Gothic Horror Stories: The Death of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce

Sleepy Hollow Landscapes: Rockefeller State Park Preserve, Sleepy Hollow, Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York

When we say Ambrose Bierce was a western writer, we aren’t referring to western civilization. Rather, Bierce lived and wrote in the western United States, based in San Francisco for much of his career. A journalist by trade, Bierce left his indelible stamp on the short story with the twist at the end, and found his style and temperament ideal for gothic horror. Born in 1842, Bierce witnessed the horrors of the Civil War, including the bloody battle of Shiloh. Daring and courageous, his war career more or less came to an end after suffering a serious head wound at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, a short ways from Atlanta.

Following the war Bierce continued for a short time, till an expedition landed him in San Francisco, where he stayed and took up writing. Bierce’s style was described by H.P. Lovecraft as “grim” and “savage.” Bierce had spent some time in the war as a cartographer, mapping out likely locations for battle, and this skill shows in his descriptions of the landscapes in which his stories are set, which often become part of the stories themselves. Bierce might have drawn motive if not inspiration from real life. One son died from complications of alcoholism, the other a suicide, distraught over a woman. Bierce himself divorced his wife after suspecting infidelity on her part.

In 1913, Bierce is said to have left for Washington D.C., to explore the sites of battles in which he had fought. According to popular belief he then crossed in Mexico and caught up with Pancho Villa, tagging along in his campaigns as an observer. Some say he met his end in front of a Mexican firing squad, others that he likely died to complications from asthma. His female companion claims to have received a letter from Bierce telling her of his Mexican adventures, and that he was leaving in the morning for an unknown location. Nothing more was heard from the writer.

Though some doubt the story of his Mexican adventure, as he was already in ill-health and unlikely able to make the journey, others stand by it. At any rate, the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce is still today one of the great American vanishing acts.

The Death of Halpin FrayserÂwas originally published in 1893, as part of the collection Can Such Things Be?.

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For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether. – HALL.

One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: ‘Catharine Larue.’ He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said so much.

The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where he lives now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practises sleeping in the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp earth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves have fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and away the best persons, who regard that as a very advanced age. They are the children. To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came to his death by exposure.

He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking for doves and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon it had come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although he had only to go always downhill — everywhere the way to safety when one is lost — the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was overtaken by night while still in the forest. Unable in the darkness to penetrate the thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the root of a large madrono and fallen into a dreamless sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companions sweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word in the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not why, a name, he knew not whose.

Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. The circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and hardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption that the night was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep. But his sleep was no longer dreamless.

He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he travelled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway was a road less travelled, having the appearance, indeed, of having been long abandoned, because, he thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious necessity.

As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by invisible existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind. From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They seemed to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against his body and soul.

It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big, broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheel-ways were pitted and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage.

All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation — the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth — that he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and all was as before. But he had made a beginning at resistance and was encouraged. He said:

‘I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not malignant travelling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record and an appeal. I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure — I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!’ Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.

Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocket-book one half of which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with the point of his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt that this was not so — that it was near by and had not moved.

A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness — a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence — some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching him; from what direction he did not know — dared not conjecture. All his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to complete his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the haunted wood, might sometime rescue him if he should be denied the blessing of annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!

In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville, Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position in such society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Their children had the social and educational opportunities of their time and place, and had responded to good associations and instruction with agreeable manners and cultivated minds. Halpin being the youngest and not over robust was perhaps a trifle ‘spoiled.’ He had the double disadvantage of a mother’s assiduity and a father’s neglect. Frayser pere was what no Southern man of means is not — a politician. His country, or rather his section and State, made demands upon his time and attention so exacting that to those of his family he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.

Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn, somewhat more addicted to literature than law, the profession to which he was bred. Among those of his relations who professed the modern faith of heredity it was well understood that in him the character of the late Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the glimpses of the moon — by which orb Bayne had in his lifetime been sufficiently affected to be a poet of no small Colonial distinction. If not specially observed, it was observable that while a Frayser who was not the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy of the ancestral ‘poetical works’ (printed at the family expense, and long ago withdrawn from an inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed, there was an illogical indisposition to honour the great deceased in the person of his spiritual successor. Halpin was pretty generally deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in metre. The Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk — not practical in the popular sense of devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any qualities unfitting a man for the wholesome vocation of politics.

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In justice to young Halpin it should be said that while in him were pretty faithfully reproduced most of the mental and moral characteristics ascribed by history and family tradition to the famous Colonial bard, his succession to the gift and faculty divine was purely inferential. Not only had he never been known to court the Muse, but in truth he could not have written correctly a line of verse to save himself from the Killer of the Wise. Still, there was no knowing when the dormant faculty might wake and smite the lyre.

In the meantime the young man was rather a loose fish, anyhow. Between him and his mother was the most perfect sympathy, for secretly the lady was herself a devout disciple of the late and great Myron Bayne, though with the tact so generally and justly admired in her sex (despite the hardy calumniators who insist that it is essentially the same thing as cunning) she had always taken care to conceal her weakness from all eyes but those of him who shared it. Their common guilt in respect of that was an added tie between them. If in Halpin’s youth his mother had ‘spoiled’ him he had assuredly done his part toward being spoiled. As he grew to such manhood as is attainable by a Southerner who does not care which way elections go, the attachment between him and his beautiful mother — whom from early childhood he had called Katy — became yearly stronger and more tender. In these two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element in all the relations of life, strengthening, softening, and beautifying even those of consanguinity. The two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their manners were not infrequently mistaken for lovers.

Entering his mother’s boudoir one day Halpin Frayser kissed her upon the forehead, toyed for a moment with a lock of her dark hair which had escaped from its confining pins, and said, with an obvious effort at calmness:

‘Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to California for a few weeks?’

It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a question to which her tell-tale cheeks had made instant reply. Evidently she would greatly mind; and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.

‘Ah, my son,’ she said, looking up into his face with infinite tenderness,’ I should have known that this was coming. Did I not lie awake a half of the night weeping because, during the other half, Grandfather Bayne had come to me in a dream, and standing by his portrait — young, too, and handsome as that — pointed to yours on the same wall? And when I looked it seemed that I could not see the features; you had been painted with a face cloth, such as we put upon the dead. Your father has laughed at me, but you and I, dear, know that such things are not for nothing. And I saw below the edge of the cloth the marks of hands on your throat — forgive me, but we have not been used to keep such things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go to California. Or maybe you will take me with you?’

It must be confessed that this ingenious interpretation of the dream in the light of newly discovered evidence did not wholly commend itself to the son’s more logical mind; he had, for the moment at least, a conviction that it foreshadowed a more simple and immediate, if less tragic, disaster than a visit to the Pacific Coast. It was Halpin Frayser’s impression that he was to be garroted on his native heath.

‘Are there not medicinal springs in California?’ Mrs. Frayser resumed before he had time to give her the true reading of the dream — ‘places where one recovers from rheumatism and neuralgia? Look — my fingers feel so stiff; and I am almost sure they have been giving me great pain while I slept.’ She held out her hands for his inspection. What diagnosis of her case the young man may have thought it best to conceal with a smile the historian is unable to state, but for himself he feels bound to say that fingers looking less stiff, and showing fewer evidences of even insensible pain, have seldom been submitted for medical inspection by even the fairest patient desiring a prescription of unfamiliar scenes. The outcome of it was that of these two odd persons having equally odd notions of duty, the one went to California, as the interest of his client required, and the other remained at home in compliance with a wish that her husband was scarcely conscious of entertaining.

While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walking one dark night along the water-front of the city, when, with a suddenness that surprised and disconcerted him, he became a sailor. He was in fact ‘shanghaied’ aboard a gallant, gallant ship, and sailed for a far countree. Nor did his misfortunes end with the voyage; for the ship was cast ashore on an island of the South Pacific, and it was six years afterward when the survivors were taken off by a venturesome trading schooner and brought back to San Francisco.

Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud in spirit than he had been in the years that seemed ages and ages ago. He would accept no assistance from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow survivor near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news and remittances from home, that he had gone gunning and dreaming.

III

The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood — the thing so like, yet so unlike, his mother — was horrible! It stirred no love nor longings in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past — inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lustreless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood — a body without a soul! In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence — nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. ‘An appeal will not lie,’ he thought, with an absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light up a tomb.

For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew grey with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon him with appalling ferocity! The act released his physical energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant he seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator — such fancies are in dreams; then he regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce as that of its hideous antagonist.

But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream? The imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat’s result is the combat’s cause. Despite his struggles — despite his strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the cold fingers close upon his throat. Borne backward to the earth, he saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand’s-breadth of his own, and then all was black. A sound as of the beating of distant drums — a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.

A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog. At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light vapour — a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a cloud — had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would have said: ‘Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone.’

In a moment it was visibly larger and denser. While with one edge it clung to the mountain, with the other it reached farther and farther out into the air above the lower slopes. At the same time it extended itself to north and south, joining small patches of mist that appeared to come out of the mountain-side on exactly the same level, with an intelligent design to be absorbed. And so it grew and grew until the summit was shut out of view from the valley, and over the valley itself was an everextending canopy, opaque and grey. At Calistoga, which lies near the head of the valley and the foot of the mountain, there were a starless night and a sunless morning. The fog, sinking into the valley, had reached southward, swallowing up ranch after ranch, until it had blotted out the town of St. Helena, nine miles away. The dust in the road was laid; trees were adrip with moisture; birds sat silent in their coverts; the morning light was wan and ghastly, with neither colour nor fire.

Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first glimmer of dawn, and walked along the road north-ward up the valley toward Calistoga. They carried guns on their shoulders, yet no one having knowledge of such matters could have mistaken them for hunters of bird or beast. They were a deputy sheriff from Napa and a detective from San Francisco — Holker and Jaralson, respectively. Their business was man-hunting.

‘How far is it?’ inquired Holker, as they strode along, their feet stirring white the dust beneath the damp surface of the road.

‘The White Church? Only a half mile farther,’ the other answered. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘it is neither white nor a church; it is an abandoned schoolhouse, grey with age and neglect. Religious services were once held in it — when it was white, and there is a graveyard that would delight a poet. Can you guess why I sent for you, and told you to come armed?’

‘Oh, I never have bothered you about things of that kind. I’ve always found you communicative when the time came. But if I may hazard a guess, you want me to help you arrest one of the corpses in the graveyard.’

‘You remember Branscom?’ said Jaralson, treating his companion’s wit with the inattention that it deserved.

‘The chap who cut his wife’s throat? I ought; I wasted a week’s work on him and had my expenses for my trouble. There is a reward of five hundred dollars, but none of us ever got a sight of him. You don’t mean to say — ‘

‘Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you fellows all the time. He comes by night to the old graveyard at the White Church.’

‘The devil! That’s where they buried his wife.’

‘Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that he would return to her grave some time!’

‘The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return to.’

‘But you had exhausted all the other places. Learning your failure at them, I “laid for him” there.’

‘And you found him?’

‘Damn it! he found me. The rascal got the drop on me — regularly held me up and made me travel. It’s God’s mercy that he didn’t go through me. Oh, he’s a good one, and I fancy the half of that reward is enough for me if you’re needy.’

Holker laughed good-humouredly, and explained that his creditors were never more importunate.

‘I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with you,’ the detective explained. ‘I thought it as well for us to be armed, even in daylight.’

‘The man must be insane,’ said the deputy sheriff. ‘The reward is for his capture and conviction. If he’s mad he won’t be convicted.’

Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of justice that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed his walk with abated zeal.

‘Well, he looks it,’ assented Jaralson. ‘I’m bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the ancient and honourable order of tramps. But I’ve gone in for him, and can’t make up my mind to let go. There’s glory in it for us, anyhow. Not another soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the Moon.’

‘All right,’ Holker said; ‘we will go and view the ground,’ and he added, in the words of a once favourite inscription for tombstones: ‘”where you must shortly lie” — I mean if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion. By the way, I heard the other day that “Branscom” was not his real name.’

‘What is?’

‘I can’t recall it. I had lost all interest in the wretch and it did not fix itself in my memory — something like Pardee. The woman whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her. She had come to California to look up some relatives — there are persons who will do that sometimes. But you know all that.’

‘Naturally.’

‘But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you find the right grave? The man who told me what the name was said it had been cut on the headboard.’

‘I don’t know the right grave.’ Jaralson was apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan. ‘I have been watching about the place generally. A part of our work this morning will be to identify that grave. Here is the White Church.’

For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint grey outline through the fog, looking huge and far away. A few steps more, and it was within an arm’s length, distinct, dark with moisture, and insignificant in size. It had the usual country-schoolhouse form — belonged to the packing-box order of architecture; had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin — a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as ‘monuments of the past.’ With scarcely a glance at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on into the dripping undergrowth beyond.

‘I will show you where he held me up,’ he said. ‘This is the graveyard.’

Here and there among the bushes were small enclosures containing graves, sometimes no more than one. They were recognized as graves by the discoloured stones or rotting boards at head and foot, leaning at all angles, some prostrate; by the ruined picket fences surrounding them; or, infrequently, by the mound itself showing its gravel through the fallen leaves. In many instances nothing marked the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal — who, leaving ‘a large circle of sorrowing friends,’ had been left by them in turn — except a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of the mourners. The paths, if any paths had been, were long obliterated; trees of a considerable size had been permitted to grow up from the graves and thrust aside with root or branch the enclosing fences. Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.

As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their way through the growth of young trees, that enterprising man suddenly stopped and brought up his shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low note of warning, and stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon something ahead. As well as he could, obstructed by brush, his companion, though seeing nothing, imitated the posture and so stood, prepared for what might ensue. A moment later Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the other following.

Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man. Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike the attention — the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of a sympathetic curiosity.

The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart. One arm was thrust upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent acutely, and the hand was near the throat. Both hands were tightly clenched. The whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual resistance to — what?

Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of which was seen the plumage of shot birds. All about were evidences of a furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and denuded of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had been pushed into heaps and ridges on both sides of the legs by the action of other feet than theirs; alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions of human knees.

The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the dead man’s throat and face. While breast and hands were white, those were purple — almost black. The shoulders lay upon a low mound, and the head was turned back at an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded eyes staring blankly backward in a direction opposite to that of the feet. From the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded, black and swollen. The throat showed horrible contusions; not mere finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong hands that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh, maintaining their terrible grasp until long after death. Breast, throat, face, were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from the fog, studded the hair and moustache.

All this the two men observed without speaking — almost at a glance. Then Holker said:

‘Poor devil! he had a rough deal.’

Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his shotgun held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the trigger.

‘The work of a maniac,’ he said, without withdrawing his eyes from the enclosing wood. ‘It was done by Branscom — Pardee.’

Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth caught Holker’s attention. It was a redleather pocket-book. He picked it up and opened it. It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda, and upon the first leaf was the name ‘Halpin Frayser.’ Written in red on several succeeding leaves — scrawled as if in haste and barely legible — were the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while his companion continued scanning the dim grey confines of their narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water from every burdened branch:

‘Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.
The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
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Significant, in baleful brotherhood.

‘The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.

‘No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:
The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.
‘Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.
With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.

‘I cried aloud! — the spell, unbroken still,
Rested upon my spirit and my will.
Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!

‘At last the viewless — ‘

Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read. The manuscript broke off in the middle of a line.

‘That sounds like Bayne,’ said Jaralson, who was something of a scholar in his way. He had abated his vigilance and stood looking down at the body.

‘Who’s Bayne?’ Holker asked rather incuriously.

‘Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years of the nation — more than a century ago. Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I have his collected works. That poem is not among them, but it must have been omitted by mistake.’

‘It is cold,’ said Holker; ‘let us leave here; we must have up the coroner from Napa.’

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Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in compliance. Passing the end of the slight elevation of earth upon which the dead man’s head and shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance under the rotting forest leaves, and he took the trouble to kick it into view. It was a fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly decipherable words, ‘Catharine Larue.’

‘Larue, Larue!’ exclaimed Holker, with sudden animation. ‘Why, that is the real name of Branscom — not Pardee. And — bless my soul! how it all comes to me — the murdered woman’s name had been Frayser!’

‘There is some rascally mystery here,’ said Detective Jaralson. ‘I hate anything of that kind.’ There came to them out of the fog — seemingly from a great distance — the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their weapons nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be met with arms. As it had grown out of silence, so now it died away; from a culminating shout which had seemed almost in their ears, it drew itself away into the distance until its failing notes, joyous and mechanical to the last, sank to silence at a measureless remove.

M.R. James’ ghost stories written for Christmas strike an ominous chord year round

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Journal

M.R. James’ ghost stories have been making people wary of the dark for well over a century now. James helped usher in a new era of horror, taking literature beyond the gothic ghost stories which came before, and in a real sense, brought contemporary situations to horror. Even if his protagonists led lives not shared by most members of society, then or now, British or otherwise, the fear translates.

M.R. James was born Montague Rhodes James in 1862, the son of a cleric, and went on to become a scholar of medieval literature, specializing in ancient Christian and British historic manuscripts, as well as becoming Vice Chancellor at Cambridge and Provost of King’s College and Eton. Despite his success as an author of horror stories, academia was his world.

His friends called him Monty, and he was by many accounts the formal British gentleman and scholar portrayed in so many cliched forms over the past hundred years. But quirksome and with a mischievous glint in his eye, he had more P.G. Wodehouse about him than Downton Abbey. Despite not showing any proclivities towards vices or even the ladies other than as a friend – for all we know he died a virgin at the age of 73 – one area in which he strayed from his strict religious upbringing and moralistic surroundings was a love of ghost stories.

He was very fond of entertaining, friends, colleagues and students alike, which were usually men, as was to be expected from someone in his position. This has led to much speculation about his sexuality, which misses the point of James. Simply put, he didn’t put his sexuality out there, because he didn’t think it relevant. When it came to ghost stories, he didn’t care to blend sex with horror. Writing of other horror authors, James said “They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.”

Nor have I with the speculation on James’ sexuality. Of all the horrors he wrote about, the modern tendency to look for clues to his personal life would likely horrify him most.

It’s doubtful that M.R. James considered himself a horror writer, but instead a scholar. For M.R. James, ghost stories were something he did to entertain others, as well as himself. James was known to push the boundaries of his mind and talents. Even as he downplayed the results. Writing in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, James writes “Few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously.”

As a scholar, James was brilliant, one of the best alive in his time. Yet he didn’t look down on others, and through his ghost stories, he managed to speak to people in a way that connected, in language direct as well as elegant. You don’t feel spoken down to reading an M.R. James ghost story.

M.R. James ghost story images — Worbarrow Bay, Dorset. James set his stories quite often in isolated locations, such as the seaside out of season. In his work, the location blended seamlessly with the characters and plot as an essential element to the story.

How the tradition of reading an M.R. James ghost story at Christmas began

When M.R. James was 31 and a lecturer at Cambridge college, he was a member of the Chitchat Society. The group was comprised of scholars and associates of King’s College at Cambridge as well as Trinity College, for the purpose of “the promotion of rational conversation.” According to the minutes book, The Chitchat Club aimed to achieve this “by the intellectual discussion of an original paper read by the member in whose rooms they had met.” They met regularly, to discuss literature and other interesting topics, imbibe a bit and cut loose as only 19th century scholars could.

It was late in 1893 that M.R. James read his first ghost story to the Chitchat Society, Canon Albert’s Scrapbook, or as it was called at the time, A Curious Read. It was a hit from the start, and as the years went by, the author reading his stories aloud became a tradition, particularly when he started reading the tales at Christmas. It’s one of the tragedies of the modern age that we’ve lost this habit of reading aloud. It’s a performance that any literate person can share in, and much of literature was meant to be read this way. But it requires patience, sitting quietly, and it takes longer to read aloud than silently to one’s self. But the results are worth it.

James didn’t invent the idea of reading ghost stories at Christmas. That practice even predated Dickens which predated James. Few of James’ Christmas ghost stories are even set in the holidays. But he perfected the ghost story, and his Christmas readings at the Chitchat club and later in whatever position he held became legendary. Oliffe Richmond was in the audience at least once and wrote of what he saw. Following dinner, the group would move to James’ personal quarters and then “Monty disappeared into his bedroom. We sat and waited in the candlelight… “Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.”

It was the popularity of M.R. James ghost stories told at these gatherings, and a desire to help the career of a young illustrator that persuaded the author to publish his first collection. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary appeared in 1904, and little could James have known that he had sealed his place in popular culture for all time, and not just the tiny ripple of scholarly advancement and continuity he had hoped to make in academic quarters.

M.R. James Ghost Stories illustration — The Avenue, Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Somerset. Many of the protagonists of James’s stories were educators or historians, typically men who were interested in antiquities. The antiquarian ghost story descended from the writing of M.R. James.

Ghost and more in the stories of M.R. James

M.R. James downplayed the importance of his ghost stories. He wrote that “The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim. If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”

Though his plots and ideas resonated with the common man, his protagonists tended to be scholars and antiquarians, earning him the title of the father of the antiquarian ghost story, a field of writing which grew increasingly popular.

The concept of lost secrets and arcane knowledge, helped bring to life the work of another horror author, H.P. Lovecraft who was greatly influenced by M.R. James’ ghost stories. Writing in 1927 in an essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft writes “Montague Rhodes James has an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers.”

Like Lovecraft, many of James’ stories don’t deal with ghosts at all, but instead invoke horror and terror through secret, sometimes invisible agents. In some even, the source of terror was nothing more than an object.

James dispensed of some of the more gothic elements, which helps to make his writing cleaner, as well as shorter, though he was himself a fan of some gothic horror writers.

Instead he put his somewhat unique characters in ordinary settings, which many of us can and do find ourselves. In that manner, it’s possible to feel what his characters feel. The stoic, formal British character, the stiff upper lip is often tested by the weird, the grotesque, pushing at them to accept that all is not as as they believe. As their formal British facade crumbles in the face of the unknowable, the result is sheer terror. For it’s not just physical danger which defines the horror, but the loss of self, the crumbling of the psyche.

Or as Clark Ashton Smith wrote in 1934, “The peculiar genius of M. R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.”

M.R. James’ ghost stories are known for fanatical attention to detail, his ability to describe a setting in perfect detail. When the horror comes the detail gives way to an open ended description, perfect for you to get the idea, but allow your imagination to fill in the details. As Shirley Jackson proved in The Haunting of Hill House, or even Stephen King has toyed with, nothing an author can write can terrify as much as our own thoughts, creating the face of the monster out of our own individual fears.

M.R. James’ ghost stories can be equally entertaining to read for their description of the English countryside, or his character studies, just as much as for the elements of horror. It’s that balance of light and dark, the dichotomy of the pastoral settings, the quirky British tendency that even if things are as they should be, they aren’t quite right, that sets James apart from his contemporaries. And it’s his light touch, his skilled use of language that further set him apart as the master.

M.R. James ghost story illustration — Skull and bone detail of tomb, Bath Abbey, Somerset. James didn’t shy away from the macabre or the gruesome in his tales. Many of the descriptions he writes had their basis in the churches, abbeys and religious manuscripts of Britain and the continent.

M.R. James and his techniques of terror

“I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.”
M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Perhaps it could be said that M.R. James was the first modern horror writer. If you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula even, though both contain moments of pure terror, there are so many paths branching out in different directions that the sense of horror is seldom overbearing.

M.R. James’ ghost stories hurtle along towards the inevitable, horrifying conclusion with very little wasted language and few elements that let the mind stray elsewhere.

“Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”
M.R. James

The terrors that M.R. James introduced were different than the ghost stories of the past. Dickens, in his own classic Christmas ghost story, A Christmas Carol, managed to tell of the supernatural in a way which provoked little fear. Perhaps because we don’t identify with Scrooge, his miserly ways are beyond most of us. Though Ebenezer experiences sheer terror, we’re rooting for the ghosts in that tale.

James dispensed of the moralizing and went for the jugular. It was his intention to scare the shit out of his audiences.

Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Emil Petaja in 1935, that “M.R. James joins the brisk, the light, & the commonplace to the weird about as well as anyone could do it — but if another tried the same method, the chances would be ten to one against him. The most valuable element in him — as a model — is his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life & history — having it grow naturally out of the myriad conditions of an ordinary environment…”

Even when writing literary criticisms on the horror genre, James has an amazing skill with language … “At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice’, pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams’, are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M G Lewis.”

James famously wrote that “A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!”

James didn’t shy from the gruesome. In the story, Lost Hearts he writes of children having their still beating hearts carved from their chest after being given sanctuary in the country house of an eccentric English gentleman who pursued immortality through the occult. He could write the macabre, the gruesome and based many of his creatures descriptions and other horrors on the ancient manuscripts which he studied. “At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate. Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by the appalling effigy.”

What makes a Jamesian ghost story?

James work has proved so popular that he has many imitators, and few if any equals.

His stories were usually set in a village or country manor, typically Britain but sometimes as well on the European continent. Often the setting is a college or university, or even the seaside. Usually there is some reason why the characters find themselves isolated and alone, even if there are others nearby. His settings are easily explained as these were the places he knew well.

His characters were typically men, mainly clerics or scholars, again drawing on what he knew best. They tend to be somewhat oblivious to their surroundings. A seaside visitor might be so enraptured by the scenery as to miss several omens, and find himself wandering into danger without realizing it, even as the reader sees the horrifying steps before the protagonist takes them.

Finally, there’s some arcane knowledge discovered. Often it’s a book, an object, a painting or sketch, a manuscript or even a message hidden inside a book that creates the mystery that draws in the scholar. They become so obsessed with solving the mystery that they ignore the dangers till it’s too late.

A Jamesian story moves inexorably towards its conclusion, the pitch rising continually higher. James himself wrote that “Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.”

Great Chalfield Manor, Holt, Wiltshire. James’ ghost stories set in country houses captured the cracked veneer of the normalcy of the gentry floating on the surface, but who might very well be functioning under a hereditary curse, or be hiding an interest in arcane rituals involving cutting the beating hearts from vulnerable children.

The legacy of M.R. James and the Christmas ghost story

M.R. James died peacefully in 1936 in his bedroom at Eton College. He lived his life in the confines of academia. He travelled Europe extensively, as well as his own country of Britain, often by bicycle.

During his lifetime, he released four collections of ghost stories. His popularity never waned, but beginning in 1968 with a BBC production of Whistle and I’ll Come to You, it took on a new twist.

The BBC continued the trend by producing M.R. James stories for Christmas, in a series titled A Ghost Story for Christmas, which led to five dramatizations of his tales in the seventies.

Then in 2000, also from the BBC, our era’s Count Dracula, Christopher Lee read a collection of stories, in the character of M.R. James, by candlelight at King’s College.

The popularity of those led to more Christmas ghost stories from the BBC since, including one for Christmas of 2019. And just as Dicken’s Christmas ghost story led to a resurgence of Christmas traditions, so has James’ stories led to a revival of the tradition of ghost stories during the holidays.

M.R. James was the definition of a gentleman and a scholar

It always surprises me to hear of women being fans of M.R. James. It’s true that the horror in his stories is universal. But the characters, based on the types of people he knew best were usually male. Particularly the main characters. Unlike for instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, which was another conservative British bachelor scholar, before the movies sexed him up this past decade, the adaptation of James’ stories are still cloaked in that masculine, academic realm.

It’s a testimony to the sheer horror, the terror of M.R. James ghost stories that the appeal is universal.

There’s an appeal to that kind of lifestyle. At several points in my own life, I’ve sworn off the comforts and curses of romantic love, and felt assured that lost in my own pursuits, both scholarly and antiquarian, I could live out my days more contentedly than in the fervent swelling of youth. But like a character from one of James’ stories, I too missed the warning signs and finally have found myself in the clutches of that most unknown and unknowable creature. The right woman.

James never gave away his secret, how he felt about ghosts, whether he believed or not. All he said on the subject was “I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.” But he did allude in an unpublished work written near his death to an experience as a child which may have made him a believer.

But like his sexuality, there is no need to understand the man to understand his gift. As he himself wrote, “God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands.” Perhaps James did believe in the supernatural, but that misses the point. James knew fear, and the possibility that there is more to this world than meets the eye. That’s all he needed to know to create some of the greatest horror stories in the canon.

James left a lot to the reader’s imagination, and so as we read his tales, together we create horrors that are unique to each of us. As for the mysteries of James himself, for those who care, the answer can be summed up I his own words … “The reader must judge for himself.”

Ghost stories from M.R. James from the Wytchery

The Ash Tree by M.R. James
The Mezzotint
The Tractate Middoth

Original published collections of the ghost stories of M.R. James

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1904. 8 stories. More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1911. 7 stories. A Thin Ghost and Others. 1919. 5 stories. A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. 1925. 6 stories. Wailing Well. 1928 (tale), Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley.

A Warning to the Curious by M. R. James

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories

M.R. James is one of the best loved writers of ghost stories in the English language. An academic by nature and profession, as well as a devout Christian, James was cagey when discussing his own belief in the supernatural. His tales usually involved antiquarians who delved a bit too deeply into the mysteries they studied, with sinister results.

James claimed “I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas.” His first collection of ghost stories appeared in 1904, Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary, with another volume following in his lifetime. To learn more about Christmas ghost stories click here.

