by Donald Tyson
In The Shadow Out of Time, we have the history professor Ferdinand C. Ashley, along with Tyler M. Freeborn, professor of anthropology, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, professor of political economy, his son Wingate Peaslee of the department of psychology, and William Dyer, professor of geology.
The Whisperer in Darkness names a Professor Dexter of the zoology department, and Albert N. Wilmarth of the English department.
Wilmarth's name occurs again in At the Mountains of Madness, as does that of William Dyer, along with the names of Lake, professor of biology, Atwood, professor of physics, and Frank H. Pabodie of the engineering department.
From The Dreams in the Witch House we learn of Professor Ellery of the chemistry department, and in mathematics Professor Upham. Old Waldron, the university doctor, is also mentioned.
The name of the dean of the medical school at Miskatonic University, Dr. Allen Halsey, occurs in Herbert West-Reanimator, when Halsey prohibits West from experimenting with human cadavers. After his death, Halsey becomes West's first really successful experimental subject.
(The Thing on the Doorstep; The Dunwich Horror; The Shadow Out of Time; The Whisperer in Darkness; At the Mountains of Madness; The Dreams in the Witch House; Herbert West-Reanimator)
A land first settled by human beings when wandering tribes of shepherds built the cities of Kadatheron, Thraa, and Ilarnek along the river Ai. Later, more aggressive tribes pushed further into Mnar and built the city of Sarnath beside an unnamed lake. The spot was chosen because it was rich in precious metals that could be easily mined. On the other side of this lake was the city of Ib, populated by a race of humanoid amphibians who were said to have descended from the Moon in the distant past with their city and the lake. The land of Mnar is said to be remote from other lands "both of waking and of dream." It appears to be an actual place, not a dream place, but one that existed in the distant past. In The Nameless City mention is made of "the land of Mnar when mankind was young."
(At the Mountains of Madness; The Doom That Came to Sarnath; The Nameless City)
Raised mounds of earth in the western part of Oklahoma have an artificial appearance, and mark the entrances to the subterranean blue-litten land of K'n-yan. The flat-topped mound near the town of Binger rises thirty to forty feet above the level plain and extends three hundred feet in its longest diameter by fifty feet across, being elliptical in circumference. Although the particular mounds described by Lovecraft do not exist, there are Indian mounds at Spiro, Oklahoma.
(The Mound)
A port city of Mnar noted for its pearl-diving industry.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
A "vanished continent" that Lovecraft asserted in his story Out of the Aeons had flourished 200,000 years ago, according to tablets inscribed in the Naacal tongue. The concept of the Naacal civilization of Mu comes from the fanciful writings of James Churchward (1851-1936), who wrote three books on the subject of Mu. Lovecraft further indicated that Mu had been inhabited by the Mi-Go from Yuggoth before the coming of mankind to its shores. The Mi-Go built an enormous stone fortress on the top of Mount Yaddith-Gho to hold their god Ghatanothoa.
(Out of the Aeons)
A valley through which flows the frigid river Xari. On its southern slope is the town of Sinara, through which pass dromedary men.
(The Quest of Iranon)
An ancient land scried by the mystic writer Rudolf Yergler, the history of which he detailed in his book the Chronicle of Nath. We know this land was not in the dreamlands because an amber gem once guarded by the high-priest of Nath has come down to modern times and is presently in the keeping of an unnamed museum.
(The Tree on the Hill)
An ancient castle built by Lunaeus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion, which was stationed in Britain at Lindum. Gabinius was cast out of the Roman army for participating in certain forbidden rites in a cliff-side cavern on the shore of the North Sea with a strange tribe feared by the native Britains, that was rumored to have descended from the inhabitants of lost Atlantis. He constructed his keep on the cliff above the cavern.
(The Descendant)
City in the land of Lomar, near the North Pole, which was destroyed by the coming of an ice Age and the attacks of the hairy Gnophkehs. It was located "on the plateau of Sarkia, between the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek," and was constructed largely of marble. It had a great public square that contained numerous statues, and several smaller squares where the inhabitants met to socialize. The gray-eyed men of the city are said to have been the bravest of all the Lomarians. The smallest of the images of the toad-god Tsathoggua that was found in the red-litten underground cavern world of Yoth by the men of the blue-litten cavern world of K'n-yan eventually found its way to the city of Olathoe in Lomar, where it was worshipped.
(Polaris; The Mound; The Quest of Iranon)
An ancient graveyard at Arkham, unused for over a century prior to the events related in the story The Unnamable, which was written by Lovecraft in 1923. That would date the last interment to around 1800. A great willow tree grows in the midst of the tombs, the expanding trunk of which has nearly engulfed one of the tilted headstones. Beside this graveyard stands a deserted house that dates from the seventeenth century.
(The Unnamable)
A "city of lutes and dancing" that lies beyond the Karthian Hills from the granite city of Teloth. The men of Teloth say that Oonai is both lovely and terrible, and camel-drivers sometimes whisper leeringly about it.
