September 2006 Issue The Horror Library, your Haunted Home for Horror Fiction, Dark Art, Horror Games, Movie Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Alternative Music, Horror Authors, Horror Short Fiction and featuring The Terrible Twelve - RJ Cavender, Bailey Hunter, Boyd E Harris, Megg Roper, Jason Beirens, CJ Hurtt, Eric Stark, Cordelia Snow, Chris Perridas, Curt Mahr, Stephen Sommerville, M Louis Dixon, Kerry Drummond
Interview with T. Peter Park, Fortean authority on H.P. Lovecraft
By Chris Perridas
Chris Perridas for Horror Library: I'd like our audience to know that T. Peter Park is a foremost Fortean authority on H. P. Lovecraft and the cultural impact his writing has had on our culture through folklore. First, I think, we should let our readers know who Charles Fort is and how Fortean philosophy interprets the world around us.
T. Peter Park: Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932) was an American writer who devoted most of his life to collecting, compiling, summarizing, and publishing reports of "damned" and "excluded" phenomena ignored or dismissed by orthodox scientists as "impossible" or inexplicable by accepted scientific theories.
Fort spent years in libraries combing through books, scientific journals, popular magazines, and newspapers for reports of scientific anomalies. He published his researches in four books, The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). These are now available together as The Complete Books of Charles Fort (New York: Dover Publications, 1974).
He published scores of reports of strange lights and contraptions seen in the sky for the past two centuries, suggesting that they might be extraterrestrial spacecraft. He thus anticipated our post-World War II "Age of Flying Saucers."
Fort is also famous for his countless reports of "rains" of frogs, fishes, snails, insects, blood, raw meat, stones, coins, ice blocks, and other unorthodox objects and substances. However, he also described many other baffling phenomena—toads found inside rocks, strange animals, mysterious disappearances, poltergeists, strange lights accompanying religious revivals, people with unusual powers and abilities, etc. He coined the now common word "teleportation," for the instantaneous transportation of people or objects from one place to another, seemingly without passing through the intervening space.
HL: Did Fort have a specific philosophy? How did he express it?
TPP: Throughout his books, Fort continually poked fun at orthodox scientific dogmatism, pomposity, pretension, and readiness to ignore or dismiss occurrences and phenomena that didn't quite fit into received scientific theory. He felt that there is nothing in science or religion that is more than just the accepted thing to wear for a while. Fort described accepted scientific and philosophical world-views, cosmologies, and paradigms as "dominants," simply the world-views imposed on the rest of society by authorities, or "Establishments" in a given historical period.
He thus unconsciously echoed the early 20th century Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony," the ability of ruling social classes to make other classes accept their values and world-view. Fort saw scientists as the priesthood of 19th and 20th century Western society, succeeding the religious priesthoods of earlier centuries—but equally dogmatic and authoritarian, in his view.
Some writers, like English "Fortean" writer Colin Bennett, have called Fort an early "postmodernist" thinker, anticipating the views of more academically fashionable late 20th century postmodernists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and I think Bennett is quite right! Fort, however, wrote far more clearly than the Foucaults, Derridas, and Baudrillards, in a far livelier style, with far less jargon and far more humor! Like them, however, he felt it was becoming less and less possible for thinking men and women to seriously believe in an orderly, easily understandable universe where everything is neatly explained by clear, unambiguous scientific, historical, and sociological laws and principles that wrap up everything with no exceptions, anomalies, or loose ends.
On a less lofty level, Fort is certainly the pioneer and patron saint of all recent and contemporary writers who deal with UFO's, abductions, ESP, ghosts, poltergeists, crop circles, Bigfoot, Yeti, "Lake Monsters," and other anomalous phenomena. Such phenomena are called "Fortean" in his honor, and people who study or write about them are called "Forteans."
HL: That's fascinating. I know through the Anomalist that you have uncovered a horrific incident that perhaps happened at the end of the 19th century in a midwestern town. Could you elaborate on that, and how HPL's writing might have been involved.
