I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England-sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical-and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and-so far-last time. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, they really knew very little for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.īut at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world.
That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched since the low, black reef lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour. Only one paper-a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy-mentioned the deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef.
Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.Ĭomplaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation.
Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.
The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting-under suitable precautions-of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.
FULL VERSION over 16 Minutes of 'The Shadow over Innsmouth' available when downloaded.ĭuring the winter of 1927–28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth.