Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
America’s Stonehenge! The very name conjures up vistas of huge, standing stone circles, almost unimaginable antiquity, lost civilizations, and maybe the occasional orgiastic human sacrifice, doesn’t it?
It’s obviously supposed to.
The real deal is not quite as impressive as that, but I will have to admit that it does not entirely disappoint. And it’s got something to do with H.P. Lovecraft. What more could you ask?
Lovecraft may have known of the place, although not under that name. If he ever visited, he did so privately, since it was not open as a tourist attraction until 1958. It was called Mystery Hill originally, but, probably because there are dozens of Mystery Hills all over America, most of them places of natural optical illusions where cars seem to roll uphill, a more distinctive name was needed. “America’s Stonehenge” better evokes imaginings of a hoary past, and, incidentally, sells more tickets. Whether what we see there is authentic is one question. Whether this site, a rumor of its existence, or similar sites scattered across New England inspired Lovecraft’s fiction is, I think, the more interesting question.
Located in Salem, New Hampshire, not far from but not to be confused with the other Salem, America’s Stonehenge is a roadside attraction, probably more appropriately listed in Weird US (where it is indeed listed) than in any serious archaeological text. I visited last July on a suitably gloomy, overcast day, which may have helped contribute to the eldritch atmosphere. I was there precisely because of the alleged Lovecraftian connection, which, curiously enough, the fellow at the ticket office/museum did not know about, for all it could be a considerable source of publicity.
America’s Stonehenge is on the site of a former farm. It occupies a wooded hillside. It is allegedly four thousand years old, but scientific difficulties begin immediately, if only because William B. Goodwin, the first “researcher” to purchase the place in 1937, and especially Frank Glynn, a president of the Connecticut Archeological Society in the 1950s, seemed determined to make the evidence fit their conclusions rather than draw their conclusions from the evidence. Think of the proverbial Egyptologist who was caught filing something off a tomb so the inscriptions would fit his theory. At the very least, this is a highly contaminated site.
We know that it has been altered and changed over the centuries, including some removal of stones in the eighteenth century in keeping with the good old Yankee tradition of tax evasion. (There was a tax on quarried stone in those days.) Then again, some of the structures have been built up. Some may have been used to hide moonshine in more recent times.
What remains is a series of very primitive stone structures, the largest of them like trenches lined with stones and roofed over with more. You can walk into a couple of the tunnels or caves. There is the celebrated “altar stone,” which does indeed have a sinister-looking groove around the edge, and an obvious “drain.” Around it, raised stones are placed to mark the movements of the sun, solstices, equinoxes, etc. It has been carbon-dated, we are assured. Four thousand years old.
At the ticket office/gift shop there is a considerable amount of display that tries to convince you that this site was built by Phoenicians or Celts or other trans-Atlantic peoples—even medieval Templars, for all they are at variance with the 4,000-year claim. (Well, maybe they worked on it later.) We are also told that runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad were hidden here. Why, some of their very shackles have been excavated and are on display in a glass case. That there could have been slaves hiding hereabouts is not impossible, but why they would still be wearing their shackles until they got as far as New Hampshire is not explained. (If you believe that, why, I have the very dollar that George Washington once threw across the Potomac, which I will show you for a price. Or would you prefer the third thighbone of the Apostle Peter?)
Actually, I think the documentary film shown in the little theater opposite the ticket counter may have let the truth slip out in a careless moment. There are, apparently, hundreds of such constructs around New England, few this elaborate, but stone “altars” and “tables” and upturned stones are found all over northern Massachusetts and into New Hampshire and Vermont. Lovecraft hinted darkly in several stories that these were used by Native sorcerers to call down Things from the stars in orgiastic rites, and maybe the old New England witches had a hand in it too. In “The Thing on the Doorstep” we are told that one such complex in Maine even features a pit of shoggoths. Well, why not? What’s an eldritch structure like that without a pit of shoggoths?