TPP: In 1999, the on-line Anomalist published my article summarizing my 30-odd years of research on the "Lincoln Legend." That is my name for an allegedly true story, with supernatural touches that I heard in 1966 from a college friend about a weird family named Lincoln who supposedly terrorized an unnamed small Midwestern town in the 1890's or very early 1900's.
The Lincolns (apparently no kin of President Lincoln) were described as a family—father, mother, teen-age son, and daughter—of squat, "froggish" folk, with "ugly," "frog-like" faces, high broad foreheads, and bulging, "hyper-thyroid" eyes, who moved into that Midwestern town from somewhere back East in the 1890's or early 1900's. Their physical description, I thought right away, sounded a lot like the hybrid half-human, half-"Deep Ones" Innsmouthers of H.P. Lovecraft's novelette "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," about a decaying New England seaport whose economically desperate sailors make an unholy pact—involving interbreeding—with sinister Dagon-worshipping merbeings for wealth and good fishing.
Anyway, the Lincolns soon became very unpopular in their new Midwestern home, with their aloof, unfriendly personalities and their habit of roaming the town's streets and peering into local citizen's windows late at night.
Tensions climaxed when the teen-aged Lincoln son was lynched for allegedly raping and murdering the daughter of a prominent local citizen. The Lincoln father cursed the town at his son's funeral, throwing a worm or slug at the girl's father and exclaiming "Here is your doom!"
The surviving Lincolns then left town, presumably returning back East. However, the molested girl's relatives soon suffered gruesome deaths, and townsfolk started seeing the lynched Lincoln boy's ghost peering through their bedroom windows at night. For the next several years, the town was plagued by floods, droughts, tornadoes, and other natural disasters. When the townsfolk dug up the dead Lincoln boy's grave, they found it was empty—with a single set of footsteps LEAVING the empty grave! However, the natural disasters ended after the opening of the grave!
HL: That story is worthy of our Horror Library Hall of Fame! How did you come across this story and did you ever track down its origin?
TPP: Well, like I said, I first heard this story from a college friend in 1966, as a graduate student in History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. My friend said he'd just heard it a few days before, at a family gathering he'd attended in Kermit, West Virginia.
He'd heard it from an elderly doctor friend of the family, who'd heard it many years earlier from a dying patient who had been a participant or eyewitness of some of the original events. In the four decades since 1966, I've done an enormous amount of research trying to get to the bottom of the story, as summarized in my Anomalist article, hoping to find its ultimate origin either a perhaps somewhat exaggerated and embellished true sequence of real-life events, or in a specific, identifiable fictional weird horror tale in the Ambrose Bierce—H.P. Lovecraft vein. However, I've never yet found either a real-life historical or a specific printed fictional "smoking gun"!
I've written to countless archives, libraries, historical societies, and local historians, who all uniformly replied that they had never heard of or read about that story or anything like it, and could find nothing like it in their files, records, and holdings. Authorities on H.P. Lovecraft or weird fiction, for their own part, likewise replied to my queries that they did not recall any story specifically like it. A few Fortean writers and researchers told me the thought they had once heard or read about that story or something similar, but when they checked their own files and Fortean book collections a bit more closely they found they had nothing about it or quite like it!
I just could not find either a historical or a literary "smoking gun"! A weird elusiveness seemed to hang about the whole thing! In my on-line Anomalist article, I concluded that the "Lincoln Legend" was probably an incomplete or incipient "urban legend," in some way probably influenced or inspired by HPL's Shadow Over Innsmouth judging by the physical description of the Lincoln family!
As you know, Chris, in the last few weeks, you and I have had a lot of e-mail discussions back and forth about this "Lincoln Legend" and its probable Lovecraftian influences. I've come to see that there may be a lot of merit in your view that the Lincoln Legend probably started about a century or so ago as an authentic local Appalachian or West Virginia folk tale, with a subsequent Lovecraftian overlay between the 1940's and the 1960's.
It began, as you suggest, as an Appalachian or West Virginia lynching and revenge ghost story, about an unjustly lynched youth's ghost getting back at the people who lynched him, but then got enhanced and colored with a Lovecraftian overlay in either the late 1940's or the 1960's.
