Walpurgis Night is here and it may interest you to know that H.P. Lovecraft's supremely weird Walpurgis Night story contains several Polish characters. Set in Arkham, the fictional New England college town in which Lovecraft placed most of his stories,
The Dreams in the Witch House, is the tale of a student, named Walter Gilman, who studies mathematics and folklore at Arkham's Miskatonic University. These dual concerns have lead the student to rent a room in Arkham's "Witch House" so named because it had harbored a reputed sorceress, named Kesiah Mason, who'd escaped from her Salem jail cell during the infamous witch trials, before the pious townsfolk were able to set her alight. The circumstances of her liberation were very mysterious:
That was in 1692-the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
At the time of Lovecraft's story, presumably the mid 1930's when it was authored, the Witch House is owned by a Polish man and peopled with some Polish tenants. Readers familiar with Lovecraft's xenophobia may expect to find the Polonians less than favorably characterized in the tale, and I heartily invite them to read it at the link provided below, and to decide for themselves, if it is true, as many critics have alleged, that Lovecraft had indeed become far more tolerant during the last years of his life.
As April advanced Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix-given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church-could bring him relief.
/writings/texts/fiction/dwh.aspx
