Graveside circus will commemorate 66th anniversary of horror writer's death

08:39 AM EST on Thursday, April 1, 2004

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

AP photo Lovecraft circa 1934. His tales have inspired a grim devotion in fans.

PROVIDENCE -- This weekend in Swan Point Cemetery, a crowd will gather. They'll read ghoulish prose. They'll carry coffee and ice cream. And they'll once more honor H.P. Lovecraft.

"It started as a small, dignified service," says Carl Johnson, director of the H.P. Lovecraft Commemorative Activities Committee. "It has become a production."

This is the 66th anniversary of the Providence author's death. Actually Saturday's 3 p.m. service in the cemetery on Blackstone Boulevard is a few weeks after the March 15 anniversary of Lovecraft's death. But history has taught its organizer that the weather and ground conditions of March 15 aren't always suitable for a service, which usually attracts about 100 participants.

Cemetery policy prohibits photographing and videotaping within its gates. While 23 Rhode Island governors are buried in Swan Point, reportedly no grave is more visited than Lovecraft's.

"It has become a mecca to horror fans," Johnson says. "If people don't know what's going on, they might think it's Rhode Island's version of Mardi Gras. It is an oddity. People do come in costume."

Most dress in black. And the coffee and ice cream they carry, which were among Lovecraft's favorite foods, are offerings to the man whose writings and headstone proclaim "I am Providence."

Lovecraft, who is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, was born in Providence in 1890. With the exception of a couple of years in a failed marriage in New York, Lovecraft lived all his life here, largely as a loner, taking late-night walks in the College Hill neighborhood, which he loved for its antiquity and beauty.

However, Lovecraft wrote fantastical horror.

"His stories are very chilling," Johnson says. "You put yourself in the place of the protagonist and feel it is a haunted world. He is very convincing."

While Lovecraft wrote about the supernatural, Johnson says, he wasn't a believer in it, although his followers seem to be.

It's not unusual during the Lovecraft service, Johnson says, for supernatural things to happen. There was the time, he says, a baby repeatedly uttered the sound of one of Lovecraft's made-up words. There was a time when a woman began singing a dirge to Lovecraft, and it began to snow, but stopped when she stopped. Another time a murder of crows gathered and drowned out a singer. And during the first memorial serice in 1987, a cold front came and went in minutes.

"It was so sudden," Johnson says. "Everyone just looked at each other."

Johnson started this memorial in 1987 on the 50th anniversary of Lovecraft's death, noting that before then the author received relatively little attention in his own home town. Johnson continued the tradition for a few years, until he moved out of state. And when he returned to Rhode Island in 1998, he resumed the Lovecraft commemoration tradition, now in its 10th year.

It might seem incongruous, all this attention for a private, solitary man.

"Lovecraft would be, at best, amused," Johnson says. "I hope he wouldn't be offended."