Lovecraft's eldritch tales, you noted, were reprinted in cheap "G.I." editions for the military during World War II, and again republished in the 1960's by August Derleth and Arkham House. Either or both could have inspired a West Virginian already familiar with the traditional old lynching, ghost, and revenge folk-tale to embellish it with some Lovecraftian touches. I think that this may be a pretty plausible scenario!
Adding a physical description based on HPL's ichthyoid and batrachian Innsmouthers may have been felt to give a more "sophisticated," "highbrow," "literary" aura to the old "hillbilly" legend!
HL: I've appreciated our vigorous dialogue on this. On the subject of Lovecraft, there is also the idea that HPL might not only have written about aliens amongst us- such as in his story Colour Out of Space- but may have had intimate contact with other life forms. Tell our readers about that.
TPP: In my Anomalist article on H.P. Lovecraft: The Abductee? (The Anomalist, No. 9, Winter 2000-2001, pp. 82-91), I presented evidence from his letters, autobiographical reminiscences, and standard biographies that at various periods of his life HPL might have had paranormal or at least disturbing and baffling personal experiences that inspired his life-long literary obsession with the macabre, eldritch, and uncanny events despite his official public persona as a staunch life-long atheist and materialist.
His lifelong posture as a dogmatic scientific rationalist and uncompromising religious and paranormal skeptic, I suggested, was largely a psychological "denial" or "defense" mechanism against unsettling, uncanny personal experiences—whether truly paranormal or just dream and hallucinatory—that "spooked" him no end. In my article and with my title, I did not mean to suggest that Lovecraft was LITERALLY abducted, or that he actually had modern "abductee" style experiences closely anticipating the scripts of Budd Hopkins and David M. Jacobs. However, I DID mean to suggest that he quite probably DID have baffling, unsettling personal experiences of various sorts!
I described HPL's recurrent childhood "night-gaunt" nightmares, his hallucinatory childhood visions of ancient Greek dryads and satyrs, and his mentally disturbed mother's hallucinations of monsters.
I also described his 1920 "Dr. Spencer" dream of a Civil War era past-life experience (see below), and his 1930's novelette The Whisperer in Darkness, with its remarkable anticipations of mid and late 20th century UFO lore! In The Whisperer in Darkness, HPL portrayed alien invaders hiding in the hills of Vermont, who quite likely have sinister designs. However, they also lull their human "contactees" with upbeat Utopian messages of offering vastly increased scientific knowledge. Here, HPL's aliens anticipate modern UFO entities with their double aspect as scary impersonal hideous "Grays," "Reptoids," and "Mantids" with their traumatic, frightening medical and reproductive experiments and as beautiful benevolent angelic "Space Brothers" lifting us up to a new higher spiritual plane!
HL: Many of our readers know that HPL was a herculean letter writer, as well as a poet and fiction writer. Some of those epistles were to Alfred Galpin, and one letter in particular explained a fantastic Civil War era dream HPL had. But was it a dream?
TPP: HPL described an "odd dream" in a 1920 letter to Alfred Galpin and Maurice W. Moe, his fellows in his small "Gallomo" (Galpin—Lovecraft—Moe) literary club. He dreamed of being a Civil War army surgeon home on furlough observing a home-town medical colleague's experiments with alien body parts. A later Fortean investigator felt HPL's dream just possibly might have an actual historical basis suggesting a 19th century U.S. government UFO crash cover-up!
In his dream, Lovecraft was First Lieutenant Eben Spencer, a physician and Union Army surgeon in the Civil War, home on a furlough on July 8, 1864 in his unnamed native village in northern New York state. In the dream, a distraught friend begged him to visit his older brother, Spencer's close friend and medical colleague, Dr. Chester, who had been acting strangely and "conducting secret experiments in a laboratory" in his attic for two years, creating "sickening odours" and "odd sounds." The secretive, bad tempered Dr. Chester reluctantly admitted his brother and Spencer to his laboratory, proudly showing them two neatly severed left arms that he successively brought in on a large glass slab. Sneering at Spencer's "amputation practice in the army," Dr. Chester asked what he thought "professionally" of the first arm, which was "damp, gelatinous and bluish white," its "fingers...without nails." Spencer saw that it "clearly...was not a human arm," and told Dr. Chester, "This is not the arm of any living thing," to which the experimenter replied, "Not yet, Spencer." The Army surgeon's "sinister colleague" then announced "This is only the beginning, Spencer."