(The Quest of Iranon)
The main commercial center in the village of Dunwich. It was here, a week after the birth of Wilbur Whateley, that Old Whateley the wizard made the prophetic statement that the people of the place would one day hear his daughter's child call out his unknown father's name on the top of Sentinel Hill. The child cried the name "Yog-Sothoth."
(The Dunwich Horror)
A land conquered by the city state of Sarnath, which ruled the land of Mnar ten thousand years ago. Pnath was noted for the excellence of its wine.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath)
An area in the city of New York described by Lovecraft as "a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call '"Dickensian."'
Having lived in this part of New York in 1924, Lovecraft was able to describe it from first-hand observation. He was appalled at the racially and culturally mingled population, and used it as the location for a fictional secret cult of Yazidi devil worshippers. He characterized it as "a babel of sound and filth" that "sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles."
(The Horror at Red Hook)
A southern plantation house built in 1816 by a former plantation owner from Louisiana on low-lying land in southern Missouri. It was the scene of a macabre tragedy in 1916, one hundred years after its erection. Denis de Russy, son of the owner Antoine de Russy, murdered his French wife, Marceline Bedard, with a machete and hacked off her long black hair, under the conviction that she was a gorgon masquerading in the form of a beautiful woman, and that the hair was animated with an evil life of its own. The mansion burned to the ground, and afterwards its foundations were widely believed to be haunted.
(Medusa's Coil)
The vast and forbidding desert of the southern Arabian Peninsula, which lies to the east of Yemen, was known in ancient times as the Empty Space, or Empty Quarter (Roba el Khaliyeh) but it is presently referred to as the Crimson Desert or simply as the Sands. At 225,000 square miles, it is the largest expanse of sand in the world. The Sahara in Africa may be fifteen times bigger, but the
Sahara is made up mostly of rock and gravel. The Empty Space is almost all sand. Only the wandering tribes of the Bedouin have been able to live upon its edges, and even they seldom venture across its terrible burning expanse.
Deserts have always been regarded as the haunts of evil spirits and supernatural creatures that prey upon human beings. In the biblical book of Leviticus 16:20-2 it is written that the scapegoat was led out of Jerusalem into the desert wilderness and left as a sacrifice for the demon Azazel. The Empty Space is the land of the jinn, spirits malicious towards mankind who travel across its sands in the form of whirling dust columns. They haunt the night and forever try to tempt the unwary traveler away from his tent. Their voices howl on the wind.
The Empty Space is best known as a place where the mad poet and author of the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred of Yemen, wandered in search of occult knowledge. Hidden somewhere amid the endless sand dunes lies Irem, the City of Pillars, that is described in the Arabian text, The Book of A Thousand Nights and a Night, a favorite book of Lovecraft's as a young boy. Lovecraft wrote of Alhazred in his History of the Necronomicon that he had "spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia-the Roba el Khaliyeh or `Empty Space' of the ancients-and `Dahna' or `Crimson' desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. [...] He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind." Lovecraft asserted in a latter to Clark Ashton Smith dated November 27, 1927, that Alhazred had learned the worship of Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu in the Empty Space.
In The Last Test, the necromancer and physician Doctor Alfred Clarendon claimed to have spoken in Yemen with an old man who had come back alive from the Crimson Desert, and had seen Irem, City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb. These twin gods were worshipped in the subterranean empire of K'n-yan-however, the great blue-litten cavern of K'n-yan lies beneath Oklahoma, so the old man of Yemen cannot have reached K'n-yan from the Empty Space. He must have found another site of worship of Nug and Yeb.
(History of the Necronomicon; The Last Test)
A wooden hill in Vermont east of Dark Mountain, on which was found the black stone, a stone carved with unknown hieroglyphics that pertain to the Mi-Go.
(The Whisperer in Darkness)
An ancient street in an unnamed French city, probably Paris. It lies on the other side of a dark river from the more traveled part of the city, the banks of which are lined with soot-stained brick warehouses. A stone bridge spans the river. For a description of this river, see Lovecraft's poem "The Canal" in Fungi from Yuggoth. The hill which the street ascends is extremely steep, so much so that it has been closed to all except foot traffic, and some portions of it are flights of steps. Its narrow surface is composed of a mixture of paving stones, cobblestones, and bare earth, and on either side the old houses lean drunkenly, their upper stories almost touching above the street, or linked by elevated walkways. At the summit of the hill is a tall wall against which the Rue d'Auseil terminates. A decaying rooming house stands third from the end of the street, but at five stories is the tallest structure near the wall.
The silent, withdrawn inhabitants of the street are all very old, including the proprietor of the rooming house, the paralytic Blandot, and the tenant of its attic chamber, the mute German musician Erich Zann. A student of metaphysics takes a room in the house because the street lies less than half an hour's walk from the university. He looks out the attic window of Erich Zann, hoping for a view of what lies beyond the wall, since that attic window is the only window in the street high enough to see over the wall. He is horrified to discover that he sees only a black void alive with motion, unlike anything on Earth. The shock causes a nervous breakdown, and when he recovers, the student finds that he can no longer locate the Rue d'Auseil no matter how many maps of the city he studies, or how diligently he searches for it.
