A Visit to the Dark Swamp

The edge of the Dark Swamp.

 Out east on the Putnam Pike in Glocester, Rhode Island, on the border with Connecticut, there is a neglected patch of wild land with an eerie reputation: the Dark Swamp. In November 1923, H.P. Lovecraft and fellow horror writer Clifford Martin Eddy Jr. attempted to travel to the swamp to investigate local legends of supernatural occurrences and nameless creatures. Although the authors never managed to find their way into the swamp itself, the lore and the atmosphere of the area may have helped inspire stories like The Dunwich Horror and The Colour Out of Space, and Lovecraft's letter about his trip to the vicinity of Dark Swamp is the main conduit through which knowledge of the legends of the swamp has survived to the present.   

The Dark Swamp is located near the western edge of Glocester, RI, between Reynolds Rd and Willie Woodhead Rd, on state forest land associated with the Durfee Hill Management Area. I visited in December last year, starting on foot from the small parking area at the end of the paved northern section of Willie Woodhead Rd, and seeing the sights of the swamp from the maze of footpaths and wood roads west of W.W. Rd, with some bushwacking into interesting-looking locales. Logging and hunting takes place in the state forest, and a sign suggested that wearing blaze-orange is required for entry during hunting season. 

The inexplicably named, semi-impassible unpaved middle section of Willie Woodhead Rd, east of the Dark Swamp. 

 The rough, hilly landscape in and around the Dark Swamp is pretty typical of southeastern New England. The bedrock is the hard, pale granite of Avalonia, the ancient island arc pasted onto parts of coastal North America during the formation of Pangea. The soil is thin and acidic and mostly made of rocks. The uplands support a stunted, scraggly forest of White Pine and a half a dozen different oak species, with an understory of various blueberries, huckleberries and shadbushes, with mountain laurel and impenetrable tangles of catbrier here and there. This vegetation type is known as Oak-Heath Forest. Low-lying areas are dominated by Eastern Hemlock and Red Maple, with an understory of highbush blueberries and Sweet Pepperbush. Lovecraft found the landscape of the rural Glocester hills, woods and isolated farmsteads to be uncommonly beautiful, and it still is lovely, but good lord imagine trying to make a living from agriculture on soil like that, in an era before powered equipment and chemical fertilizers.     

Grave of the infant Eliza Ann Bowen.

Cellar hole just east of the Dark Swamp.

 The Dark Swamp was not quite as shunned by humanity as Lovecraft suggests, and there are remains of 19th Century inhabitation on the eastern margins of the swamp. A small but still regularly maintained cemetery has graves from the Bowen family from the mid eighteen-hundreds. A little further south there is an early fieldstone cellar hole from a farmhouse, including the base of a massive central chimney, with surrounding stone walls and the remains of outbuildings. The buildings were electrified at some point in the 20th Century, and probably would have been standing and occupied in the 1920s for Lovecraft's visit, if he had managed to reach the area. 

A deep dug well next to the farmhouse ruins.

Flash photo down the well. 

Next to the cellar hole there is a deep dug well, lined with stone and with a pool of clear water at the bottom, maybe 20 feet down. It was strongly reminiscent of my image of the contaminated well in Colour Out of Space, but of course every lonely farmhouse in New England in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries would have had something similar. This particular example was quite well-preserved and deep; they are often shallow and collapsed or choked with debris when you run across them in the woods. 

Large cairn near the Dark Swamp. 

Group of big cairns in a hollow between low ridges. 

One of the peculiar features of the Dark Swamp area is the unusual prevalence of cairns, or lithic sites. There was a striking group of about 20 large cairns, some almost as tall as me and 12-15 feet across, deeper in the forest in the vicinity of the farmhouse ruins, scattered around the floor and sides of a small hollow. These sorts of things could be prehistoric ceremonial grounds from Native Americans, or the product of the land-clearing efforts of settlers, or something else, but the large number and size of dry fieldstone structures at this spot was odd.   

Barren field of sand near the Dark Swamp. 

 Another peculiarity of the Dark Swamp is a rounded patch of barren sand, about an acre in size and easily visible in satellite photos of the swamp, with almost no living vegetation within its perimeter. This will immediately bring to mind the "Blasted Heath" in Colour Out of Space, though Lovecraft did not mention having heard of this particular sand field, if indeed the site existed in this state in the 1920s. Could this be a place where blasphenous sacrifices to the Old Ones have been performed on May Eve, and the veil between worlds is worn thin, and malign influences from beyond the stars seep into our sphere, such as naught that is of our world may long endure? Or, might it be that, since time immemorial, drunken Swamp Yankees have gathered at an old sand pit, on May Eve, to drive their ATVs around in circles, thus killing anything that starts to grow in an already challenging micro-environment for the establishment of vegetation? One shudders at the mere contemplation of the possibilities.  

Dense stand of Atlantic White Cedar in the Dark Swamp. Now that, my friends, is a dark swamp. 

 Much of the actual Dark Swamp is not dark at all, at least not now. There is a whole complex of wetlands that make up what I suppose is the Swamp, with watery low areas separated by hillocks and eskers of glacial outwash sand and gravel; most of these wetlands are sunny and open, with cattails and sedges around shallow pools. There are a lot of dead trees, sun-bleached and barkless, both fallen and standing, in the open marshy areas, though, and it is clear that 100 years ago the whole swamp was probably shaded by thick growths of pine, hemlock and Red Maple. Likely what has happened is that beavers returned in the mid-twentieth century--after having been hunted to local near-extinction in colonial times--building dams and raising water levels in parts of the Dark Swamp, either drowning or straight-up eating the trees that had made the swamp dark. There are still some suitably dismal corners of the Swamp with dense tree cover, though, including a cedar swamp with some real old-growth looking specimens of Atlantic White Cedar and a deep spongy bed of sphagnum moss, which hint at how this half-forgotten corner of Rhode Island earned its name.