Colonial Horrors Read online

  Dedicated to my wife, best friend, and partner in crime, Jamie Paige Davis, who understands the love of a good story.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Graeme Davis

  THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW by Washington Irving

  AN ESSAY FOR THE RECORDING OF REMARKABLE PROVIDENCES by Increase Mather

  WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD by Cotton Mather

  LITHOBOLIA by R.C.

  WIELAND by Charles Brockden Brown

  THE MONEY-DIGGERS by Washington Irving

  RACHEL DYER by John Neal

  MOLL PITCHER by John Greenleaf Whittier

  THE BIRTH-MARK by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS by Edgar Allan Poe

  THE LAKE GUN by James Fenimore Cooper

  IN THE PINES by W. F. Mayer

  THE ROMANCE OF CERTAIN OLD CLOTHES by Henry James

  AN AUTHENTICATED HISTORY OF THE BELL WITCH by Martin van Buren Ingram

  MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF OUR OWN LAND by Charles M. Skinner

  THE SALEM WOLF by Howard Pyle

  THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD by H. P. Lovecraft

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Graeme Davis

  From the Salem witch trials to Washington Irving’s headless horseman to the shadows that lay thick over Lovecraft Country, the Colonial era is the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. Where European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the mysteries and superstitions of the Thirteen Colonies with their inward-looking towns, their stifling religion, and their dark and perilous woods.

  Some tales of the Colonial era have gone on to become part of American literary canon and have spread across other media. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1820, was filmed as early as 1922, presented onstage in multiple forms including a short-lived 1948 Broadway musical, and most recently has inspired a popular television series. The dark and brutal history of the Salem witch hysteria has been revisited in novels, films, and plays—most notably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible—and continues to inspire both supernatural fiction and social and political commentary.

  To the first colonists, the New World was a strange and threatening place, ruled by native peoples whom the colonists feared and despised as “heathen savages.” The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed that the Devil was real and active in all human affairs, and Puritan logic maintained that all who were not Christians (and many of those who were the wrong kind of Christians) actually worshipped the Devil: in his 1684 work An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, the Puritan minister (and later, Salem judge) Increase Mather observes that in “a great Wigwam (i.e. Indian House) at both ends was an Image; here the Indians in the War time were wont to Powaw (i.e. invocate the Devil).” Satan clearly held sway over this newly discovered continent, and would surely attack Christians there with every means at his command. Tales of native barbarism, violence, and cruelty were rife, with each fresh atrocity described in almost salacious detail: unsurprisingly, reports of colonial violence against native communities were briefer and more soberly expressed.

  Witches, of course, were the Devil’s natural allies and servants even in Europe, where more than a millennium of Christianity and almost two centuries of persecution had, according to some, failed to stamp them out completely. Given Satan’s long ascendancy in the New World, they posed an even greater threat, working to weaken the Christian society of the colonies from within while hostile natives attacked from without.

  Certain historical events were seized upon as proof that the Devil stalked the New World and would stop at nothing to destroy the souls of good Christians. The mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Colony in 1590 fuels wild theories that persist to this day. A possible outbreak of ergot poisoning at Salem led to the witch hysteria of 1692-3, and although accused witches had been hanged in New England as early as 1647, the town has been synonymous with witchcraft ever since. A religious feud in New Jersey led to the legend of the Jersey Devil, which has since grown into a pop-culture icon as well as a hunted cryptid.

  Early reports of witches, ghosts, and other supernatural terrors were reported as fact by the writers of the seventeenth century, although it has been suggested that a formal division between fiction and nonfiction did not yet exist. At least some of these tales were religious or political allegories, or were intended to have an “improving” effect upon readers, rather than simply to entertain them.

  The eighteenth century saw the rise of the novel as a literary form in English, first in Britain and then in the newly independent United States of America. In the second half of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, Gothic fiction developed in Europe, and when American writers looked for a homegrown setting to match the ruined castles and crumbling monasteries of the European Gothic, it was natural that they should turn to the troubled and superstitious time of the colonies.

  Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland was published in 1798, just two years after Matthew Lewis’s Gothic classic The Monk, and Washington Irving published “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” two years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Although American writers did not entirely ignore the attractions of a European setting, it was the Thirteen Colonies that became the natural home of American horror.

  Later writers followed suit. The crumbling towns of New England’s backwaters cast a deep shadow over H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, many of which dealt with an evil from the past coming horribly into the present. The mere mention of Salem, or any reference to dark deeds in Colonial times, has become something like a certificate of pedigree, invoking the shades of Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, and the rest to attest to a story’s American credentials.

