H.P. Lovecraft. The Mound
The Mound
by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
Written December 1929 through early 1930
Published November 1940 in Weird Tales, Volume 35, Number 6, pages 98-120
I.
It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped
thinking of the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground
because our own especial civilisation happens to be new there; but
nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up whole
chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains
before recorded history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500
years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal
culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B.C. We hear rumours of still
older things, too-of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals
and known today only through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts-so that
the idea of newness is fading out pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch
the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits from successive
life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British
author spoke of Arizona as a "moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and
stark and old-an ancient, lonely land".
Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying-almost
horrible-ancientness of the West than any European. It all comes from an
incident that happened in 1928; an incident which I'd greatly like to
dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has left such a
frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can't put it off very
easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian
ethnologist constantly takes me and where I had come upon some devilishly
strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no mistake-Oklahoma is a
lot more than a mere pioneers' and promoters' frontier. There are old, old
tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat
ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are
brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things. I am white and
Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of
Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have
heard and seen too much to be "sophisticated" in such matters. And so it
is with this incident of 1928. I'd like to laugh it off-but I can't.
I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost
tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong
Indian corroboration, and-I felt sure-an ultimate Indian source. They were
very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and
prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks of linkage
with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All of
them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the
western part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of
exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.
The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a
government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after
horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in
the air between great armies of invisible spectres-battles that involved
the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on
metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine
bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as
well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but
subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any
glimpse of the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of
the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians
alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and
had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the
ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the
most singular costumes and weapons. They even went so far as to say that
they could not be sure the horses were really horses.
The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as
kinsfolk. They referred to them as "those people", "the old people", or
"they who dwell below", and appeared to hold them in too great a
frightened veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist had been
able to pin any, tale-teller down to a specific description of the beings,
and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians
had one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that "men very
old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time,
then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people and spirits they mix
up-get all the same".
Now all of this, of course, is "old stuff" to an ethnologist-of a piece
with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which
abound among the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado
centuries ago on his vain search for the fabled Quivira. What took me into
western Oklahoma was something far more definite and tangible-a local and
distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the outside
world of research, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the
ghosts which it treated of. There was an added thrill in the fact that it
came from the remote town of Binger, in Caddo County, a place I had long
known as the scene of a very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence
connected with the snake-god myth.
The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in
a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third
of a mile west of the village-a mound which some thought a product of
Nature, but which others believed to be a burial-place or ceremonial dais
constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was
constantly haunted by, two Indian figures which appeared in alternation;
an old man who paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk,
regardless of the weather and with only brief intervals of disappearance,
and a squaw who took his place at night with a blue-flamed torch that
glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon was bright the
squaw's peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over half the
villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.
Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of
the two visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost all, but a living
Indian who had killed and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her
somewhere on the mound. According to these theorists he was pacing the
eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which
took visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their
spectral beliefs, held that both man and woman were ghosts; the man having
killed the squaw and himself as well at some very distant period. These
and minor variant versions seemed to have been current ever since the
settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained
to an astonishing degree by still-existing phenomena which anyone might
observe for himself. Not many ghost tales offer such free and open proof,
and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurking in this
small, obscure village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the
ruthless searchlight of scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of
1928 I took a train for Binger and brooded on strange mysteries as the
cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelier and
lonlier landscape.
Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a
flat windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500
inhabitants besides the Indians on a neighbouring reservation; the
principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil is decently
fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train
drew in at twilight, and 1 felt rather lost and uneasy-cut off from
wholesome and every-day things-as it puffed away to the southward without
me. The station platform was filled with curious loafers, all of whom
seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whom I had letters
of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street whose ruled
surface was red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally
delivered at the door of my prospective host. Those who had arranged
things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high
intelligence and local responsibility, while his mother-who lived with him
and was familiarly known as "Grandma Compton"-was one of the first pioneer
generation, and a veritable mine of anecdote and folklore.
That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among
the villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed
a baffling and important one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost
as a matter of course by everyone in Binger. Two generations had been born
and grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and its restless
figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned,
so that the village and the farms had not spread toward it in all four
decades of settlement; yet venturesome individuals had several times
visited it. Some had come back to report that they saw no ghosts at all
when they neared the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had
stepped out of sight before they reached the spot, leaving them free to
climb the steep slope and explore the flat summit. There was nothing up
there, they said-merely a rough expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian
watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected,
have descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the
plain; although there was no convenient cover within sight. At any rate,
there did not appear to be any opening into the mound; a conclusion which
was reached after considerable exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass
on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared
that they felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could
describe nothing more definite than that.
It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they
wished to move. It is heedless to mention that all these daring surveys
were conducted by day. Nothing in the universe could have induced any
human being, white or red, to approach that sinister elevation after dark;
and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in the
brightest sunlight.
But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the
chief terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been
typical, the phenomenon would have bulked far less prominently in the
local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact that many other seekers
had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come back at
all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named
Heaton had gone with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth.
He had heard curious tales from the Indians, and had laughed at the barren
report of another youth who had been out to the mound and had found
nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass from the village
while the other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot,
he saw the sentinel Indian walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a
trap-door and staircase existed on the top. The other youth had not