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The place on the east coast which the reader is asked to consider is Scaburgh. It is not very different now from what I remember it to have been when I was a child. Marshes intersected by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fir woods, and, above all, gorse, inland. A long sea-front and a street: behind that a spacious church of flint, with a broad, solid western tower and a peal of six bells. How well I remember their sound on a hot Sunday in August, as our party went slowly up the white, dusty slope of road towards them, for the church stands at the top of a short, steep incline. They rang with a flat clacking sort of sound on those hot days, but when the air was softer they were mellower too. The railway ran down to its little terminus farther along the same road. There was a gay white windmill just before you came to the station, and another down near the shingle at the south end the town, and yet others on higher ground to the north. There were cottages of bright red brick with slate roofs… but why do I encumber you with these commonplace details? The fact is that they come crowding to the point of the pencil when it begins to write of Seaburgh. I should like to be sure that I had allowed the right ones to get on to the paper. But I forgot. I have not quite done with the word-painting business yet.

Walk away from the sea and the town, pass the station, and turn up the road on the right. It is a sandy road, parallel with the railway, and if you follow it, it climbs to somewhat higher ground. On your left (you are now going northward) is heath, on your right (the side towards the sea) is a belt of old firs, wind-beaten, thick at the top, with the slope that old seaside trees have; seen on the skyline from the train they would tell you in an instant, if you did not know it, that you were approaching a windy coast. Well, at the top of my little hill, a line of these firs strikes out and runs towards the sea, for there is a ridge that goes that way; and the ridge ends in a rather well-defined mound commanding the level fields of rough grass, and a little knot of fir trees crowns it. And here you may sit on a hot spring day, very well content to look at blue sea, white windmills, red cottages bright green grass, church tower, and distant martello tower on the south.

As I have said, I began to know Seaburgh as a child; but a gap of a good many years separates my early knowledge from that which is more recent. Still it keeps its place in my affections, and any tales of it that I pick up have an interest for me. One such tale is this: it came to me in a place very remote from Seaburgh, and quite accidentally, from a man whom I had been able to oblige–enough in his opinion to justify his making me his confidant to this extent.

I know all that country more or less (he said). I used to go to Scaburgh pretty regularly for golf in the spring. I generally put up at the ‘Bear’, with a friend–Henry Long it was, you knew him perhaps–(‘Slightly,’ I said) and we used to take a sitting-room and be very happy there. Since he died I haven’t cared to go there. And I don’t know that I should anyhow after the particular thing that happened on our last visit.

It was in April, 19–, we were there, and by some chance we were almost the only people in the hotel. So the ordinary public rooms were practically empty, and we were the more surprised when, after dinner, our sitting-room door opened, and a young man put his head in. We were aware of this young man. He was rather a rabbity anaemic subject–light hair and light eyes–but not unpleasing. So when he said: ‘I beg your pardon, is this a private room?’ we did not growl and say: ‘Yes, it is,’ but Long said, or I did–no matter which: ‘Please come in.’ ‘Oh, may I?’ he said, and seemed relieved. Of course it was obvious that he wanted company; and as he was a reasonable kind of person–not the sort to bestow his whole family history on you–we urged him to make himself at home. ‘I dare say you find the other rooms rather bleak,’ I said. Yes, he did: but it was really too good of us, and so on. That being got over, he made some pretence of reading a book. Long was playing Patience, I was writing. It became plain to me after a few minutes that this visitor of ours was in rather a state of fidgets or nerves, which communicated itself to me, and so I put away my writing and turned to at engaging him in talk.

After some remarks, which I forget, he became rather confidential. ‘You’ll think it very odd of me’ (this was the sort of way he began), ‘but the fact is I’ve had something of a shock.’ Well, I recommended a drink of some cheering kind, and we had it. The waiter coming in made an interruption (and I thought our young man seemed very jumpy when the door opened), but after a while he got back to his woes again. There was nobody he knew in the place, and he did happen to know who we both were (it turned out there was some common acquaintance in town), and really he did want a word of advice, if we didn’t mind. Of course we both said: ‘By all means,’ or ‘Not at all,’ and Long put away his cards. And we settled down to hear what his difficulty was.

‘It began,’ he said, ‘more than a week ago, when I bicycled over to Froston, only about five or six miles, to see the church; I’m very much interested in architecture, ‘and it’s got one of those pretty porches with niches and shields. I took a photograph of it, and then an old man who was tidying up in the churchyard came and asked if I’d care to look into the church. I said yes, and he produced a key and let me in. There wasn’t much inside, but I told him it was a nice little church, and he kept it very clean, “But,” I said, “the porch is the best part of it.” We were just outside the porch then, and he said, “Ah, yes, that is a nice porch; and do you know, sir, what’s the meanin’ of that coat of arms there?”

‘It was the one with the three crowns, and though. I’m not much of a herald, I was able to say yes, I thought it was the old arms of the kingdom of East Anglia.

“‘That’s right, sir,” he said, “and do you know the meanin’ of them three crowns that’s on it?”

‘I said I’d no doubt it was known, but I couldn’t recollect to have heard it myself.

‘”Well, then,” he said, “for all you’re a scholard, I can tell you something you don’t know. Them’s the three ‘oly crowns what was buried in the ground near by the coast to keep the Germans from landing–ah, I can see you don’t believe that. But I tell you, if it hadn’t have been for one of them ‘oly crowns bein’ there still, them Germans would a landed here time and again, they would. Landed with their ships, and killed man, woman and child in their beds. Now then, that’s the truth what I’m telling you, that is; and if you don’t believe me, you ast the rector. There he comes: you ast him, I says.”

‘I looked round, and there was the rector, a nice-looking old man, coming up the path; and before I could begin assuring my old man, who was getting quite excited, that I didn’t disbelieve him, the rector struck in, and said:

“What’s all this about, John? Good day to you, sir. Have you been looking at our little church?”‘

‘So then there was a little talk which allowed the old man to calm down, and then the rector asked him again what was the matter.

“‘Oh,” he said, “it warn’t nothink, only I was telling this gentleman he’d ought to ast you about them ‘oly crowns.”

‘”Ah, yes, to be sure,” said the rector, “that’s a very curious matter, isn’t it? But I don’t know whether the gentleman is interested in our old stories, eh?”

‘”Oh, he’ll be interested fast enough,” says the old man, “he’ll put his confidence in what you tells him, sir; why, you known William Ager yoursell, father and son too.”

‘Then I put in a word to say how much I should like to hear all about it, and before many minutes I was walking up the village street with the rector, who had one or two words to say to parishioners, and then to the rectory, where he took me into his study. He had made out, on the way, that I really was capable of taking an intelligent interest in a piece of folklore, and not quite the ordinary tripper. So he was very willing to talk, and it is rather surprising to me that the particular legend he told me has not made its way into print before. His account of it was this: “There has always been a belief in these parts in the three holy crowns. The old people say they were buried in different places near the coast to keep off the Danes or the French or the Germans. And they say that one of the three was dug up a long time ago, and another has disappeared by the encroaching of the sea, and one’s still left doing its work, keeping off invaders. Well, now, if you have read the ordinary guides and histories of this county, you will remember perhaps that in 1687 a crown, which was said to be the crown of Redwald, King of the East Angles, was dug up at Rendlesham, and alas! alas! melted down before it was even properly described or drawn. Well, Rendlesham isn’t on the coast, but it isn’t so very far inland, and it’s on a very important line of access. And I believe that is the crown which the people mean when they say that one has been dug up. Then on the south you don’t want me to tell you where there was a Saxon royal palace which is now under the sea, eh? Well, there was the second crown, I take it. And up beyond these two, they say, lies the third.”

‘”Do they say where it is?” of course I asked.

‘He said, “Yes, indeed, they do, but they don’t tell,” and his manner did not encourage me to put the obvious question. Instead of that I waited a moment, and said: “What did the old man mean when he said you knew William Ager, as if that had something to do with the crowns?”

‘”To be sure,” he said, “now that’s another curious story. These Agers it’s a very old name in these parts, but I can’t find that they were ever people of quality or big owners these Agers say, or said, that their branch of the family were the guardians of the last crown. A certain old Nathaniel Ager was the first one I knew–I was born and brought up quite near here–and he, I believe, camped out at the place during the whole of the war of 1870. William, his son, did the same, I know, during the South African War. And young William, his son, who has only died fairly recently, took lodgings at the cottage nearest the spot; and I’ve no doubt hastened his end, for he was a consumptive, by exposure and night watching. And he was the last of that branch. It was a dreadful grief to him to think that he was the last, but he could do nothing, the only relations at all near to him were in the colonies. I wrote letters for him to them imploring them to come over on business very important to the family, but there has been no answer. So the last of the holy crowns, if it’s there, has no guardian now.”

‘That was what the rector told me, and you can fancy how interesting I found it. The only thing I could think of when I left him was how to hit upon the spot where the crown was supposed to be. I wish I’d left it alone.

‘But there was a sort of fate in it, for as I bicycled back past the churchyard wall my eye caught a fairly new gravestone, and on it was the name of William Ager. Of course I got off and read it. It said “of this parish, died at Seaburgh, 19–, aged 28.”‘There it was, you see. A little judicious questioning in the right place, and I should at least find the cottage nearest the spot. Only I didn’t quite know what was the right place to begin my questioning at. Again there was fate: it took me to the curiosity-shop down that way–you know–and I turned over some old books, and, if you please, one was a prayer-book of 1740 odd, in a rather handsome binding–I’lljust go and get it, it’s in my room.’

He left us in a state of some surprise, but we had hardly time to exchange any remarks when he was back, panting, and handed us the book opened at the fly-leaf, on which was, in a straggly hand:

‘Nathaniel Ager is my name and England is my nation,

Seaburgh is my dwelling-place and Christ is my Salvation,

When I am dead and in my Grave, and all my bones are rotton,

I hope the lord will think on me when I am quite forgotton.’

This poem was dated 1754, and there were many more entries of Agers, Nathaniel, Frederick, William, and so on, ending with William, 19–.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘anybody would call it the greatest bit of luck. I did, but I don’t now. Of course I asked the shopman about William Ager, and of course he happened to remember that he lodged in a cottage in the North Field and died there. This was just chalking the road for me. I knew which the cottage must be: there is only one sizable one about there. The next thing was to scrape some sort of acquaintance with the people, and I took a walk that way at once. A dog did the business for me: he made at me so fiercely that they had to run out and beat him off, and then naturally begged my pardon, and we got into talk. I had only to bring up Ager’s name, and pretend I knew, or thought I knew something of him, and then the woman said how sad it was him dying so young, and she was sure it came of him spending the night out of doors in the cold weather. Then I had to say: “Did he go out on the sea at night?” and she said: “Oh, no, it was on the hillock yonder with the trees on it.” And there I was.

‘I know something about digging in these barrows: I’ve opened many of them in the down country. But that was with owner’s leave, and in broad daylight and with men to help. I had to prospect very carefully here before I put a spade in: I couldn’t trench across the mound, and with those old firs growing there I knew there would be awkward tree loots. Still the soil was very light and sandy and easy, and there was a rabbit hole or so that might be developed into a sort of tunnel. The going out and coming back at odd hours to the hotel was going to be the awkward part. When I made up my mind about the way to excavate I told the people that I was called away for a night, and I spent it out there. I made my tunnel: I won’t bore you with the details of how I supported it and filled it in when I’d done, but the main thing is that I got the crown.’

Naturally we both broke out into exclamations of surprise and interest. I for one had long known about the finding of the crown at Rendlesham and had often lamented its fate. No one has ever seen an Anglo-Saxon crown–at least no one had. But our man gazed at us with a rueful eye. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and the worst of it is I don’t know how to put it back.’

‘Put it back?’ we cried out. ‘Why, my dear sir, you’ve made one of the most exciting finds ever heard of in this country. Of course it ought to go to the Jewel Houise at the Tower. What’s your difficulty? If you’re thinking about the owner of the land, and treasure-trove, and all that, we can certainly help you through. Nobody’s going to make a fuss about technicalities in a case of this kind.’

Probably more was said, but all he did was to put his face in his hands, and mutter: ‘I don’t know how to put it back.’

At last Long said: ‘You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I seem impertinent, but are you quite sure you’ve got it?’ I was wanting to ask much the same question myself, for of course the story did seem a lunatic’s dream when one thought over it. But I hadn’t quite dared to say what might hurt the poor young man’s feelings. However, he took it quite calmly–really, with the calm of despair, you might say. He sat up and said: ‘Oh, yes, there’s no doubt of that: I have it here, in my loom, locked up in my bag. You can come and look at it if you like: I won’t offer to bring it here.’

We were not likely to let the chance slip. We went with him; his room was only a few doors off. The boots was just collecting shoes in the passage: or so we thought: afterwards we were not sure. Our visitor–his name was Parton–was in a worse state of shivers than before, and went hurriedly into the room, and beckoned us after him, turned on the light, and shut the door careflilly. Then he unlocked his kit-bag, and produced a bundle of clean pocket-handkerchief in which something was wrapped, laid it on the bed, and undid it. I can now say I have seen an actual Anglo-Saxon crown. It was of silver–as the Rendlesham one is always said to have been–it was set with some gems, mostly antique intaglios and cameos, and was of rather plain, almost rough workmanship. In fact, it was like those you see on the coins and in the manuscripts. I found no reason to think it was later than the ninth century. I was intensely interested, of course, and I wanted to turn it over in my hands, but Paxton prevented me. ‘Don’t you touch it,’ he said, ‘I’ll do that.’ And with a sigh that was, I declare to you, dreadful to hear, he took it up and turned it about so that we could see every part of it. ‘Seen enough?’ he said at last, and we nodded. He wrapped it up and locked it in his bag, and stood looking at us dumbly. ‘Come back to our room,’ Long said, ‘and tell us what the trouble is.’ He thanked us, and said: ‘Will you go first and see if–if the coast is clear?’ That wasn’t very intelligible, for our proceedings hadn’t been, after all, very suspicious, and the hotel, as I said, was practically empty. However, we were beginning to have inklings of–we didn’t know what, and anyhow nerves are infectious. So we did go, first peering out as we opened the door, and fancying (I found we both had the fancy) that a shadow, or more than a shadow–but it made no sound–passed from before us to one side as we came out into the passage. ‘It’s all right,’ we whispered to Paxton–whispering seemed the proper tone–and we went, with him between us, back to our sitting-room. I was preparing, when we got there, to be ecstatic about the unique interest of what we had seen, but when I looked at Paxton I saw that would be terribly out of place, and I left it to him to begin.

‘What is to be done?’ was his opening. Long thought it right (as he explained to me afterwards) to be obtuse, and said: ‘Why not find out who the owner of the land is, and inform–‘ Oh, no, no!’ Paxton broke in impatiently, ‘I beg your pardon: you’ve been very kind, but don’t you see it’s got to go back, and I daren’t be there at night, and daytime’s impossible. Perhaps, though, you don’t see: well, then, the truth is that I’ve never been alone since I touched it.’ I was beginning some fairly stupid comment, but Long caught my eye, and I stopped. Long said: ‘I think I do see, perhaps: but wouldn’t it be a relief–to tell us a little more clearly what the situation is?’

Then it all came out: Paxton looked over his shoulder and beckoned to us to come nearer to him, and began speaking in a low voice: we listened most intently, of course, and compared notes afterwards, and I wrote down our version, so I am confident I have what he told us almost word for word. He said: ‘It began when I was first prospecting, and put me off again and again. There was always somebody–a man–standing by one of the firs. This was in daylight, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked straight for him. I would lie down for quite a long time and take careful observations, and make sure there was no one, and then when I got up and began prospecting again, there he was. And he began to give me hints, besides; for wherever I put that prayer-book–short of locking it up, which I did at last–when I came back to my loom it was always out on my table open at the flyleaf where the names are, and one of my razors across it to keep it open. I’m sure he just can’t open my bag, or something more would have happened. You see, he’s light and weak, but all the same I daren’t face him. Well, then, when I was making the tunnel, of course it was worse, and if I hadn’t been so keen I should have dropped the whole thing and run. It was like someone scraping at my back all the time: I thought for a long time it was only soil dropping on me, but as I got nearer the–the crown, it was unmistakable. And when I actually laid it bare and got my fingers into the ring of it and pulled it out, there came a sort of cry behind me–oh, I can’t tell you how desolate it was! And horribly threatening too. It spoilt all my pleasure in my find–cut it off that moment. And if I hadn’t been the wretched fool I am, I should have put the thing back and left it. But I didn’t. The rest of the time was just awful. I had hours to get through before I could decently come back to the hotel. First I spent time filling up my tunnel and covering my tracks, and all the while he was there trying to thwart me. Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don’t, just as he pleases, I think: he’s there, but he has some power over your eyes. Well, I wasn’t off the spot very long before sunrise, and then I had to get to the junction for Seaburgh, and take a train back. And though it was daylight fairly soon, I don’t know if that made it much better. There were always hedges, or gorse-bushes, or park fences along the road–some sort of cover, I mean–and I was never easy for a second. And then when I began to meet people going to work, they always looked behind me very strangely: it might have been that they were surprised at seeing anyone so early; but I didn’t think it was only that, and I don’t now: they didn’t look exactly at me. And the porter at the train was like that too. And the guard held open the door after I’d got into the carriage–just as he would if there was somebody else coming, you know. Oh, you may be very sure it isn’t my fancy,’ he said with a dull sort of laugh. Then he went on: ‘And even if I do get it put back, he won’t forgive me: I can tell that. And I was so happy a fortnight ago.’ He dropped into a chair, and I believe he began to cry.

We didn’t know what to say, but we felt we must come to the rescue somehow, and so–it really seemed the only thing–we said if he was so set on putting the crown back in its place, we would help him. And I must say that after what we had heard it did seem the right thing. If these horrid consequences had come on this poor man, might there not really be something in the original idea of the crown having some curious power bound up with it, to guard the coast? At least, that was my feeling, and I think it was Long’s too. Our offer was very welcome to Paxton, anyhow. When could we do it? It was nearing half-past ten. Could we contrive to make a late walk plausible to the hotel people that very night? We looked out of the window: there was a brilliant full moon–the Paschal moon. Long undertook to tackle the boots and propitiate him. He was to say that we should not be much over the hour, and if we did find it so pleasant that we stopped out a bit longer we would see that he didn’t lose by sitting up. Well, we were pretty regular customers of the hotel, and did not give much trouble, and were considered by the servants to be not under the mark in the way of tips; and so the boots was propitiated, and let us out on to the sea-front, and remained, as we heard later, looking after us. Paxton had a large coat over his arm, under which was the wrapped-up crown.

So we were off on this strange errand before we had time to think how very much out of the way it was. I have told this part quite shortly on purpose, for it really does represent the haste with which we settled our plan and took action. ‘The shortest way is up the hill and through the churchyard,’ Paxton said, as we stood a moment before, the hotel looking up and down the front. There was nobody about–nobody at all. Seaburgh out of the season is an early, quiet place. ‘We can’t go along the dyke by the cottage, because of the dog,’ Paxton also said, when I pointed to what I thought a shorter way along the front and across two fields. The reason he gave was good enough. We went up the road to the church, and turned in at the churchyard gate. I confess to having thought that there might be some lying there who might be conscious of our business: but if it was so, they were also conscious that one who was on their side, so to say, had us under surveillance, and we saw no sign of them. But under observation we felt we were, as I have never felt it at another time. Specially was it so when we passed out of the churchyard into a narrow path with close high hedges, through which we hurried as Christian did through that Valley; and so got out into open fields. Then along hedges, though I world sooner have been in the open, where I could see if anyone was visible behind me; over a gate or two, and then a swerve to the left, taking us up on to the ridge which ended in that mound.

As we neared it, Henry Long felt, and I felt too, that there were what I can only call dim presences waiting for us, as well as a far more actual one attending us. Of Paxton’s agitation all this time I can give you no adequate picture: he breathed like a hunted beast, and we could not either of us look at his face. How he would manage when we got to the very place we had not troubled to think: he had seemed so sure that that would not be difficult. Nor was it. I never saw anything like the dash with which he flung himself at a particular spot in the side of the mound, and tore at it, so that in a very few minutes the greater part of his body was out of sight. We stood holding the coat and that bundle of handkerchief, and looking, very fearfully, I must admit, about us. There was nothing to be seen: a line of dark firs behind us made one skyline, more trees and the church tower half a mile off on the right, cottages and a windmill on the horizon on the left, calm sea dead in front, faint barking of a dog at a cottage on a gleaming dyke between us and it: full moon making that path we know across the sea: the eternal whisper of the Scotch firs just above us, and of the sea in front. Yet, in all this quiet, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment.

Paxton pulled himself out of the hole, and stretched a hand back to us. ‘Give it to me,’ he whispered, ‘unwrapped.’ We pulled off the handkerchiefs, and he took the crown. The moonlight just fell on it as he snatched it. We had not ourselves touched that bit of metal, and I have thought since that it was just as well. In another moment Paxton was out of the hole again and busy shovelling back the soil with hands that were already bleeding He would have none of our help though It was much the longest part of the job to get the place to look undisturbed yet–I don’t know how–he made a wonderful success of it. At last he was satisfied and we turned back.

We were a couple of hundred yards from the hill when Long suddenly said to him: ‘I say you’ve left your coat there. That won’t do See?’ And I certainly did see it–the long dark overcoat lying where the tunnel had been. Paxton had not stopped, however: he only shook his head, and held up the coat on his arm. And when we joined him, he said, without any excitement, but as if nothing mattered any more: ‘That wasn’t my coat.’ And, indeed, when we looked back again, that dark thing was not to be seen.

Well, we got out on to the road, and came rapidly back that way. It was well before twelve when we got in, trying to put a good face on it, and saying–Long and I–what a lovely night it was for a walk. The boots was on the look-out for us, and we made remarks like that for his edification as we entered the hotel. He gave another look up and down the sea-front before he locked the front door, and said: ‘You didn’t meet many people about, I s’pose, sir?’ ‘No, indeed, not a soul,’ I said; at which I remember Paxton looked oddly at me. ‘Only I thought I see someone turn up the station road after you gentlemen,’ said the boots. ‘Still, you was three together, and I don’t suppose he meant mischief.’ I didn’t know what to say; Long merely said ‘Good night,’ and we went off upstairs, promising to turn put all lights, and to go to bed in a few minutes.

Back in our room, we did our very best to make Paxton take a cheerful view. There’s the crown safe back,’ we said; ‘very likely you’d have done better not to touch it’ (and he heavily assented to that), ‘but no real harm has been done, and we shall never give this away to anyone who would be so mad as to go near it. Besides, don’t you feel better yourself? I don’t mind confessing,’ I said, ‘that on the way there I was very much inclined to take your view about–well, about being followed; but going back, it wasn’t at all the same thing, was it?’ No, it wouldn’t do: ‘You’ve nothing to trouble yourselves about,’ he said, ‘but I’m not forgiven. I’ve got to pay for that miserable sacrilege still. I know what you are going to say. The Church might help. Yes, but it’s the body that has to suffer. It’s true I’m not feeling that he’s waiting outside for me just now. But-‘ Then he stopped. Then he turned to thanking us, and we put him off as soon as we could. And naturally we pressed him to use our sitting-room next day, and said we should be glad to go out with him. Or did he play golf, perhaps? Yes, he did, but he didn’t think he should care about that tomorrow. Well, we recommended him to get up late and sit in our room in the morning while we were playing, and we would have a walk later in the day. He was very submissive and piano about it all: ready to do just what we thought best, but clearly quite certain in his own mind that what was coming could not be averted or palliated. You’ll wonder why we didn’t insist on accompanying him to his home and seeing him safe into the care of brothers or someone. The fact was he had nobody. He had had a flat in town, but lately he had made up his mind to settle for a time in Sweden, and he had dismantled his flat and shipped off his belongings, and was whiling away a fortnight or three weeks before he made a start. Anyhow, we didn’t see what we could do better than sleep on it–or not sleep very much, as was my case and see what we felt like tomorrow morning.

We felt very different, Long and I, on as beautiful an April morning as you could desire; and Paxton also looked very different when we saw him at breakfast. ‘The first approach to a decent night I seem ever to have had,’ was what he said. But he was going to do as we had settled: stay in probably all the morning, and come out with us later. We went to the links; we met some other men and played with them in the morning, and had lunch there rather early, so as not to be late back. All the same, the snares of death overtook him.

Whether it could have been prevented, I don’t know. I think he would have been got at somehow, do what we might. Anyhow, this is what happened.

We went straight up to our room. Paxton was there, reading quite peaceably. ‘Ready to come out shortly?’ said Long, ‘say in half an hour’s time?’ ‘Certainly,’ he said: and I said we would change first, and perhaps have baths, and call for him in half an hour. I had my bath first, and went and lay down on my bed, and slept for about ten minutes. We came out of our rooms at the same time, and went together to the sitting-room. Paxton wasn’t there–only his book. Nor was he in his room, nor in the downstair rooms. We shouted for him. A servant came out and said: ‘Why, I thought you gentlemen was gone out already, and so did the other gentleman. He heard you a-calling from the path there, and run out in a hurry, and I looked out of the coffee-room window, but I didn’t see you. ‘Owever, he run off down the beach that way.’

Without a word we ran that way too–it was the opposite direction to that of last night’s expedition. It wasn’t quite four o’clock, and the day was fair, though not so fair as it had been, so that was really no reason, you’d say, for anxiety: with people about, surely a man couldn’t come to much harm.

But something in our look as we ran out must have struck the servant, for she came out on the steps, and pointed, and said, ‘Yes, that’s the way he went.’ We ran on as far as the top of the shingle bank, and there pulled up. There was a choice of ways: past the houses on the sea-front, or along the sand at the bottom of the beach, which, the tide being now out, was fairly broad. Or of course we might keep along the shingle between these two tracks and have some view of both of them; only that was heavy going. We chose the sand, for that was the loneliest, and someone might come to harm there without being seen from the public path.

Long said he saw Paxton some distance ahead, running and waving his stick, as if he wanted to signal to people who were on ahead of him. I couldn’t be sure: one of these sea-mists was coming up very quickly from the shuth. There was someone, that’s all I could say. And there were tracks on the sand as of someone running who wore shoes; and there were other tracks made before those–for the shoes sometimes trod in them and interfered with them–of someone not in shoes. Oh, of course, it’s only my word you’ve got to take for all this: Long’s dead, we’d no time or means to make sketches or take casts, and the next tide washed everything away. All we could do was to notice these marks as we hurried on. But there they were over and over again, and we had no doubt whatever that what we saw was the track of a bare foot, and one that showed more bones than flesh.

The notion of Paxton running after–after anything like this, and supposing it to be the friends he was looking for, was very dreadful to us. You can guess what we fancied: how the thing he was following might stop suddenly and turn round on him, and what sort of face it would show, half-seen at first in the mist–which all the while was getting thicker and thicker. And as I ran on wondering how the poor wretch could have been lured into mistaking that other thing for us, I remembered his saying, ‘He has some power over your eyes.’ And then I wondered what the end would be, for I had no hope now that the end could be averted, and–well, there is no need to tell all the dismal and horrid thoughts that flitted through my head as we ran on into the mist. It was uncanny, too, that the sun should still be bright in the sky and we could see nothing. We could only tell that we were now past the houses and had reached that gap there is between them and the old martello tower. When you are past the tower, you know, there is nothing but shingle for a long way–not a house, not a human creature; just that spit of land, or rather shingle, with the river on your right and the sea on your left.

Butjust before that, just by the martello tower, you remember there is the old battery, close to the sea. I believe there are only a few blocks of concrete left now: the rest has all been washed away, but at this time there was a lot more, though the place was a ruin. Well, when we got there, we clambered to the top as quick as we could to take breath and look over the shingle in front if by chance the mist would let us see anything. But a moment’s rest we must have. We had run a mile at least. Nothing whatever was visible ahead of us, and we were just turning by common consent to get down and run hopelessly on, when we heard what I can only call a laugh: and if you can understand what I mean by a breathless, a lungless laugh, you have it: but I don’t suppose you can. It came from below, and swerved away into the mist. That was enough. We bent over the wall. Paxton was there at the bottom.

You don’t need to be told that he was dead. His tracks showed that he had run along the side of the battery, had turned sharp round the corner of it, and, small doubt of it, must have dashed straight irito the open arms of someone who was waiting there. His mouth was full of sand and stones, and his teeth and jaws were broken to bits. I only glanced once at his face.

At the same moment, just as we were scrambling down from the battery to get to the body, we heard a shout, and saw a man running down the bank of the martello tower. He was the caretaker stationed there, and his keen old eyes had managed to descry through the mist that something was wrong. He had seen Paxton fall, and had seen us a moment after, running up–fortunate this, for otherwise we could hardly have escaped suspicion of being concerned in the dreadful business. Had he, we asked, caught sight of anybody attacking our friend? He could not be sure.

We sent him off for help, and stayed by the dead man till they came with the stretcher. It was then that we traced out how he had come, on the narrow fringe of sand under the battery wall. The rest was shingle, and it was hopelessly impossible to tell whither the other had gone.

What were we to say at the inquest? It was a duty, we felt, not to give up, there and then, the secret of the crown, to be published in every paper. I don’t know how much you would have told; but what we did agree upon was this: to say that we had only made acquaintance with Paxton the day before, and that he had told us he was under some apprehension of danger at the hands of a man called William Ager. Also that we had seen some other tracks besides Paxton’s when we followed him along the beach. But of course by that time everything was gone from the sands.

No one had any knowledge, fortunately, of any William Ager living in the district. The evidence of the man at the martello tower freed us from all suspicion. All that could be done was to return a verdict of wilful murder by some person or persons unknowtn.

Paxton was so totally without connections that all the inquiries that were subsequently made ended in a No Thoroughfare. And I have never been at Seaburgh, or even near it, since.

