The courtyard is located just to the north of the Hay Library at 20 Prospect St. in Providence.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Horror of Place Tour Download
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Thursday, May 31, 2007
Text
Introduction
It is well-known that the city of
Old
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Mountains Madness 526
Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut. SOI 610
I could tell I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up. Whisperer in Darkness 454
Courtyard
Begin to grasp your surroundings in this courtyard. Absorb the atmosphere from Lovecraft’s words as you attempt to orient yourself.
It was in a deep damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. Statement of
It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror. CooS 342
The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. Colour Out of Space 340
There was too much silence in the dim alleys between [the trees] and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay. CooS 341
Weeds and briers reigned and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth CooS 342
Upon everything there was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. CooS 342
It was a fearsomely archaic place and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. CooS 343
As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich unaltered survival from the past. S o
Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. LF 55
Of wild creatures there were none--they are wise when death leers close Lurking Fear 55
It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. LF 72
Area to Right
We’ll now explore the constructions and passageways to the right.
Approach the oddly undulating object near the ramp.
No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone. C of Cth 168-69
Begin at the strange primitive ramplike stairs.
Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth , and bordered by most walls encrusted with nitre. S of RC 3
Climb up the ramp and peer into the low tunnel between these ancient buildings.
Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing spreading stone... He 147
But look more closely
Then I saw a black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth--Herbert West Reanimator 54 (LofA)
Before long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly ceased there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meat from the butcher's and of the muffled shouting, declamation, rhythmic changing and screaming supposed to come from some very deep cellar below the place. CDWard 284
Climb down from the ramp and walk into the courtyard. Lean over the shrubs on your right to see the odd subterranean constructions and passages.
There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered. H at RH 144
Walk further into the courtyard and look down into the metal grates that bar entry to the underworld.
It was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us. Shunned House 95
Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering. LF 75
There was a subtler thing we often thought we detected—a very strange thing which was however merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor – a vague shifting deposit of mold or nitre which we sometime though we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths...” SH 100
Trees
Now step among the trees moving counterclockwise among them, looking closely at their bark, roots and branches.
The ancient lighting-scarred trees seemed unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions. Lurking Fear 55
Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple. LF 66
Area to Left
Now carefully approach the low vegetation to your left as you face away from the street..
...somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white fungeous, foetid, overnourished vegetation that never saw full daylight LF 66
Botanists too ought to study the stunted flora on the border of [this] spot for they might shed light on the country notion that the blights is spreading – little by little, perhaps an inch a year. CooS 367
Look up from the flora here at the building itself that looms above you.
There was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only high narrow slits for windows CD Ward 223
The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. MM 535
We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjust of the vast rock masses... MM 535
Leave behind this mysterious structure and prepare to cross the street.
Across the Street
Carefully cross this accursed street for the traffic can be bad, and note the abysmal tower to your left
There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone. The Outsider 8
We had at once recognized it as a monstrous … tower figuring in the very earliest carvings ... MM 563
Quickly walk past the tower before its looming presence overwhelms and note your surroundings.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand, sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and more desolate as we passed. S O
Watch out for birds as you walk past the tower and away from the road
It is vowed that the birds [here] are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence. Dunwich Horror 373
Tripes
Slowly approach the large tentacled monunment of unearthly appearance.
It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased imagination could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragoon and a human caricature I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy tenctacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. C of Cth 169
End
Prepare to exit these environs and enter the eerie city proper but remember not to disclose too much of what you have seen.
“...in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down
Know that others have confronted horrors like these.
Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow small-paned windows. Here he know strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of the monstrous past might not-at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys have utterly perished. Dreams in Witch House 656
Here cosmic sin had entered and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubi howled praise to Hecate, and heedless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin cursed flutes and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ahstaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousnesses were let down and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould. Horror at Red Hook 141
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining it its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position there in that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Call of Cthulu 167Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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