and marvels. So. Get popping, someone.
Text quoted from Volume 1, Number Four of the Cthulhu Prayer Society Newsletter:
By 1725, only 18 documented burials had occurred in the [North Burial Ground of Providence], clear sign that home burial was still preferred. The burial ground land was used for a town animal pound. A whipping post and stocks were set up there, too. The Rhode Islanders may have been rebels against the Puritans, but they were still Englishman, fond of dispensing corporal punishment for such offenses as reveling on the Sabbath.
Gravestone carving became a Providence profession with the arrival of John Anthony Angel, who came from Portsmouth, RI in 1747. Other gravestone carvers were George Allen, Seth Luther, and Stephen
Hartshorn.Finally, the idea of a civic burial ground caught on. As the population expanded and land grew scarcer and more valuable, it became plain that having Grandpa in the backyard was an impediment to business and real estate. The burial ground underwent expansion, with some houses along its edge vacated, the owners often settling for an exchange of land. The burial ground underwent successive expansions in 1747, 1764, 1776 and 1867.
The creation of Benefit Street, cutting across many vertical plots of land running up College Hill, also resulted in the relocation of a number of family plots to the North Burial Ground, with the endorsement and encouragement of the city fathers. Providence’s Quakers also acquired a designated part of the burial ground for themselves, moving their graves from Olive Street. Many other historic grave plots wound up in Swan Point Cemetery, which explains how a garden cemetery opened in 1846 has stones from the 18th century!
Taken by me some time later:
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More Sarah Helen Whitman: HOURS OF LIFE and POE’S HELEN.
(PDFs via kobek.com. Ya heard?)