Glassic Gothic Ghost Stories: Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Terrestrial Anomalies, Extra-terrestrial visitors, hairy monsters, abandoned asylums and assorted weird tales

Building 93, KIng’s Park Psychiatric Hospital, Long Island, New York

Growing up in the seventies, we were more likely to equate the title of this short story to Black Sabbath than to H.P. Lovecraft. A song by that same title appeared on their debut album, Black Sabbath in 1970.

Much has been written about a thread of white supremacy in Lovecraft’s work, but with Beyond the Wall of Sleep, he broadens his venom to include the descendants of Dutch ancestry from the Catskill mountains in upstate New York. It deals with some of the classic elements of the gothic ghost story – madness, murder and asylums, in a chilling look at one man’s descent into insanity and ultimately, death.

Lovecraft composed the tale early in his career, in 1919, and it was first published in a small, amateur publication, the Pine Cones in October of that same year.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

H.P. Lovecraft

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900–1901, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when first I beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case. This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly; with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbours to his cabin—a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting his determination to reach some ‘big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor, and the loud queer music far away’. As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain ‘thing that shines and shakes and laughs’. At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a daemoniac ecstasy of bloodthirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would ‘jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped him’. Family and neighbours had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognisable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine, they realised that he had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed searching party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became that of a sheriff’s posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the nearest gaol; where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awaked to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbour Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact. That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he wakened with no singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Dr. Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality; and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man’s mental attacks. After some show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a strait-jacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbours. Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leathern harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On the source of Slater’s visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream life, and from this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me; born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever recognised me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never enjoy again. His family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of decadent mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation was, that in a kind of semi-uncorporeal dream life Slater wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light; in a region unbounded and unknown to man. That there he was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life; moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge. From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a true dream-world indeed existed, oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dulness could not utter? Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is sceptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion, convertible into ether waves of radiant energy like heat, light, and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a fellow-student; but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use. Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream life of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments again; and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater’s violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own; constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain; but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one of their nature.

It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing finally occurred. As I look back across the years I realise how unreal it seems; and sometimes half wonder if old Dr. Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year’s vacation on which I departed the next week. That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep. I did not strap on the strait-jacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic “radio”; hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand; while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air; extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendour. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes; covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eye could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal, plastic entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted aeons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth—where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene; fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of colour which had never before been present. The lips, too, seemed unusual; being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had been Slater’s. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes. I did not arouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged head-bands of my telepathic “radio”, intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was now gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanded eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.
“Joe Slater is dead,” came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. “He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years. I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquillity! Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence—you who without knowing idly gave to its blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Daemon-Star. It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for aeons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the Daemon-Star. I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet—the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again—perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away.”
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, and the pale eyes of the dreamer—or can I say dead man?—commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an insistent and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Dr. Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honour that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulate in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me—yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biassed witness, another’s pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. Garrett P. Serviss:

“On February 22, 1901, a marvellous new star was discovered by Dr. Anderson, of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye.”

Laudanum from the Witch’s Garden: The opiate that drove the romantic poets to enlightenment and insanity

A Witch's Garden Grimoire, Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Daily Life in History

I’m standing in the Tate Gallery, years ago, staring at the painting by Sir John Everett Millais of Ophelia. I know the story, and the story of the model, Elizabeth Siddal. It was the Pre-Raphelite movement in painting, the romantic poets were just fading away. Elizabeth was a great beauty of her time, but in a subtle way. She was the wife, as well as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her and her husband both partook of Laudanum, her more than him. She became a full blown addict, lost a child, and died of an overdose. Upon finding her corpse, it took three doctors to convince Rossetti his wife was dead.

That painting always haunted me. The landscape looks like Wonderland. And as Ophelia floats down the stream to her doom, you don’t see the anguish. Or at least I don’t. I see Alice.

Laudanum is diluted opium, a ten percent solution in a tincture, some say the color of dried blood and very bitter. Many people think of opium as morphine, which it is, but it also contains the opiates codeine and thebaine, as well. The idea was hashed out by a Swiss-German alchemist, Paracelsus, known as the father of toxicology, in the sixteenth century. It went through many permutations, mixed with everything from alcohol to hashish, belladonna, mercury and even cayenne pepper. Along the way it picked up a devoted following.

And to think, it all came from poppies.

My favorite laudanum story, I got from a friend who swore it was true. Her mother in law, a nice little old lady here in the states decided to have a tea party, a real Victorian affair. She heard laudanum was a popular item in the Victorian era, and so managed somehow to score some, and proceeded to dose the tea with it. It did not turn out well, but all survived.

Into the Victorian era, Laudanum was cheap – cheaper at times than alcohol, available without a prescription and thought to cure almost whatever ailed you. Your kid keeps acting up? A few drops of opium will calm him down. Feeling a little down? It’ll pick you up. Diarrhea, bronchitis, colds, gout and of course anything to do with a woman’s reproductive system and cycle.

Being incredibly addictive, if you suffered from a prolonged illness you could come out of it with a nasty habit.

Or as was often the case, a fondness for the idyllic daydream state it gave you, or even your mind opened and creativity sparked. Until the addict’s habit takes over the creative part of the brain.

Being the artsy type, I’ve always been interested in the relationship between art and altered states. I freely admit, I’ve experimented on a number of occasions, with varying results. But the further you go down that path, the less and less work you do.

Usually. There are exceptions. But very few happy endings. You seldom read about anyone who speaks warmly of their time as an addict. I never got that far, but I got close enough to the edge to see what was on the other side.

Seed pods from an Opium Poppy, the source of opium. By Cate Davies, artist.

To the Victorians in particular, laudanum provided haven in a horrifying world. Britain’s extensive trade network ensures a steady, and cheap supply of opium to manufacture it. And then the Brits got into the cultivation of the Opium Poppy.

In Poe’s Ligeia, the opium addict narrator eludes to a few ruby colored drops into his wife’s drink, which brings upon her death. It’s assumed this is laudanum, as the telling part is that Poe set this story in England.

Incidentally, the rumor that Poe was an opium addict is unlikely to be true. That’s not to say he never had laudanum, it was universal for certain common maladies of the day. The rumor gets its fuel from Ligeia and other opium references in his stories, and the common belief that writers are auto biographical in their work. Which with Poe in particular, wasn’t always true.

There were plenty of people who were experimenting with Laudanum and art. Wilkie Collins, who knew a thing or two about horror took it for gout and rheumatism, and used it in the plot of The Moonstone.

Elizabeth Barret Browning was up to 40 drops a day when she began corresponding with her future husband, Robert Browning, after starting on the drug following an injury at the age of fifteen. It’s believed that the drug contributed to her frail health for the rest of her life.

The example most often pointed to for laudanum use in art is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. The poem, written after waking from an opium induced dream is indeed visionary. But those visions turned to nightmares brought on later by Coleridge’s addiction.

From Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Cassy uses laudanum to kill a child, to The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Dickens, which features the nefarious Uncle Jasper who swills the stuff, the drug became mainstream.

In horror novels, it plays a part in both Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In a sense, Laudanum helped inspire both. Dracula was influenced by an earlier work, The Vampyre by John Polidori. Polidori was staying with Lord Byron, another noted laudanum consumer, at Byron’s villa in Switzerland. Byron was in exile for among other things, a rumored incestuous relationship with his half sister. A competition conceived one evening during a storm, to see who could write the best horror story led to Polidori’s book, expanded upon by an idea originally proposed by Byron. Perhaps as a doctor, Polidori’s main role was as supplier, we’ll never know. But his lasting work was The Vampyr.

The only other story to come out of that evening, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose protagonist Victor takes laudanum to calm his nerves and sleep.

Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy was there and came up with only a fragment of a tale, poetry being his thing. His influence is keenly felt on his wife’s book though, as the genesis of the idea came from a conversation between him and Polidori. Percy kept a flask with laudanum, and by all accounts, it did seem to free up his creativity early on. But it took its toll, mentally and eventually physically. Byron’s daughter also became an addict.

I’ve never taken laudanum myself. It really first came to my attention from the Ken Russell film Gothic, a fictional (we hope) account of that night in Switzerland with Byron, Shelley and the rest. It’s filmed from the point of view of someone indulging right along with the poets, and does an admirable job of making the viewer feel it. How accurate it is I don’t know, but it pretty much warned me against it. I like strange, but I have my limits.

So is there a takeaway to these anecdotes? If so it’s this. Laudanum was made for occasional use, not prolonged use. It did have valid medical benefits. But those benefits were negated when it because a habit.

Some writers and artists did find a creative spark in laudanum, but if it became a regular habit, it stopped being useful and caused other problems. And if left unchecked, quite often misery and death.

From Wikipedia we learn that M. H. Abrams, whose most influential work to any American undergraduate was overseeing the Norton Anthology of English Literature, weighed in on the subject. He believed in what he called the mirror and the lamp. In short, he believed that the reader during the Romantic era saw literature as a mirror on their society. He believed the writers saw what they were doing as bringing out their inner soul to illuminate the world, and that the drugs helped access a place inside them that couldn’t be reached any other way.

He saw their opium use as a tool that freed their inner self and let it come pouring out in verse. But he also saw the dark side, Of Percy Bysshe Shelley, he wrote “The tragedy of Shelley’s short life was that intending always the best, he brought disaster and suffering upon himself and those he loved.”

Also from Wikipedia, Elisabeth Schneider counters that the euphoria produced by opium “merely frees the creativity naturally found within the poet.”

Either way, it had the desired effect, at least for a while. In our zero tolerance was on drugs, saying recreational drugs use has benefits is akin to farting in church. But it’s true, and our kids aren’t stupid enough not to realize it. They see it in popular culture all the time, in some of the most influential people of their age. And they see them die, and hopefully make up their own mind, not just react to slogans.

I’m reminded of Louis Armstrong who was an avid marijuana smoker in his youth. From reading about him I learned that in fact, marijuana slows down your perception of time, which is beneficial when you’re trying to cram sixty four notes in two seconds. The story was the same with him. The benefits he got from the drug were outweighed when he got busted in an era much more prohibitive than today.

In the end, art, be it visual or literary comes from inside. We all have different ways of reaching that place to yank it out. The romantics went deeper than we do in our art today, and perhaps it took a bit of nature’s wonder to set it free.

Exploring the imagination of Washington Irving and early American folklore along the Rip Van Winkle Trail in the Catskills … a photo essay

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Journal, Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson River Valley

WHOEVER has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky, but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

RIP VAN WINKLE, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow emerges from the sludge of childhood memories, cloaked in reds and oranges, made crisp with the first cool breeze of autumn. I pity the generations born after Tim Burton got a hold of Sleepy Hollow and painted that Washington Irving story in blues and blacks. It’s a beautiful film, but he missed an essential part of the story, the autumn connection.

Luckily he didn’t get his hands on Rip Van Winkle and so I still have that direct pipeline into the feeling I got from the story as a child.

Just guessing, I likely ran across both stories in the Autumn. TV programmers also seemed to associate the two stories with that season.

Those of us who grew up in rural areas lived with a different kind of Autumn. You didn’t have to take the yearly pilgrimage to check out the fall foliage. You were surrounded by it. The cornfields turned brown and were ready for picking and the entire landscape changed to a new palette.

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View of the Catskills from Rip's Lookout Point, Rip Van Winkle Trail, near Palenville, NY — View of the Catskills from Rip’s Lookout Point, Rip Van Winkle Trail, near Palenville, NY

The Catskill, Katskill, or Cat River Mountains, derived their name in the time of the Dutch Domination, from the catamounts by which they were infested, and which, with the bear and the deer, are still found in some of their most difficult recesses. The interior of these mountains is in the highest degree wild and romantic. Here are rocky precipices mantled with primeval forests, deep gorges walled in by beetling cliffs, with torrents tumbling as it were from the sky, and savage glens rarely trodden except by the hunter. With all this internal rudeness, the aspect of these mountains towards the Hudson at times is eminently bland and beautiful, sloping down into a country softened by cultivation and bearing much of the rich character of Italian scenery about the skirts of the Appenines.

Washington Irving, Spanish Papers, and other Miscellanies hitherto unpublished or uncollected

As you wind up Interstate 87 northward through the Hudson Valley, the Catskill Escarpment rises up dramatically, forming a wall to your west, an ominous introduction to one of the country’s most mysterious regions.

This area was originally a high plateau, which over the past few million years has been carved by rivers and streams into the mountains we see today. Glaciers widened the ravines and rounded off the mountain tops, forming the Catskill’s unmistakable shapes. The process continues, so slowly we can’t see it except from repeated visits when our years pile up. But it’s hard to see the slow, steady effects of nature from the highway, where the fast moving sleight of hand of man seeks to reshape this region for it’s own, commercial purposes.

And yet the mystique clings to these peaks as surely as the mist which shrouds their summits when you time it just right and get lucky with your visit. No amount of roadside kitsch can dilute the haunted atmosphere which hangs on the valleys and dales of the Catskills.

There’s a feeling we get when mountains rise and fall so suddenly. The Catskills aren’t like much of the Appalachians, spread out lazily across the horizon. It’s more compact, tightly squeezed and the hollows seem darker, or as Irving wrote, “long blue shadows over the valleys”, the air a bit cooler and wherever you smelled wood smoke in the early years of our country, you found talked of mystery and imagination.

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Catskill Mountains from across the Hudson River at Olana. Washington Irving stayed with friends on this side of the Hudson before writing Rip Van Winkle, and most of his views of the Catskills were from a distance, like this one.

Rip Van Winkle was born on the Hudson River

At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a Village, whose shingle roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant (may he rest in peace!), and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks, brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weathercocks.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

We’re a nation of immigrants so it’s no wonder our folk tales are based on those from other lands. Much of this country was Dutch, and a European feel colored much of the early history of the area. Folklore, like people, travel along highways, and in the earliest days the highway which led from relative civilization to the Catskills was the Hudson River.

As many of us remember from childhood history class, upstate New York was explored by Henry Hudson, on his ship the Half Moon, giving that mighty river its name. Hudson made friends with the native Americans, trading with them and hearing their stories. He was searching for the northwest passage across the continent, for a shortcut to the Orient. He went as far as Albany before turning back, convinced, rightly, that the passage would not lie in that direction.

As they followed the current south, back towards New Amsterdam and fall coming on, they sailed past the Catskills. It was about midnight when Hudson heard music coming down from the mountains. Intrigued, Hudson and a few crew members went to shore, in search of the source. They climbed up into the mountains and the music got louder.

Reaching the edge of a cliff, Hudson came across a crew of men, short in stature, with long, crabby beards, dancing to the strains of this unearthly music, their eyes glowing red. Seeing Hudson and his men, the dwarves welcomed them and brought them closer to the firelight. They were treated to a strong draught, brewed in the mountains, heady and intoxicating and the men took to dancing around the fire, mingling with the dwarves while their Captain sipped a single glass and spoke to their leader, learning something of their mysterious secrets.