  Today, the descendants of Salem witches still cavort across the pages of popular fiction, falling in love with Byronic vampires and manly werewolves or simply trying to get by in a hostile world. The various adaptations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” have already been mentioned. The 2004 movie National Treasure followed Masonic clues left by the Founding Fathers in a lighthearted answer to Dan Brown’s Eurocentric hits The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. In 2012, the popular video game franchise Assassin’s Creed set its third installment amid a Templar conspiracy during the Revolutionary War. In 2015, the movie The VVitch: A New England Folktale won awards at the Sundance and London Film Festivals, among others. There is even a Dungeons & Dragons–style tabletop roleplaying game called Colonial Gothic, in which players encounter Masonic plots, witchcraft, monsters from Native American lore, and Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space and time.

  The Colonial era is the true birthplace of American horror, and will no doubt continue to host all manner of tales of terror and suspense. The stories in this book—some well-known, others less so—are where it all began.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Because of their antiquity, many of the stories in this collection—which range in year of publication from 1684 to 1927—use archaic spellings and turns of phrase. Even some of the nineteenth-century tales use British-style spelling and grammar. If these stories came from present-day authors, an editor would feel compelled to “correct” the anomalies, but I believe the period language is a vital part of them, and so they are presented as I found them in their original state.

  COLONIAL

  HORRORS

  THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

  Washington Irving

  1820

  It seems strange that America’s best-known and most iconic ghost story was written while its author was living in England. Irving traveled widely throughout his life, and was staying with his sister Sarah and her husband
, Henry van Wart, in the English city of Birmingham when he wrote this story and the other stories in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

  In America, the collection was published in seven parts between June 1819 and September 1820; a two-volume set was published in London in February and July of 1820, and formed the basis for the first single-volume American edition, published in 1824. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” appeared in the sixth American installment and was an immediate success. Sir Walter Scott, one of Irving’s literary heroes, called the book “positively beautiful,” and the fashionable poet Lord George Byron claimed to have learned it by heart. In Britain, the book not only helped establish Irving’s reputation as a writer, but also established American writers in general as being worthy of consideration by British readers, who had previously dismissed all English writing produced outside their own country.

  Although the Sketch Book’s other content—with the notable exception of “Rip Van Winkle”—has sunk into obscurity, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is still going strong. The story has been filmed multiple times, starting in 1922. It has spawned stage plays, musicals, operas, and musical suites. Multiple television adaptations include a 2013 series which brings Ichabod Crane’s battle with the headless horseman into the present day. Almost two centuries after its original publication, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” remains the one Colonial horror story that everyone knows—even if they have never read it in its original form.

  (Found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker.)

  A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,

  Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,

  And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,

  For ever flushing round a summer sky.

  —Castle of Indolence

  In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market-town or rural port which by some is called Greensburg, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days by the good housewives of the adjacent country from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley, or rather lap of land, among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose, and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.

  I recollect that when a stripling my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all Nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.

  From the listless repose of the place and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

  The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been carried away by a cannonball in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country-folk hurrying along in the gloom of night as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.

  Such is the general purport of this legendary superstition, which has furnished materials for many a wild story in that region of shadows; and the spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

  It is remarkable that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure in a little time to inhale the witching influence of the air and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams and see apparitions.

  I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud, for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New York, that population, manners, and customs remain fixed, while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current. Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom.

  In this by-place of Nature there abode, in a remote period of American history—that is to say, some thirty years since—a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried”, in Sleepy Hollow for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snip nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

  His school-house was a l
ow building of one large room, rudely constructed of logs, the windows partly glazed and partly patched with leaves of old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at vacant hours by a withe twisted in the handle of the door and stakes set against the window-shutters, so that, though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out—an idea most probably borrowed by the architect, Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eel-pot. The school-house stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the foot of a woody hill, with a brook running close by and a formidable birch tree growing at one end of it. From hence the low murmur of his pupils’ voices, conning over their lessons, might be heard in a drowsy summer’s day like the hum of a bee-hive, interrupted now and then by the authoritative voice of the master in the tone of menace or command, or, peradventure, by the appalling sound of the birch as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge. Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly were not spoiled.

  I would not have it imagined, however, that he was one of those cruel potentates of the school who joy in the smart of their subjects; on the contrary, he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity, taking the burden off the backs of the weak and laying it on those of the strong. Your mere puny stripling, that winced at the least flourish of the rod, was passed by with indulgence; but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough, wrong-headed, broad-skirted Dutch urchin, who sulked and swelled and grew dogged and sullen beneath the birch. All this he called “doing his duty by their parents;” and he never inflicted a chastisement without following it by the assurance, so consolatory to the smarting urchin, that “he would remember it and thank him for it the longest day he had to live.”