Vermont

Vermont
Location	United States
Type	State
Appearances	HPL: "The Whisperer in Darkness"

Vermont is a state in the New England region of the United States. H. P. Lovecraft visited it twice, in 1927 and 1928, and later used it as the setting for his story "The Whisperer in Darkness".

Vermont's population in 1930, the year Lovecraft wrote his story, was 359,611. Its largest city at the time was Burlington, with 24,789 residents. Vermont's capital is Montpelier, which then had 7,837 people.

Travels

Lovecraft first visited Vermont in August 1927, one of several New England locales he saw that summer. This visit produced the travelogue "Vermont--a First Impression", which first appeared posthumously in Something About Cats and Other Pieces (Arkham House, 1949).

He returned to the state at the invitation of his correspondent Vrest Orton, spending two weeks with him in Brattleboro in June 1928.

'Whisperer in Darkness'

Lovecraft set his tale of a hidden alien race in "the wild domed hills of Vermont". Albert Wilmarth's impressions as he approaches Henry Akeley's home suggest how the landscape fired Lovecraft's imagination:

“

[A] vague quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its towering, threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which might or might not be hostile to mankind.... Archaic covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the river seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation. There were awesome sweeps of vivid valley where great cliffs rose, New England’s virgin granite shewing grey and austere through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousand pathless peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well lurk. The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritably breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even greater than I had imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in common with the prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning....

„

Lovecraft uses several real Vermont locations in his story: Akeley lives outside Townshend, a town about 15 miles from Brattleboro; one comes to his place through the "quaint, sightly village of Newfane". Wilmarth describes Brattleboro as "the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up."

The "historic and unprecedented Vermont floods" that set the plot in motion are an actual historical event. The Mi-Go sightings occasioned by the flood occur in real Vermont rivers; one encounter is "connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville."

The only other mention of Vermont in Lovecraft's fiction is in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where the Newburyport station agent--who is the first person to tell Olmstead about Innsmouth--mentions wild tales about devil worship there, then says, "but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don’t go down with me."