Hudson decided it was time to return and sail on, but when he went to call to his men, he couldn’t find them. He soon realized they had become absorbed by the dwarves, taking on the same features and looking little like they had when they left the ship. Hudson remembered being warned about these metal working residents of the Catskills, from the tales told to him by the native Americans.

The leader of the dwarves explained to Hudson it was simply the effect of the liquor, and as it wore off they’d return to their former selves. The Captain took leave of their hosts and marched the transformed crew members back down the mountainside to their ship, and true to his host’s word, they were back to the their normal features and height when they awoke, though sporting insanely nasty hangovers.

Twenty years later, Hudson was dead, set adrift by mutineers and never seen again. But on that anniversary of that night, and every twenty years after, Hudson and his crew step once more into the firelight and dance and play nine pins with the dwarves in the moonlight, the sound of falling pins like thunder across the mountains.

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The Hudson River from the Bear Mountain Overlook

The Catskill Mountains, as I have observed, maintain all the internal wildness of the labyrinth of mountains with which they are connected. Their detached position, overlooking a wide lowland region, with the majestic Hudson rolling through it, has given them a distinct character, and rendered them, at all times, a rallying point for romance and fable. Much of the fanciful associations with which they have been clothed may be owing to their being peculiarly subject to those beautiful atmospherical effects, which constitute one of the great charms of Hudson River scenery. To me they have ever been the fairy region of the Hudson. I speak, however, from early impressions, made in the happy days of boyhood, when all the world had a tinge of fairyland. I shall never forget my first view of these mountains. It was in the course of a voyage up the Hudson, in the good old times, before steamboats and railroads had driven all poetry and romance out of travel. A voyage up the Hudson in those days was equal to a voyage to Europe at present, and cost almost as much time; but we enjoyed the river then; we relished it as we did our wine, sip by sip; not as at present, gulping all down at a draught, without tasting it. My whole voyage up the Hudson was full of wonder and romance.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

How the spirit of Rip Van Winkle took over rock and roll

Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell where are you going?
This he told meSaid, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm,
Gonna join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free. Joni Mitchell

For many of us, the story of Rip Van Winkle is our introduction to folklore. Washington Irving was one of our first writers of renown, so it’s logical to start with him. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is more advanced, more intense. Rip Van Winkle reads like an American fairy tale, and weaves into its fabric threads of our country’s birth. It’s taught early in the year, as the history classes are still in the colonial era, merging seamlessly into autumn, the time of year when the story is set.

When we reach middle age, the strains of that story are set so far into our past that it could be in our DNA. Mention the name, or mention the Catskills and our mind turns orange and red with autumnal memories, the smell of leaves freshly fallen and the sound of our feet crunching over and through them. The landscape glows, and all the magic, all the mystery returns on those first cool breezes.

This was a pilgrimage I was destined to make from the time I was in first grade, far too long in coming. The history of the Catskills didn’t end with Irving. The Catskill’s theater scene, and horror tales of standup comedians playing the resorts wormed their way into my young mind from watching Johnny Carson. Woodstock made it a musical mecca, and over time it became harder to remember that initial feeling I got when I heard the word Catskill. It had been influenced by too many currents. I knew I had to get back to the garden if you will, back to what drew me there to begin with. And so as I hurtled up Interstate 87, I took the Saugerties exit and headed towards Woodstock.

On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins. They were dressed in a quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts, and most of them had enormous breeches, of similar style with that of the guide’s. Their visages, too, were peculiar: one had a large beard, broad face, and small piggish eyes: the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and colors. There was one who seemed to be the commander. He was a stout old gentleman, with a weather-beaten countenance; he wore a laced doublet, broad belt and hanger, high-crowned hat and feather, red stockings, and high-heeled shoes, with roses in them. The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlor of Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

This mountain zone is, in fact, the great poetical region of our country, resisting, like the tribes which once inhabited it, the taming hand of cultivation, and maintaining a hallowed ground for fancy and the Muses. It is a magnificent and all-pervading feature that might have given our country a name, and a poetical one, had not the all-controlling powers of commonplace determined otherwise.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

As I came off the interstate and approached the toll booth, I turned down my car stereo. It was a George Harrison album, and the guy in the booth lit up. He’d just bought an anthology of Harrison’s, after being without his music for years. That’s the kind of thing you expect as you approach Woodstock.

Woodstock is much more to rock and roll than the festival that borrowed its name, which wasn’t even held in Woodstock, but fifty miles away. That weekend might have taken over the name, but rock and roll took over the town even before the festival.

Dylan came here to recover from a motorcycle accident. His backing band followed and the locals started calling them The Band, which stuck.

Living in the Catskills changed The Band. They had spent years on the road, touring with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks, then with Dylan. It was a chance to get off the road, to live in a house rather than hotel rooms and vans. According to their keyboardist, Garth Hudson who still lives in the area, it was a chance to “get reacquainted with screen doors and dishwashers and going to the dump.”

The metamorphosis eerily reflected Henry Hudson’s crew who partied with the dwarves in the mountains and took on their characteristics. Rolling Stone wrote that when they landed in Woodstock, “They grew beards, split firewood, collected antique rifles, planted marijuana in the woods and began dressing like nineteenth-century frontier gunslingers, in wool vests and denim shirts and cowboy boots. ‘They looked unlike anyone we’d ever met,’ remembers folk musician Happy Traum, who moved to Woodstock the previous year, ‘like something from another world’”

Their music changed too. The nucleus of The Band came from Canada, supplemented by a drummer, Levon Helm, from Arkansas. Inspired by Dylan’s poetry, and the tales they heard from Levon about the American south, and from years on the road, they sang about an America disappearing and in some cases, long gone. Their music took on the flavors of America’s past, forging a new sound.

Together, Dylan and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes in the basement of a house three of the members lived in, called Big Pink, in the woods between Woodstock and West Saugerties. There they gave a big shot in the arm to the new style known as country-rock, and almost single handedly invented the sound and style of music which is now known as Americana or roots music, though it took about half a century for it to catch on.

George Harrison came for Thanksgiving to visit Dylan, and saw his days with The Beatles were nearly over. Eric Clapton came for a visit and was inspired to quit Cream. Both wanted to join The Band, so enamored were they by the sound, the lifestyle and the organic way they had of making music. Van Morrison followed and moved in nearby, and most of the New York scene at least visited. Todd Rundgren took a job engineering and producing records in nearby Bearsville, working for Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman who had a vision of Woodstock as a mecca for artists.

The dream of Peace still hangs on in the Catskill village of Woodstock — The dream of peace still hangs on in the Catskill village of Woodstock

The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair made his dream a reality and Woodstock went from being the sleepy little Catskill village it was into what it is today. There are drum circles on Sundays in the village square, head shops abound, peace and love fills the air.

But there’s nothing worse than seeing your childhood put up for sale, which is always how I feel when I’m in a hip, rock and roll or even witchy shopping district. So after the cursory walk through town, I got back in the car and followed the main street into the countryside, and after a brief detour looking for Todd Rundgren’s psychic imprint on Mink Hollow, made my way north.

The Catskills, Mink Hollow — Mink Hollow, where Todd Rundgren holed up and recorded The Hermit of Mink Hollow. The hermit didn’t refer to Rundgren himself, but a folk tale about an escaped mental patient who terrorized the night and was believed to live in the Catskill forests of that area.

The other arts, along with Rip Van Winkle led the way to making the Catskills a tourist destination,

James Fenimore Cooper is credited with writing the first American novel, and his native Americans in The Last of the Mohicans travelled the trails of the Catskills. The poets that Washington Irving spoke of did in fact write of the region, long before the folkies and the rockers made their stamp on it. William Cullen Bryant wrote of a visit to Kaaterskill falls in winter …

Midst greens and shades the Catterskill leaps,
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps
With the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.

But when, in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,
He builds, in the starlight clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air.

The Catskills have been called America’s first wilderness. Only a couple hundred miles from New York City, artists started flocking to the mountains when tourism started early in the 19th century. The Hudson River school was America’s first art movement, a collective of artists who worked in the region, and they brought the beauty of the landscape to the attention of the world. Thomas Cole kept a studio in the town of Catskill, and across the river Fredric Edwin Church built his electric home Olana overlooking the Hudson with the Catskills beyond.

The further north you go the more the signs of the sagging tourism industry jumps out at you. What was once upscale is now often in ruins. The resorts of old are increasingly boarded up, or in ruins with only the big players who can afford full service and nightly entertainment still in business.

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The Falls of Kaaterskill by Thomas Cole, one of the artists of the Hudson River School

On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the singularity of the stranger’s appearance. He was a short square-built old fellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled beard. His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion—a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist—several pair of breeches, the outer one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the sides, and bunches at the knees. He bore on his shoulder a stout keg, that seemed full of liquor, and made signs for Rip to approach and assist him with the load. Though rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance, Rip complied with his usual alacrity; and mutually relieving one another, they clambered up a narrow gully, apparently the dry bed of a mountain torrent. As they ascended, Rip every now and then heard long rolling peals, like distant thunder, that seemed to issue out of a deep ravine, or rather cleft, between lofty rocks, toward which their rugged path conducted. He paused for an instant, but supposing it to be the muttering of one of those transient thunder-showers which often take place in mountain heights, he proceeded.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

Outside of Saugerties is a wilderness area known as Devil’s Kitchen, the name thought to have been inspired by the boulder infested gorge that runs through it, forming caldrons of swirling, churning water. Early settlers reported that during storms, they’d hear banging coming from below, like the sound you’d hear coming from a very large kitchen.

Like much of the Catskills, and many places with high overlooks and sheer bluffs, Devil’s Kitchen has seen its share of fatalities by unfortunate or careless hikers. Those foolhardy enough to hike the area at night, or intrepid campers spending the night in the area report seeing strange lights in the forest, swinging to and fro, like lanterns being carried by the ghosts of the miners who used to work here. Mining, particularly blue stone was once big business in the Catskills, and many miners met their fate in these hills around Devil’s Kitchen. So it would be no surprise to find their spirits still trying to find the way home, the light of their lanterns being the only sign of their continued existence here in this world.

From a science website called The Weather Dork I found what seems to be a typical encounter with the ghost lights of Devil’s Kitchen …

“There is a small campsite at the top of the cliffs above Devil’s Kitchen. This campsite is frequented by kids that live in West Saugerties looking to sneak away into the woods. I have never been to the campsite personally, however, a friend from high school did frequent the campsite and told me of a story that happened to him and three others.”

“It was late September and the four boys hiked down the path leading to the campsite above Devil’s Kitchen. My friend told me that the path was littered with downed trees and bushes that prevented a steady pace. At the campsite, they boys made a fire and began cooking dinner. Soon after dinner while the boys were talking around the fire, they began to hear moaning and whispers in the trees around them. At first they believed the wind and trees were creaking and moaning but to make sure they grabbed flashlights and began walking around the area to see if anyone was nearby. They walked down the path that led to and from the campsite. When they came around a corner they saw a light floating in the path about 40 feet in front of them. The boys called out to whoever it was standing on the trail. There was no response. Another light appeared behind the first and slowly floated toward the closest. (Mind you this path is full of trees and there is no way to hold a lantern steady while negotiating the trail.) The boys called out again but there was no sound. They put their flashlights together to try to see as far down the path as possible but there was no figure or person, just a light among the downed trees.”

“The light disappeared. At this point the boys went back to the camp to pack up to leave; however, when they got back to the camp and were putting out the fire they could hear the voices and rustling in the woods all around them. While walking as fast as they could down the path to get back to their cars they could see lights in the woods around them. Finally they made it down the trail and cliffs and went home.”

I love these places where the locals go to engage in their libations and tell their ghost stories. But I’m looking for Rip Van Winkle, and by all accounts he’s to be found a little further north and to the west. And since I wasn’t prepared to camp on the heights of Devil’s Kitchen, I pressed on.

Approaching the Catskills and Rip Van Winkle Bridge

Washington Irving and the cultural appropriation of native American folklore

“I was a lively boy, somewhat imaginative, of easy faith, and prone to relish everything that partook of the marvellous. Among the passengers on board the sloop was a veteran Indian trader, on his way to the Lakes, to traffic with the natives. He had discovered my propensity, and amused himself throughout the voyage by telling me Indian legends and grotesque stories about every noted place on the river, such as Spuyten Devil Creek, the Tappan Sea, the Devil’s Darts Kammer, and other hobgoblin places. The Catskill Mountains, especially, called forth a host of fanciful traditions. We were all day slowly tiding along in sight of them, so that he had full time to weave his whimsical narratives. In these mountains, he told me, according to Indian belief, was kept the great treasury of storm and sunshine for the region of the Hudson. An old squaw spirit had charge of it, who dwelt on the highest peak of the mountain. Here she kept day and night shut up in her wigwam, letting out only one of them at a time. She made new moons every month, and hung them up in the sky, cutting up the old ones into stars. The great Manitou or master spirit employed her to manufacture clouds. Sometimes she wove them out of cobwebs, gossamers, and morning dew, and sent them off, flake after flake, to float in the air and give light summer showers. Sometimes she would brew up black thunder-storms, and send down drenching rains, to swell the streams and sweep everything away. He had many stories, also, about mischievous spirits, who infested the mountains, in the shape of animals, and played all kinds of pranks upon Indian hunters, decoying them into quagmires and morasses, or to the brinks of torrents and precipices. All these were doled out to me as I lay on the deck, throughout a long summer’s day, gazing upon these mountains, the ever-changing shapes and bites of which appeared to realize the magical influences in question. Sometimes they seemed to approach, at others to recede; during the heat of the day they almost melted into a sultry haze; as the day declined they deepened in tone; their summits were brightened by the last rays of the sun, and later in the evening their whole outline was printed in deep purple against an amber sky. As I beheld them, thus shifting continually before my eye, and listened to the marvellous legends of the trader, a host of fanciful notions concerning them was conjured into my brain, which have haunted it ever since.”

Washington Irving, Spanish Papers, and other Miscellanies hitherto unpublished or uncollected

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What strikes me about the passage above, indeed about much of Irving’s writing in both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is the wealth of native American folklore. European Americans today shy away from that, keeping it separate from their own folklore. It’s likely guilt for the horrible treatment our ancestors dished out on those people, and still do.

But folklore doesn’t have to be tied to a particular people. Folklore is ingrained into the landscape. The features that inspire the tales inspire all cultures that pass through it. Irving didn’t hesitate to bring the native American tales into his own, just as he pulled from European folklore when writing Rip Van Winkle, which is easy enough to understand. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent, which contained both stories was written whilst staying in England, and England was a melting pot thousands of years before white people set foot on North America.