At this point, however, the "whole scene began to fade," and he awoke in 1920 with his normal Lovecraft self. "I have never seen Dr. Chester, or his young brother, or that village since," Lovecraft concluded, adding "I do not know what village it was. I never heard the name Eben Spencer before or since."
Lovecraft's dream intrigued UFO Roundup editor Joseph Trainor, who did some historical investigation on "Dr. Eben Spencer" and "Dr. Chester" in 1997. Research in various libraries showed that the "dream" actually had "roots in reality." There had indeed been a First Lieutenant Elbridge Gerry Spencer, surgeon, of the 94th New York Regiment, U.S. Army, from the small northern New York town of Brockett's Bridge, now called Dolgeville, near Herkimer.
HL: So Lovecraft's doctor was a real person?
TPP: Elbridge Gerry Spencer was born in Brockett's Bridge in March 1839, and enlisted in the Union Army in 1862. "Dr. Chester" was H.C. Smallwood (whose middle initial could have stood for Chester, Trainor felt), a local herbalist with a younger brother (as in Lovecraft's dream). Curiously enough, neither Spencer, "Doc". Smallwood, nor the "Doc's" younger brother were listed in the 1870 Census and the 1881 town directory, as if they had all "up and left town" before 1870. Even stranger: the 1889 Herkimer Democrat obituary of Spencer's sister stated that he had "vanished twenty years ago," i.e., around 1869.
A German born New York businessman, Alfred Dolge, came to Brockett's Bridge in 1874, introducing various industries and many German immigrants, turning the community into a "company town," and renamed it Dolgeville in 1881.
Trainor saw the whole mystery as a Roswell like 19th century UFO crash cover up. "Doc" Smallwood, he speculated, found a crashed spaceship and a badly injured alien in the woods near Brockett's Bridge, nursed the alien back to health without however being able to save its two left arms, and showed it to his brother and Lieutenant Spencer. As a dutiful Army officer, Spencer reported it to his military superiors, who informed the ruthless Union spymaster Lafayette C. Baker, head of the National Detective Police, a Civil War forerunner of the FBI. Baker murdered Spencer, "Doc" Smallwood, and the "Doc's" brother to keep their discovery a secret. Alfred Dolge, too, in Trainor's scenario, was brought to Brockett's Bridge to destroy all traces of its pre 1874 past.
Whether or not we accept Trainor's rather imaginative scenario, Lovecraft's "Spencer" dream sounds like the sort of "past life memory" sometimes cited as proof of reincarnation, and explained by more cautious parapsychologists in terms of retrocognition, or direct extrasensory (ESP) knowledge of past events.
A more mundane explanation would be that Lovecraft had read somewhere about Lieutenant Spencer and the Brockett's consciously forgotten about them, but subconsciously recalled them. This suggests that Lieutenant Spencer and his friends in Brockett's Bridge did or saw something curious enough to attract some journalist's or chronicler's attention and set them down in print in some book or article where Lovecraft later chanced upon them.
The name "Smallwood", by the way, has a curious "Name Game" resonance - in cryptozoologist and Fortean researcher Loren Coleman's terminology. Many of us remember "Gordon Smallwood" as the name of the character played by Will Patton in the 2001 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney.
Patton/Smallwood, is a Point Pleasant, W.Va. resident who has a 'Close Encounters' with an alien entity calling itself "Indrid Cold", and the character is loosely based on a real-life "contactee", Woody Derenberger. Derenberger reported encounters with an "Indrid Cold" in West Virginia during the period of the Point Pleasant "Mothman" sightings in 1966-1967.
The use of the name "Gordon Smallwood" for the Derenberger-based Will Patton character was a Fortean inside joke by the screenwriters. "Gordon Smallwood", as Fortean researchers Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark have pointed out, was originally the pseudonym the late West Virginia ufologist, friend of John A. Keel, and "Men in Black" legend launcher Gray Barker. The name was used in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) for the Quebec ufologist Laimon Mitris, who was allegedly visited by a "Man in Black"' warning him to abandon his UFO researches.
Barker, as quoted by Jerry Clark, wrote: "I would like to know someone by the name of Gordon Smallwood. The name in itself sounds honest and reputable. If there are any Gordon Smallwoods reading this book, let them rest assured the name used here is an invention. But let them write to me for I would like to know people with such a name."
Little did Barker, realize, however, that this honest, reputable, wholesomely all-American "Smallwood"" name was borne almost a century earlier by an upstate New York herbalist who may have been involved in another set of eldritch Fortean mysteries!
HL: In addition to these fantastic possibilities, you also study folk stories to ascertain whether new - and perhaps horrific - beings might be amongst us. Can you discuss cryptids and cryptohomids briefly?
TPP: Throughout recorded history, and into the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries, human beings have had countless "close encounters" with mysterious, more or less human-like beings, ranging from "Bigfoot", "Yeti", and "Leprechaun" types to "mermen" and "mermaids", seemingly half man or woman and half fish or dolphin. Such cryptohominids are described in countless myths, legends, and folklore traditions—but have also been cited in numerous 19th and 20th century reports of sightings by apparently quite sane and sincere modern eyewitnesses. Some, like traditional stories or the recent sightings of ape-like and "hairy hominid" creatures and even primitive-looking "men", may well reflect centuries of encounters with surviving modern bands or clans of pre-homo sapiens hominids. These might be our own Australopithecine, homo erectus, homo floresiensis (Flores "Hobbits"), or Neanderthal ancestors or cousins.
This seems to be probably the case, for instance, with the North American Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the Himalayan Yeti, the Caucasus kaptar, the Mongolian almas, the Sumatran orang pendek, and the Flores Island ebu gogo—the last probably based on the Flores homo floresiensis nicknamed recently as "Hobbits"!
Others, like the Irish Leprechauns and Yucatan alux, might represent dwarf hominid races kept as slaves or pets by ancient human civilizations, taught to wear human (Irish or Mayan) clothes, and practice human craft skills (like Irish shoe-making or Central American wood-chopping and pottery-making).
Another Irish "fairy", the grogoch by the way, is or was 3 feet tall, covered with reddish hair or fur, and unclothed—seemingly a homo floresiensis type, probably indicating that the "Hobbits" made it all the way from Indonesia to Ireland!
Still others—like various types of frog-men, lizard-men, and "merpeople" or "merbeings"—might represent divergent primate evolutionary lines (e.g., "merbeings" as descended from sea-going "aquatic apes"), or again might be "thought-forms", i.e., temporarily quasi-materialized "archetypal" images from the "collective unconscious" of human/animal or human/fish intermediate forms. However, just WHAT they nobody REALLY knows, except that they have been seen QUITE often! As Fortean researcher Jerome Clark has put it, they just seem to be "experience anomalies", or things we know human beings can perceive and have sometimes perceived, but of whose actual "mechanism" we simply just have no idea at present!
HPL was apparently quite familiar with the literature about many such cryptids and experience anomalies, even though he officially displayed a hard-line cynical skepticism about all of them. He may well have been aware of various "frog-man" and "frog-people" reports and legends. However, I think he was aware above all of various modern "merbeing" or "merpeople" reports from modern times, especially from the South Pacific. These, I've long suspected, may have especially inspired HPL's picture of the "Deep Ones" in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
For the possibility that at least some reports of frog-men, lizard-men, and merbeings might possibly represent aquatic or semi-aquatic primate lineages, I ask the readers to see Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe's, The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (New York: Avon Books, 1999).
HL: It's obvious that you've spent much time studying folk myths and their influence on Mr. Lovecraft. Where can we read more of your astounding research? And what is your most recent challenge?
