No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they
called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and
made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,
newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a
memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps, in which
he said:

It must be allow’d that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train
of Dæmons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the
cursed Voices of _Azazel_ and _Buzrael_, of _Beelzebub_ and
_Belial_, being heard from under Ground by above a Score of
credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a
Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the
Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling,
Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth
cou’d raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves
that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of
stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil’s Hop Yard–a bleak,
blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills
which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eery cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath.
If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they
instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they
fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come
down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old–older by
far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the
village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient
Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill
at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture
to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Century
factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great
rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more
generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of
skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizable
table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such
spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many
ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,
persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited
farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile
and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5
a. m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled
because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe
under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded,
and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout
the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive
albino woman of 35, living with an aged and half-insane father
about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered
in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according
to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child;
concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might–and
did–speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a
contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a
lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and
trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited
through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to
pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was
filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had
taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old
Whateley’s reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not
helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences,
Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose daydreams and singular
occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a
home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since
disappeared.