The neolithic people who first started raising stones to the heavens, arranging then in circles for the most part, didn’t pass their DNA to the Britons of today. It’s believed that the neolithic people who started Stonehenge, and who built many of the monuments still in existence today first came to Britain from the area around the Aegean Sea. It’s been proposed that 90% or more of those people died out or were replaced by the stock of the Beaker culture, which was replaced by successive waves of invaders. With each wave came new stories to imprint on the landscapes they found. Folklore is tied to the land, as much or more so than it is to a people.

So Irving didn’t hesitate to use the native American tales he heard in the Hudson Valley, and integrate those with the folklore of the old Dutch culture which first settled the region. And so we gain a better understanding of the beliefs that swirled around this region during Irving’s life, and the colorful strains of folklore which ran through it.

Not that Irving knew much about the Catskills at the time he wrote Rip Van Winkle in 1819. He only saw those mountains from a boat on the Hudson as he floated by on a handful of trips north, and incorporated tales and travelogues to flesh his description.

But there was at least one occasion where Irving had set foot in the Catskills. Whilst visiting a wealthy land owner on the east side of the Hudson, across from the Catskills, he accompanied the fellow’s daughters to some land their father owned around Saugerties and Woodstock. Woodstock at the time was little more than a sawmill, but the scattered farmhouses – cabins and brick houses which he writes about in Rip Van Winkle would have been found in the Saugerties area. And like the story, the people who lived there would have spoke a combination of Dutch and English, and were well versed in the ways of local folklore and fear of witchcraft. They too would have been quite familiar with the native American tales, which would influence their own.

The Catskill tourism industry began with The Catskill Mountain House. Built by a group of merchants from the nearby town of Catskill, it was situated on a plateau with sweeping views of of the Hudson valley on one side, and two forested lakes on the other. It was already a noted viewpoint, immortalized by the artists in Hudson River School, as well as writings by John Bertram and James Fenimore Cooper.

And long before that, the native Americans has their own tales to tell of the place. Writing in Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, first published in 1896, Charles M. Skinner told the tale of the Catskill’s most famous witch, likely lifted at least in part from Irving’s description in Rip Van Winkle.

“When the Dutch gave the name of Katzbergs to the mountains west of the Hudson, by reason of the wild-cats and panthers that ranged there, they obliterated the beautiful Indian Ontiora, “mountains of the sky.” In one tradition of the red men these hills were bones of a monster that fed on human beings until the Great Spirit turned it into stone as it was floundering toward the ocean to bathe. The two lakes near the summit were its eyes. These peaks were the home of an Indian witch, who adjusted the weather for the Hudson Valley with the certainty of a signal service bureau. It was she who let out the day and night in blessed alternation, holding back the one when the other was at large, for fear of conflict. Old moons she cut into stars as soon as she had hung new ones in the sky, and she was often seen perched on Round Top and North Mountain, spinning clouds and flinging them to the winds. Woe betide the valley residents if they showed irreverence, for then the clouds were black and heavy, and through them she poured floods of rain and launched the lightnings, causing disastrous freshets in the streams and blasting the wigwams of the mockers. In a frolic humor she would take the form of a bear or deer and lead the Indian hunters anything but a merry dance, exposing them to tire and peril, and vanishing or assuming some terrible shape when they had overtaken her. Sometimes she would lead them to the cloves and would leap into the air with a mocking “Ho, ho!” just as they stopped with a shudder at the brink of an abyss.”

Skinner also wrote of another bit of folklore, attached to the place.

“On the rock platform where the Catskill Mountain House now stands, commanding one of the fairest views in the world, old chief Shandaken set his wigwam,—for it is a mistake to suppose that barbarians are indifferent to beauty,—and there his daughter, Lotowana, was sought in marriage by his braves. She, however, kept faith to an early vow exchanged with a young chief of the Mohawks. A suitor who was particularly troublesome was Norsereddin, proud, morose, dark-featured, a stranger to the red man, a descendant, so he claimed, from Egyptian kings, and who lived by himself on Kaaterskill Creek, appearing among white settlements but rarely.”

On one of his visits to Catskill, a tavern-lounging Dutchman wagered him a thousand golden crowns that he could not win Lotowana, and, stung by avarice as well as inflamed by passion, Norsereddin laid new siege to her heart. Still the girl refused to listen, and Shandaken counselled him to be content with the smiles of others, thereby so angering the Egyptian that he assailed the chief and was driven from the camp with blows; but on the day of Lotowana’s wedding with the Mohawk he returned, and in a honeyed speech asked leave to give a jewel to the bride to show that he had stifled jealousy and ill will. The girl took the handsome box he gave her and drew the cover, when a spring flew forward, driving into her hand the poisoned tooth of a snake that had been affixed to it. The venom was strong, and in a few minutes Lotowana lay dead at her husband’s feet.”

Though the Egyptian had disappeared into the forest directly on the acceptance of his treacherous gift, twenty braves set off in pursuit, and overtaking him on the Kalkberg, they dragged him back to the rock where father and husband were bewailing the maid’s untimely fate. A pile of fagots was heaped within a few feet of the precipice edge, and tying their captive on them, they applied the torch, dancing about with cries of exultation as the shrieks of the wretch echoed from the cliffs. The dead girl was buried by the mourning tribe, while the ashes of Norsereddin were left to be blown abroad. On the day of his revenge Shandaken left his ancient dwelling-place, and his camp-fires never glimmered afterward on the front of Ontiora.”

And where you find high cliffs overlooking water and native Americans, you inevitably find folklore telling the tale of lover’s leaps. Skinner captured one here in the Catskills:

“The name of Indian Maiden’s Cliff—applied to a precipice that hangs above the wild ravine of Stony Clove, in the Catskills—commemorates the sequel to an elopement from her tribe of an Indian girl and her lover. The parents and relatives had opposed the match with that fatal fatuity that appears to be characteristic of story-book Indians, and as soon as word of her flight came to the village they set off in chase. While hurrying through the tangled wood the young couple were separated and the girl found herself on the edge of the cliff. Farther advance was impossible. Her pursuers were close behind. She must yield or die. She chose not to yield, and, with a despairing cry, flung herself into the shadows.”

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Outside Tannersville on The Rip Van Winkle Trail

As to the Indian superstitions concerning the treasury of storms and sunshine and the cloud-weaving spirits, they may have been suggested by the atmospherical phenomena of these mountains, the clouds which gather round their summits, and the thousand aerial effects which indicate the changes of weather over a great extent of country. They are epitomes of our variable climate, and are stamped with all its vicissitudes. And here let me say a word in favor of those vicissitudes, which are too often made the subject of exclusive repining.

Washington Irving, Spanish Papers, and other Miscellanies hitherto unpublished or uncollected

At the foot of these fairy mountains, the voyager may have descried the light smoke curling up from a village, whose shingle-roofs gleam among the trees, just where the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape. It is a little village of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant, (may he rest in peace!) and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weather-cocks.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

As you approach Palenville the Rip Van Winkle connection is impossible to miss. There’s the Rip Van Winkle car wash, Rip Van Winkle Trailer Park, and countless others, all looking to cash in on the mystique Washington Irving bestowed upon the place.

For a fictional story written by person with little knowledge of the area, it’s surprising how eager the locals are in laying claim to being the actual village in the story. Along the road which led to the Catskill Mountain House, there was a house which claimed to be Rip Van Winkel’s home. The bridge connecting the towns of Catskill and Hudson was named for Rip. Catskill laid fervent claim to have being Rip Van Winkle’s village, going as far to have Rip in its official town seal. But Irving had never visited Catskill when he wrote the story. Palenville also made the claim, erecting a sign saying it was the home of Rip Van Winkle. The town does lie at the foot of the mountain where Irving describes Rip walking, the Kaaterskill flowing down, but it didn’t exist when the story was set, and was barely in existence at the time it was written.

The reality is the village where Rip Van Winkle lived was a amalgamation of several places, most likely based on Saugerties and there is some evidence that in the description of Sleepy Hollow in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving is actually writing based on his memories of that town as well.

Irving himself chose not to be drawn in to identifing the village he was writing about, and even hinted at its fictional nature. When answering a letter written inquiring about where Rip hailed from, Irving wrote “I can give you no other information concerning the localities of the story Rip Van Winkle, than is to be gathered from the manuscript of Mr. Knickerbocker…perhaps he left this purposely in doubt. I would advise you to defer to the opinion of the very old gentlemen with whom you say you had an argument on the subject. I think it probable he is as accurately informed as anyone on the matter”

In the 1950s, Rips Retreat sprung up in Haines Falls, between Palenville and Tannersville. Featuring Dutch cottage architecture, or rather the 1950s version of fairy tale architecture which was popular at the time, it was populated by costumed interpreters, featured colonial era arts and crafts, and even old Rip himself was there to greet visitors.

For all the arguments about the location, not much has been said about the name. Doubtless the name has a big part to play in the longevity and popularity of the story, as it positively drips fairy tale vibes. Writing for The Saugerties Times, Robert M. Place relates how a local historian tipped him off to the best theory yet.

Irving lived for a time in Haledon, New Jersey and was friends with the Van Winkle family who lived in nearby Totowa. They had a boy with a broad smile that looked like a tear, and so his nickname was Rip.

Sounds perfectly plausible.

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Catskills in the distance from The Rip Van Winkle Trail

Tales from along the Rip Van Winkle Trail

Country drives have always been a way of life for me. It started as a child, riding along with my grandma and grandpa on Sunday afternoons. He was a part time farmer and loved driving the backroads and checking out the crops. Like much of my generation who grew up near the country, we spent our high school years and beyond, cruising the country roads whilst violating a whole host of laws.

Autumn in the Hudson Valley is tailor made for drives. The scenery is gorgeous any time of the year, but especially so in the fall when the landscape is painted in reds, oranges and browns. The shade in the hollow feels otherworldly, the sound of rushing water comes through the car windows as you pass rushing streams billowing over rocks, and occasionally hurtling over small cascades.

Route 23A leaving Palenville is known as the Rip Van Winkle Trail. Originally built by convicts from Sing Sing prison in 1915, for a four mile stretch you are indeed in a wilderness which Rip Van Winkle would feel right at home.

Some claim a form of time travel is possible here, even if not intended. One person posted on the internet, where all things are true, that while driving through this part of the Catskills they noticed they were low on gas, and luckily came upon a gas station and general store. The cars outside were new looking, but dated from the 1940s. Inside the shop there were no modern products at all. The gas was only $2.85 for a full tank.

There are other mysteries along this road. Outside of Tannersville it’s said that you might see Hank, the Tannersville Brakeman. His duties included climbing out of the train to change the switches on the tracks, but one night old Hank found his arm caught on the switch. Raising his lantern to see to free himself, the engineer took that as a sign to proceed, and drove over the hapless brakeman, leaving his unfortunate arm attached to the switch. It’s said you might still see Hank wandering the wilderness, accompanied by a large white dog, shining his lantern in the darkness. In a more grisly version of the story, he attacks groups of kids attending camp, ripping off their arms. When residents of Tannersville see a faintly glowing light in the distance, they shudder in response.

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At length he reached to where the ravine had opened through the cliffs to the amphitheatre; but no traces of such opening remained. The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest. Here, then, poor Rip was brought to a stand. He again called and whistled after his dog; he was only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows, sporting high in air about a dry tree that overhung a sunny precipice; and who, secure in their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at the poor man’s perplexities.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

Between Palenville and Tannersville there’s a parking lot off to the left, just after a hairpin turn. At one time this was Rip’s Lookout Point, which had a wishing well in front of the small building which served as a souvenir stand, luncheonette, and gas station. There were viewing glasses to peer into the forest, where you could see where Rip took his big nap, and the spot I was about to make for on foot. It also offered spectacular views of Kaaterskill Clove and off into the further distance. It was closed in the early sixties and sold to the state, and now it’s the parking area for Kaaterskill Falls.

Folklore has it that in 1942, a young couple decided to stop at the falls for a romantic tryst. Coming back to the car, they heard a loud banging, somewhat like thunder, and quickly realized it was a landslide. The man was crushed there in the car, and his lover was in a coma for several months. It’s believed that if you drive this section of the road, late at night, you might still see him alongside the road, looking for his lady. One woman told of seeing a man standing by the road, dressed all in black, and when she asked if needed assistance, he vanished. Others say he only appears to couples to warn them of one of their impending deaths.

Perhaps the most frightening part of the walk is that from the parking lot to the base of the trail which leads to the falls. You’re either on the road or the shoulder, with cars whizzing by. The hairpin turn at least slows them down, and it’s not long till you’re met with the rushing waters of Bastion Falls across the road, and below you where the overflow runs out beneath the road and off the side of the mountain.

Depending on the amount of rain, Bastian Falls can be a trickle, or it can be a cascade of small falls to the side of the larger one, fanning out and over rock ledges into a reflecting pool below. On days when the falls are flowing strong, you could be forgiven for thinking these were the falls Irving wrote about in Rip Van Winkle. And since he’d never been here when he wrote the story, it doesn’t really matter. But settling for this view is to rob yourself of a journey into the Rip Van Winkle wonderland.

Before Irving’s time, the Catskills were thought of as a wild and savage place, populated by hostile Indians, teeming with dangerous wildlife and where a person could easily find themselves lost, and either starving or eaten. The mood put off by these mountains was ominous, the rumors and tales fearsome. Farming which had always been an iffy proposition in the area rapidly became less than profitable, with cheaper crops coming in from the west now. Irving’s story helped put the Catskills on the map as a tourist destination, America’s first, albeit one with a mythical and somewhat supernatural history.

Kaaterskill Falls were believed to be the home of the Catskill witch, mentioned earlier. Another tale of the Catskill witch from Charles M. Skinner’s Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land echoed in Rip Van Winkle related that “Sometimes she would lead them to the cloves and would leap into the air with a mocking “Ho, ho!” just as they stopped with a shudder at the brink of an abyss. Garden Rock was a spot where she was often found, and at its foot a lake once spread. This was held in such awe that an Indian would never wittingly pursue his quarry there; but once a hunter lost his way and emerged from the forest at the edge of the pond. Seeing a number of gourds in crotches of the trees he took one, but fearing the spirit he turned to leave so quickly that he stumbled and it fell. As it broke, a spring welled from it in such volume that the unhappy man was gulfed in its waters, swept to the edge of Kaaterskill clove and dashed on the rocks two hundred and sixty feet below. Nor did the water ever cease to run, and in these times the stream born of the witch’s revenge is known as Catskill Creek.”

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Landscape painter at Bastion Falls on a slow flow day

On foot in the world of Rip Van Winkle

I grew up in the midwestern United States in the sixties, and our family would travel every other year to Florida for vacation. Along the way you’d spot See Rock City painted on the side of barns, and one year dad decided to make the pilgrimage up Lookout Mountain so we could in fact, see Rock City.

This was about the time Dylan and The Band were moving to Woodstock. For a child, Rock City was a magical experience. The trails wound through rock formations, going increasingly higher till you reached Lover’s Leap, where you could see seven states. Or so the story said. Along the trails were gnomes and other fairy tale statues, imported from Germany. It was the brainchild of the wife of a developer who created a housing development atop the mountain and christened it Fairyland. As he saw what his wife had created, he decided the public would pay to see it and the rest was history.