It was a theme of Lovecraft's work that certain sensitive individuals, at significant dates of the year or in states of mental abstraction, could wander through unknown city streets and unwittingly find themselves transported back in time. This theme is central to the story He, and there are echoes of it in The Festival and The Haunter of the Dark. The mind itself, when heightened to a pitch of alienation that is a kind of trance, becomes the gateway between dimensions of reality. In the case of The Music of Erich Zann, we are left in doubt whether the university student is unable to relocate the Rue d'Auseil because his shattered mind refuses to allow him to revisit the street, or because the street does not exist in this reality, but in view of the street's ancient appearance and the strangeness of its inhabitants, the latter assumption seem more likely.
(The Music of Erich Zann)
This town in Essex County, in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts, on the Danver River, was settled in 1636. It is now called Danvers. The famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were held here. According to Joshi (A Dreamer and a Visionary, p. 164), Lovecraft visited Salem-Village in April of 1923, and examined the farmhouse of Rebekah Nurse, one of those accused of witchcraft and hanged. Lovecraft was able to locate her grave. The massive red structure of Danvers State Hospital provided Lovecraft with inspiration for Arkham Sanitarium.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Jedediah Orne of Salem wrote to Joseph Curwen at Providence, Rhode island, concerning the failed attempts at necromancy of one Edward Hutchinson, a native of Salem-Village: "Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of." Curwen was himself a former native of Salem-Village, who had been forced to flee to Providence in advance of charges of necromancy. We learn in The Silver Key that the same course was taken by Edmund Carter, an ancestor of Randolph Carter, who was forced to flee from the witch trials at Salem-Village with his mysterious silver key, and who also came to Providence. In The Dreams in the Witch House, it was from the jail at Salem-Village that the witch Keziah Mason escaped by drawing strange curves and angles in the corner of her cell that opened a dimensional portal through time and space.
(The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; The Silver Key; The Dreams in the Witch House)
This ancient city of the land of Mnar was constructed beside a lake to take advantage of deposits of metals nearby that could be easily mined. Sarnath met its doom at the hands of the inhuman race that inhabited the city of Ib, on the other side of the lake. After the men of Sarnath sacked Ib, slaughtered its inhabitants, and stole the green stone statue of its lizard-god, Bokrug, a terrible fate was visited upon Sarnath, and it was utterly destroyed.
(The Doom That Came to Sarnath; The Quest of Iranon; The Lost City; The Nameless City)
A rounded hill not far from Dunwich that has a table-like rock on its crest that served as an altar during rites of worship dedicated to the Old Ones. Deposits of human skulls and bones have been found around the rock.
(The Dunwich Horror)
In the mythology of Tibetan Buddhism, Shamballah is supposed to be a perfect kingdom of peace and enlightenment ruled by a line of enlightened kings, that lies north of the Himalayas near or in the Gobi Desert. However, many Buddhists view it as not a physical place at all, but a state of mind that all can enter when they achieve enlightenment.
In The Diary of Alonzo Typer it is a city built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, which continues to exist undecayed behind a wall of psychic force in the eastern desert. It is described in the notebook for the years 1560 to 1580 of the Dutch wizard, Claes van der Heyl, which Alonzo Typer found in the attic of the van der Heyl family farmhouse, in the village of Chorazin, near Attica, New York, in 1935.
(The Diary of Alonzo Typer)
A street in Kingsport that is in the older section of town, near the harbor. It runs parallel with the wharfs
but is set somewhat further back from the water than Water Street. Granny Orne, one of the ancients who acts as informal historian for the town, lives there in a tiny gambrel-roofed house that is covered with moss and ivy. After three thieves tried to rob the house of the Terrible Old Man on Water Street, the car they used was later found abandoned on Ship Street, near the rear gate entrance to the back yard of the Terrible Old Man's house. This indicates that Ship Street is adjacent Water Street. It has a higher elevation than Water Street, being further from the wharfs.
(The Strange High House in the Mist; The Terrible Old Man)
A town on the southern side of the Narthos valley, beside the river Xari. It is on a caravan route, and is the stopping place for dromedary men, who get drunk in the town.
(The Quest of Iranon)
This cave not far from Arkham has an evil reputation. It lies behind the old Carter family farm, and is deeper than it appears to be. A small fissure in the rear opens upon a larger cavern. It is linked with the silver key that was the legacy to Randolph Carter from his ancestors. At age ten Randolph Carter entered it with the key and emerged strangely altered and able to foretell events in the future. It was rumored that the wizard Edmund Carter had used the Snake-Den for his dark rituals.
(The Silver Key; Through the Gates of the Silver Key)
The Church of Starry Wisdom was a stone church on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode island, built in the style of the gothic revival around 1810 or 1815. It had a great tower with a tapering steeple, high stone buttresses, a sloped roof, three massive doors, and pointed gothic stained-glass windows. The earth upon which it was built was surrounded by a retaining wall that elevated the churchyard a full six feet above the level of the streets of the town. This retaining wall was surmounted by a wrought-iron fence. Within this enclosure, beside the church, were the remnants of an old graveyard.
