Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

I’ve just returned from the wilds of Rhode Island’s Durfee Hill region, where I found “Dark Swamp,” a strange location that appears on an 1851 U.S. Geological Survey Map. The Swamp is famous today because cosmic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft set out to find it with a friend in 1923 and failed.

The story of Dark Swamp and its Lovecraftian connection is a murky one. Lovecraft was drawn to the Swamp because he’d heard it had “never been fully penetrated by any living man” and because “at midday the darkness is very deep because of the intertwined branches overhead.”

It’s easy to see why Lovecraft might want to find such a swamp. Its existence would lend a real-world concreteness to the obsession that haunted his writings: the notion that New England’s woods hide unearthly horrors. Indeed, Lovecraft reflected with a certain irony on his interest in the Swamp in a letter to Edwin Baird, editor of Weird Tales:

Probably the thing’ll turn out to be a clump of ill-nourished bushes, a few rain-puddles, and a couple of sparrows—but until our disillusion we are at liberty to think of the place as the immemorial lair of nightmare and unknown evil ruled by that subterraneous horror that sometimes cranes its neck out of the deepest potholes . . . It.

The wetter part of Dark Swamp, taken April 14, 2024.

A pretty definitive study of Lovecraft’s interest in Dark Swamp can be found in academic Stephen Gencarella’s essay “Lovecraft and the Folklore of Glocester’s Dark Swamp.” There, Gencarella highlights discrepancies in Lovecraft’s reporting about the Swamp, which suggests he may have invented the location’s folkloric backstory. As part of this backstory, Lovecraft wished to impart the notion that the locals (as well as the Native Americans before them) feared a chthonic horror that lurked in the Swamp. In an instance of literary language influencing folklore, Lovecraft’s writing about the Swamp later inspired twenty-first-century legends shared online and in books on the paranormal.

The swamp itself—which Lovecraft was unable to find on foot—is located halfway between Putnam, Connecticut, and the unbelievably picturesque village of Chepachet, Rhode Island. Once lush and dark with overhanging branches, the swamp today is full of dead trees. Beaver activity appears to have altered the terrain (to my unskilled eye, it looks as if a dam has caused one part of the swamp to flood and another part to drain). The first swamp one arrives at presents a blighted appearance—atmospheric due to its deadness, certainly impenetrable, but hardly dark with overhanging branches. The ground is squelchy with water-soaked moss, the only greenness in sight. North of this is a much wetter swamp where the beavers are clearly active. As others have reported online, this swamp is deathly quiet, and the waters appear ominously black.

A Lovecraftian fairy?

You might wonder why I’m mentioning a location associated with Lovecraftian horror on a blog about fairies. The question crossed my mind while I was driving back through Chepachet after finding the Swamp, and I wondered whether Lovecraft had ever been influenced by fairy folklore. I think the answer is to some extent.

In his description of Dark Swamp’s denizen, Lovecraft used the word “IT” to denote the creature lurking in the Swamp. But his depiction of the being is not totally unlike that of a particularly dark kind of fairy:

One very ancient man with a flintlock said that IT had mov’d in Dark Swamp, and had cran’d ITS neck out of the abysmal pothole beneath which IT had ITS immemorial lair.

If I had to summarize Lovecraftian lore, I would describe it as a strange combination of ancient Native American legends, Classical descriptions of the cults of barbarian nations (for example, Tacitus’s portrayal of druid groves), Christian depictions of various fabled paganisms, and ideas drawn from science fiction, all filtered through Lovecraft’s horrendous racism. Although the cosmic and/or chthonic beings who appear in his stories are definitely not fairies, they do share characteristics with the Fair Folk: they often inhabit features of the natural landscape (in this case, a swamp), and they’re clearly threatening. In Algonquian folklore, stories about Little People who play enchanted flutes in the woods possibly influenced Lovecraft’s descriptions of blasphemous pipers. One also finds particularly dark renderings of fairy revels or processions exaggerated to cosmic proportions.

So are there Lovecraftian fairies? Not really. But I don’t think fairies and Lovecraft’s horrors are entirely unrelated either.

Beaver activity at Dark Swamp, April 14, 2024.