TPP: I'm an active participant in several on-line lists devoted to the Fortean, anomalous, and paranormal:
I'm also the co-founder and list owner of the last one, mythfolk@yahoogroups.com , a list devoted to the intersection of mythology and folklore with history, archaeology, parapsychology, Forteanism, and modern science-fiction and fantasy literature.
Many of my letters and essays originally posted on these forums have been copied and archived by various Fortean websites on the Internet, and can be accessed by Googling my name. I have also published a number of articles in The Anomalist, in both their print edition and in their on-line edition at www.anomalist.com.
My Anomalist articles include, first of all, my on-line Lincoln Legend article, The 'Lincoln Legend': A 'Forme Fruste' Urban Legend?, and my print edition piece on H.P. Lovecraft: An Abductee?, that I've already discussed.
Another article I consider a significant contribution to critical Fortean research is Vanishing Vanishings (The Anomalist, No. 7. Winter 1998/99, pp. 158-178), an investigation into the origin, development, and ultimate debunking of the David Lang and Oliver Lerch mysterious disappearance legends.
Those are the tales, so popular in the gee-whiz pop-Forteanism of the 1950's and 1960's, of the Tennessee farmer who disappeared into thin air or another dimension in full view of his family while walking across an open field in 1880, and of the Indiana farm boy abducted by a monstrous bird or a UFO while fetching a pail of water from the well on Christmas Eve of 1889 or 1890.
I spent a lot of time and effort in trying to get to the bottom of the Lang and Lerch legends, as I did in trying to get to the bottom of the Lincoln Legend, likewise trying to find "smoking guns," whether historical or fictional, where those stories first appeared. Ultimately, I found, coming across and augmenting the findings of some skeptical earlier researchers, they were largely inspired by two science-fictional horror tales by Ambrose Bierce, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field and Charles Ashmore's Trail, both first published in Bierce's 1893 collection Can Such Things Be? However, since Vanishing Vanishings was originally published, I have learned of a few curious and puzzling complications to my original scenario of a simple straightforward derivation of the modern Lang and Lerch legends from these two 1893 Ambrose Bierce stories.
As I already mentioned about Vanishing Vanishings, Bierce reportedly based The Difficulty of Crossing a Field on a newspaper reprint of a Gallatin, Tennessee "Liar's Club" tall tale about vanishing local farmer named David Lang as told by one Joe Mulhatten—but there are very curious and puzzling complications involved here. One Fortean investigator has shown me copies of newspaper stories about an abducted Indiana farm boy Oliver Lerch, in substantially the post-1950 "canonical" form of the Lerch legend, and this goes back to 1907. This may give the lie to the "hoaxer" who "confessed" in the 1970's to inventing the whole story himself in his 1950 FATE article.
The Lerch legend, also, I believe, was probably inspired by the stories of eagles abducting children which were frequently published in late 19th and early 20th century American and European newspapers. Those of you who want to learn more about my Lang and Lerch legends afterthoughts may contact me privately at tpeterpark@erols.com .
My very first Anomalist piece was Too Many Anomalies, Not Enough Time (The Anomalist, No. 5, Summer 1997, pp. 4-7), where I discussed social, cultural, and psychological reasons for people being interested in certain anomalies more than in others.
In Reading the Strangeness: Second-Order Anomalies (The Anomalist, No. 8, Spring 2000, pp. 85-112), I discussed the psychological symbolism and subtle social & cultural messages of many anomalies, and the frequent curious coincidences involving dates, anniversaries, names, personal characteristics, etc., of anomalous events and their experiencers.
In Sky Visions, Ghost Riders, and Phantom Armies (The Anomalist, No. 10, 2002, pp. 48-62) I discussed the many weird "sky visions" seen throughout history—of "phantom armies", Greek and Roman gods and national heroes, dragons, huge mythical birds, angels, and crucified Christ figures seen in the sky, or of the Sun seeming to "dance" in the sky over crowds of pilgrims.
My on-line 2002 Anomalist piece on The Poughkeepsie Seer summarized the life, career, and beliefs of the 19th century American Spiritualist writer, "psychic", and healer Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910).