With a little critical thinking, alas, most of America’s Stonehenge falls apart. I am far more willing to believe in shoggoths than I am that Phoenicians crossed the Atlantic and built hundreds of these sites inland and away from rivers, then departed without any further trace. Of course true believers have manufactured “evidence” including a stone with an unconvincing “Punic” inscription on it, which is displayed in the gift shop/museum. Those Phoenicians must have left all their tools at home, too, because the stones in the structures show no evidence of being shaped by any means other than banging other stones against them, if they are shaped at all, and in real life the Phoenicians were quite a bit more advanced than that. (They were, after all, the folks who built Carthage.) The Celts, too, were sophisticated metal workers.
It’s actually an old, racist assumption at work here. Very obviously, what parts of this and other such sites that are genuinely ancient were built by Paleolithic natives. Not necessarily the tribes that lived there when the whites arrived in the seventeenth century but Native Americans, nevertheless. But if they were “savages,” then they couldn’t have built such a thing, and therefore Phoenicians or Celts must have done it. That they could not have built such a thing shows that they were savages and might be exploited. QED.
Similar “logic” used to be applied to Great Zimbabwe in Africa. I met a white South African couple in 1990 when I was in Rome, on a bus on the way to Pompeii. We got to talking because we three were the only English speakers present. They were vacationing in Italy because it was one of the few countries that would accept an Apartheid-era passport. They seemed to be completely ignorant of the history of their own country. They’d never heard of the Monomotapa Empire, and of course insisted that the blacks in their neighborhood were just too mentally primitive to conceive of building stone structures, so it had to have been done by King Solomon or the Egyptians or Arabs, or so forth. Needless to say, they had never read Sprague & Catherine de Camp’s Citadels of Mystery (aka Ancient Ruins and Archaeology), which has a chapter on Zimbabwe.
But if we acknowledge that the “savages” are just as smart as we are and that the ancient Britons were not the only people in the world to notice you can place stones to mark where the sun rises on certain days, then obviously ancient Indians could have done the same, and they must have built anything that is authentic at America’s Stonehenge. It occurs to me that a simple test should prove the antiquity of these stones, if antique they are. In 4000 years the Earth’s axis has moved. The stones should all be wrong. Are they? If the North Star stone really points at Polaris, then it was placed there much more recently. I wonder if anyone has checked this. I regret that I did not innocently ask that question while I was there.
What about the Lovecraftian connection? For all Lovecraft had friends in this area and visited several times, it is not clear that he ever beheld this particular spot. But he didn’t have to. That does not matter. That the alleged “archeological site” serves up a large degree of hokum, is likewise irrelevant. It does matter that Lovecraft was aware of at least similar sites, and he was, as Andrew Rothovius pointed out in his “H.P. Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths” (in The Dark Brotherhood, Arkham House, 1966), certainly the first writer to make use of them in fiction. This is how fiction differs from science. You don’t have to be right; you just have to be entertaining. You are allowed to fabricate, elaborate, and lie. Good hokum is grist for the proverbial mill.
Let your imagination run. Ignore the pseudoscience and the fake “Templar stone” in the gift shop and even the weirdly unlikely alpaca habitat outside, which enables tourists to coo at the cute critters if they get tired of looking at stones. What is exciting about all this, what must have excited Lovecraft too, is an appreciation that the New England landscape is ancient and as littered with mysterious traces of lost peoples as are, say, Arthur Machen’s Welsh hills or, for that matter Salisbury Plain. There are secrets to be unearthed.
Of course the site was used to call down Yog Sothoth from the stars. Only in the early twentieth century did Wizard Whateley manage to duplicate the procedure, among the standing stones on Sentinel Hill outside of Dunwich.
Darrell Schweitzer’s talents as choirmaster at the recent Necronomicon got his picture on The New Yorker’s web site—see “Croissants with Cthulhu” by Stephanie Gorton Murphy, <www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/croissants-with-cthulhu>.
Works Cited
Rothovius, Andrew E. “H. P. Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths.” The Dark Brotherhood andOther Pieces by H.P. Lovecraft and Divers Hands. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1966.
Moran, Mark and Mark Sceurman. Weird US. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004. The entry on America’s Stonehenge is on 41–43.
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