For me, that was one of my earliest introductions to fairy tales, and I’m pretty sure Rip Van Winkle was there as well, along with a rock formation in the shape of a witch. There was a hall with tableaus of famous folk tales, lit by blacklight. Yeah, it was pure kitsch, but to a five year old it was sheer magic.

That’s what I felt on the road to Kaaterskill Falls, and along the trail to the falls themselves. There were no gnomes in the forest, there didn’t need to be. There was enough of that sort of thing along the highway, be it in disarray and falling apart, or only memories. The great thing about being introduced to fairy tales and folklore at an early age is that it’s easier to believe.

Long before I was exposed to Tolkien and his dwarves, mining in the Misty Mountains, there were the dwarves high in the mountains overlooking the Hudson River, learned from Irving. And in Tennessee, I saw the real thing high upon Lookout Mountain.

Catskill Mountains, Ulster County, Upstate New York

When you believe as a child, it’s easier to remember as an adult. Along the path to Kaaterskill falls, climbing the stairs carved into the stone, I remembered believing, and realized there’s a part of me that believes still.

It’s about a half mile up the trail to Kaaterskill Falls, and you hear them before you see them. They fall in two segments, the first being a 180 foot cascade into a large clifftop pool, and then another 90 foot down to the base, where large rocks make for excellent places to sit and take it in.

I’ve been lucky in most of my trips to Kaaterskill Falls, visiting on weekdays just before or after the peak fall foliage season to minimize the crowd size. On this day, my first trip there, I had the place to myself, having only met one couple who were coming back as I went up the trail.

It seems inconceivable that Irving had never visited here when he wrote Rip Van Winkle, because Kaaterskill Falls are tailor made for the story. There needs to be the hike to the site, for if they were more accessible the crowds would be larger, the noise of humanity encroaching too much. As it is, if you can find yourself here alone, you can feel nature surround you and get a sense of the power it wields,

Kaaterskill Falls, where it’s believed Rip Van Winkle awoke from his nap

Sitting at the base of the falls, your senses come alive. Even on the hottest days it’s considerably cooler here. The mist from the rushing water cools you off further. The smell of the place … the water, the decomposition of leaves and other vegetation wafts heavily in the air. The light filtered through the trees and on the rushing water dances magically, twinkling in the shade. The sound envelops you, the roar of the falls above, the trickle of the stream around you and rustling of leaves and branches in the trees.

If you put yourself in the shoes of the early settlers, what seems beautiful now could carry a real sense of menace and terror. There are the beasts of the forest, any number of which could have killed you in the past. We haven’t always been the fearsome predator we are today. The earliest settlers would have had at best a musket to defend themselves, and with those you have one shot and you better make it count. Needing time to load and prime it seems a matter of luck, more than strategy. Bears and wildcats don’t stand idly by while you prepare to defend yourself. Rattlesnakes don’t give a lot of warning before striking. A knife against a bear might save your life, but you have the long walk back to civilization, torn to shreds which you’d likely not survive.

There are the cliffs to contend with, slippery from the spray, where people regularly fall to their deaths even now. Or maybe in that we’re in worse shape and more careless than in the past, as in 2018 four people died at Kaaterskill Falls while taking selfies here. Death by Instagram. It’s easy enough to follow the trail, but the trail in early days wasn’t clearly marked, had no steps cut into the steep sections, and it would be easy to find yourself lost in what at the time would have seemed like an endless wilderness.

And of course in the early days there were native Americans, some friendly, some hostile to contend with. In short, there are many ways to die in nature, even in a place possessing such natural beauty. In the roar of the falls you find those reminders, of just how small we are when we we’re reduced to nothing more than another beast in the forest.

It’s easy to see why the Mohicans feared and respected the place, and believed it to be the resting place of the creator.

Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits

The artists of the Hudson River School loved Kaaterskill Falls, and the first one known to have painted it was Thomas Cole, in a painting dating from 1826, just seven years after Rip Van Winkle appeared on paper. Cole also painted the falls with a lone Mohican warrior looking out over the falls (shown earlier), though perhaps the most famous painting of Kaaterskill Falls was by Asher Durand. Titled Kindred Spirits, it was painted in 1849 and depicted Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant together in a synthesized wilderness of Catskill landmarks. The painting was meant to be a eulogy for Cole, who had recently died, merging with Bryant who had immortalized Kaaterskill in verse.

Catterskill Falls by William Cullen Bryant

Midst greens and shades the Catterskill leaps,
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps
With the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.

But when, in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,
He builds, in the starlight clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air.

For whom are those glorious chambers wrought,
In the cold and cloudless night?
Is there neither spirit nor motion of thought
In forms so lovely, and hues so bright?
Hear what the gray-haired woodmen tell
Of this wild stream and its rocky dell.

‘Twas hither a youth of dreamy mood,
A hundred winters ago,
Had wandered over the mighty wood,
When the panther’s track was fresh on the snow,
And keen were the winds that came to stir
The long dark boughs of the hemlock fir.

Too gentle of mien he seemed and fair,
For a child of those rugged steeps;
His home lay low in the valley where
The kingly Hudson rolls to the deeps;
But he wore the hunter’s frock that day,
And a slender gun on his shoulder lay.

And here he paused, and against the trunk
Of a tall gray linden leant,
When the broad clear orb of the sun had sunk
From his path in the frosty firmament,
And over the round dark edge of the hill
A cold green light was quivering still.

And the crescent moon, high over the green,
From a sky of crimson shone,
On that icy palace, whose towers were seen
To sparkle as if with stars of their own;
While the water fell with a hollow sound,
‘Twixt the glistening pillars ranged around.

Is that a being of life, that moves
Where the crystal battlements rise?
A maiden watching the moon she loves,
At the twilight hour, with pensive eyes?
Was that a garment which seemed to gleam
Betwixt the eye and the falling stream?

‘Tis only the torrent tumbling o’er,
In the midst of those glassy walls,
Gushing, and plunging, and beating the floor
Of the rocky basin in which it falls.
‘Tis only the torrent–but why that start?
Why gazes the youth with a throbbing heart?

He thinks no more of his home afar,
Where his sire and sister wait.
He heeds no longer how star after star
Looks forth on the night as the hour grows late.
He heeds not the snow-wreaths, lifted and cast
From a thousand boughs, by the rising blast.

His thoughts are alone of those who dwell
In the halls of frost and snow,
Who pass where the crystal domes upswell
From the alabaster floors below,
Where the frost-trees shoot with leaf and spray,
And frost-gems scatter a silvery day.

‘And oh that those glorious haunts were mine!’
He speaks, and throughout the glen
Thin shadows swim in the faint moonshine,
And take a ghastly likeness of men,
As if the slain by the wintry storms
Came forth to the air in their earthly forms.

There pass the chasers of seal and whale,
With their weapons quaint and grim,
And bands of warriors in glittering mail,
And herdsmen and hunters huge of limb.
There are naked arms, with bow and spear,
And furry gauntlets the carbine rear.

There are mothers–and oh how sadly their eyes
On their children’s white brows rest!
There are youthful lovers–the maiden lies,
In a seeming sleep, on the chosen breast;
There are fair wan women with moonstruck air,
The snow stars flecking their long loose hair.

They eye him not as they pass along,
But his hair stands up with dread,
When he feels that he moves with that phantom throng,
Till those icy turrets are over his head,
And the torrent’s roar as they enter seems
Like a drowsy murmur heard in dreams.

The glittering threshold is scarcely passed,
When there gathers and wraps him round
A thick white twilight, sullen and vast,
In which there is neither form nor sound;
The phantoms, the glory, vanish all,
With the dying voice of the waterfall.

Slow passes the darkness of that trance,
And the youth now faintly sees
Huge shadows and gushes of light that dance
On a rugged ceiling of unhewn trees,
And walls where the skins of beasts are hung,
And rifles glitter on antlers strung.

On a couch of shaggy skins he lies;
As he strives to raise his head,
Hard-featured woodmen, with kindly eyes,
Come round him and smooth his furry bed
And bid him rest, for the evening star
Is scarcely set and the day is far.

They had found at eve the dreaming one
By the base of that icy steep,
When over his stiffening limbs begun
The deadly slumber of frost to creep,
And they cherished the pale and breathless form,
Till the stagnant blood ran free and warm.

As a result of Rip Van Winkle and Washington Irving, the Hudson River painters and poets, and the close proximity to New York City and New England, the Catskills were swamped with tourism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Lands that had been cleared for farming were returned to wilderness which was good. But there were efforts to tame the wilderness as well, to make it more tourist friendly. Kaaterskill Falls were dammed at the top so that the flow of the falls could be regulated and made more consistent. The falls were made to perform for tourists in effect, and visitors were charged a fee to watch.

But today, the peak of tourism seems to have passed, except for the rush of traffic during fall foliage season, and it’s possible to find yourself alone in the world Washington Irving created in his imagination, which luckily enough is a world that did and does exist.

You can go further up the falls, along a stone stairway but it’s clearly marked that you’re not supposed to. Even the lower steps are slippery and wet enough that I didn’t see the need to risk life and limb climbing up. Plenty of people do, but I was here to sit and wonder, not look for the quintessential viewing platform. Had I wanted that, I would have driven to the top and took the trail to the overlook. I wanted a pilgrimage, and it’s what I got.

A ways into the woods you’ll find the remains of a luxury hotel, skeletal and a reminder of its more gloried past. You also find a plaque, halfway up the staircase of the falls themselves, speaking of Vite, the Bayard of Dogs who fell to his death jumping from the top of falls to his master at the bottom on June 19, 1868. It’s thought by many that the dog still haunts the falls, barking and howling in the woods.

Taking a long pull from the flask I had brought – not dwarfish liquor but equally effective, I laid back on the stones and let the sounds, the smell, the feel of the coolness on my skin sink in, and tried to nap like Rip Van Winkle.

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By degrees Rip’s awe and apprehension subsided. He even ventured, when no eye was fixed upon him, to taste the beverage, which he found had much of the flavor of excellent Hollands. He was naturally a thirsty soul, and was soon tempted to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another; and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.

Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, a Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

How long I sat at the falls I can’t say, as time does stand still. But it was certainly less than the 20 years Rip Van Winkle spent napping. My reverie was interrupted with the sound of a couple coming up the trail, and I thought it best to leave the spot to them for a bit, and started back down to the mundane world, where dwarves don’t party with you in the mountains, but with a part of the mountains forever inside me.

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When you awake you will remember everything …

When you awake you will remember everything …
You will be hangin’ on a string from your…
When you believe, you will relieve the only soul
That you were born with to grow old and never know

Wash my hands in lye water
I got a date with the Captain’s daughter
You can go and tell your brother
We sure gonna love one another all night
You may be right and you might be wrong
I ain’t gonna worry all day long
Snow’s gonna come and the frost gonna bite
My old car froze up last night
Ain’t no reason to hang my head
I could wake up in the mornin’ dead
And if I thought it would do any good
I’d stand on the rock where Moses stood…

Robbie Robertson and The Band

Route 23A from Kaaterskill Falls back to Palenville is marked by some incredible S turns, with equally incredible views. Even if you didn’t have to slow down to stay the effects of gravity, you’d want to just for the scenery.

I was making my way towards the town of Catskill, passing near Salisbury Manor in Leeds, a colonial era house with a long history, sometimes dark. In 1755, Anna Dorothea Swarts, a servant at the Manor fled from the house, after suffering the abuse of its owner, William Salisbury. Nobody knows much about Anna, as she’s sometimes described as being Scottish, German or a mix of African and native American. But Lord Salisbury gave chase and caught the unfortunate girl. He claimed he had simply tied her to the back of the horse for the walk home, and she had fallen and was drug to her death. He was acquitted, but it was commonly thought he’d intentionally tied the girl to back of the horse and slapped it on the ass and let it rip her to pieces as it drug her back to the house.

Regardless of exactly how she met her doom, that wasn’t the last heard of Anna. A New York City newspaper reported in 1824 that “Sometimes sighs and lamentations were heard in the air, like the plaintiveness of the soft whistling wind. … A white horse of gigantic size, with fiery eyeballs and distended nostrils, was often seen to run past the fatal spot, with the fleetness of wind, dragging a female behind, with tattered garment and streaming hair, screaming for help. At other times the horse would appear to drag a hideous skeleton, clattering after him, half enveloped in a winding sheet.”

Curiously, there’s a variant of the story, this time about a man by the name of Ralph Sutherland. The story is the same, with the exception that Sutherland is found guilty and condemned to hang. But since he was a member of the gentry, the sentence was postponed till he was 99 years old. This created an uproar, and to soothe the public he added a stipulation that Sutherland wear a noose till the time came for his execution.

Sutherland went back to his house, tossed away the noose and drank himself into a stupor. When he awoke, the noose was once more around his neck. This time he threw it in the fire but when he awoke again, it was once more tight against his throat. No matter how he tried to dispose of it, when he awoke it was back.

One night the girl appeared to him, terrifying him and he begged her forgiveness, but she would have none of it. From that point on she would appear when he least expected it scaring the living shit out of him, sometimes appearing as a skeleton, sometimes reenacting her death with the aid of a phantom horse, sometimes throwing rocks against his window or scraping her nails along the glass. He tried to drink away his curse, even tried to join the company of others, careful to wear the noose, but people wanted nothing of him.

How it ended no one is sure. Some say he carried on like this, the phantom preventing his death till he turned 99 and the sentence was carried out. Still others say he reformed and the sentence was lifted, but he continued to wear the noose voluntarily, to remember his foul deed and what he was, so he would never fall into his old ways. My favorite version said that over time he grew used to the girl’s ghost, and they became something like friends, then fell in love and the true horror was that their love couldn’t be fulfilled, because of the obvious differences between their states of consciousness, i.e. she was dead. When he turned 99, the sentence was carried out and they were finally joined together.

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Olana From The Front, Home of the Hudson River painter Frederick Edwin Church

And then I was in Catskill town. It’s a lovely old colonial town, with historical houses and buildings a plenty. Had I time I would have pulled off for a tour of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, to see the studio of one of the most renowned of the artists of the Hudson River School. As it was, I made my way across the Hudson via the Rip Van Winkle bridge, and to Olana, the home of another of the artists, Fredric Edwin Church.

Olana is a curious home, sitting high on the hills overlooking the Hudson, the Catskills looming beyond. It’s an excellent example of Orientialist architecture, with elements of Victorian, Persian and Moorish. Across the Hudson lies the Catskills. In the other direction lies the Poconos. The house was closed for the night, but I spent some time watching the sun dip lower in the sky, the sunset washing the Catskills with pinks and reds, before heading off into the fresh Hudson Valley night.

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When you awake you will remember everything …

Want to read more about the haunted Hudson Valley?

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