In November 2004 and April 2005, I addressed the UFO/ET Congresses in Bordentown, New Jersey organized by Pat Marcattilio ("Dr. UFO"), speaking on Little Men, Frog-Men, and Mini-Men: Aliens or Other Folk?. and on The 1916 Lake Superior Mystery Aeroplanes, and on Little Men, Hobbits, and Ultra-Pygmies. .
I've had a French translation of an article on changing patterns and fashions of Fortean phenomena published as Cycles fortéennes in the French Fortean journal Gazette Fortéenne.
My enthusiastic review of fantasticreality@yahoogroups.com 's Listowner William Michael Mott's Caverns, Cauldrons, and Concealed Creatures (Yoakum, TX: Hidden Mysteries, 2000) was published in FATE in 2001, and is still floating around on the Internet as part of various websites dealing with the controversial topic of underground races and civilizations.
This Spring, I'm giving a talk on Leprechauns, dealing with the Fortean aspects of Irish fairy "close encounters" as well as with the conventionally folkloric aspects, at a local Long Island women's club's St. Patrick's Day dinner. I was invited to address them by a good friend of mine who is President of her local chapter.
In April, I may be speaking again at a Bordentown NJ UFO/ET Congress, though I haven't yet decided on a topic. Also in 2006, I plan to gather and revise a number of my Fortean and paranormal articles, from The Anomalist, various list serves, and my Bordentown talks, for publication in book form in a collection of Fortean essays and stories. I'll probably have to do a lot of editing and revising on my Lincoln Legend and Vanishing Vanishing pieces, while some of the others I think I can pretty much publish in my planned book "as is."
HL: Do you plan on any Lovecraft based stories or books?
TPP: I do! In 2006, I hope to have a chance to finish, and start trying to market, the MS of a Lovecraftian science-fiction novel based on the Lincoln Legend on which I've been working on and off these last few years, The Lincoln Symbiosis. It's inspired in about equal parts by the original Lincoln Legend, by HPL's Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror, and by more recent science-fictional and horror novels about "parallel species" and "hidden folk" like Philip José Farmer's The Lovers, Peter Straub's Ghost Story, Dean Koontz's Twilight Eyes, and Whitley Strieber's The Hunger.
I portray the Lincolns as members of a "parallel species," the "Lamra," living half-hidden among us, who wandered from Innsmouth and Dunwich to Shawnee Falls, Ohio. The "Lamra" are batrachian humanoid vampires, hinted at in the Necronomicon, with a complex method of reproduction involving sex and genetic exchange with humans (a touch I got from Farmer's The Lovers), whom they seduce in pseudo-religious cults like the Esoteric Order of Dagon and Temple of the True Illuminati, and as bizarrely alluring geisha-like small-town temptresses!
My protagonist is a Midwestern college history professor who discovers that he is descended from a Lincoln "defector" who renounced his vampiric and sexually predatory alien traditions and loyalties, and threw in his lot with homo sapiens! My protagonist mysteriously disappears, apparently "terminated with extreme prejudice" by his distant batrachian vampiric kinsmen, anxious to protect the secret of their race's existence at all costs, after traveling to Dunwich and Arkham in search of the truth about his possibly alien ancestry!
His grandfather, by the way, is the "defector" or "turncoat" younger brother of the Lincoln youth who was lynched for raping and murdering the daughter of the town's leading family! Disgusted by his family's and his race's predatory parasitism, he "goes native" (so to speak), and even converts to Christianity! He confides in an initially incredulous and then horrified Episcopalian priest, initially hinting that he might be a surviving "Missing Link," like the then just recently discovered "Java Man"!
Grandpa courts and marries a nice human girl to whom he never reveals his alien background, siring a seemingly 100% perfectly human family line, while often wondering if the Christian God can save his own "Lamra" soul!
I'm also working in a Roswell-like top-secret government biological research program on the bodies of "Lamra" captured in that Federal raid on Innsmouth in HPL's Shadow Over Innsmouth!
HL: T. Peter, it's been a pleasure to offer your work and these amazing future stories and books to the fans of the Cavender's Terrible Twelve's Horror Library site. Thank you.
