"The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror"

Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962) was just twenty-two years old when he began conducting a regular feature for Weird Tales called "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," which had been announced in the issue of April 1923 (on page 184). Four installments of "The Cauldron" followed in the issues of June, July/August, September, and October of 1923. The idea behind "The Cauldron" is that readers would submit accounts of their own weird or presumably supernatural experiences for publication. Hickey must have served as reader of manuscripts and editor. He was known later as an author of "true" or confessional-type stories in other pulp magazines. I believe stories in "The Cauldron" were of the same type. The idea was revived in the Weird Tales feature "It Happened to Me," published in eleven installments in March 1940 through November 1941. Fate magazine published similar accounts.

The authors of the dozen stories or accounts in "The Cauldron" are lumped in indexes with the writers of letters published in "The Eyrie." I don't think they should be. Instead, I think they should be considered a separate category of authors, though certainly not on the same level as the poets or the authors of fiction and longer non-fiction articles. Nonetheless, they are authors. Their stories or accounts and their names are as follows:

June 1923

• "The Ghost of Death" by Owen King of North Lamoine, Maine.

• Untitled by Otis Trevor, a reporter for the Denver Times.

• "The Death Plunge" by John Burkholz.

July/August 1923

• "The Lesson in Anatomy" by John R. Palmer.

• "The Black Nun" by H.F.K., a woman.

• "The Phantom Train" by Charles White, who may have been the same Charles White of Quebec City, Canada, who had a letter in "The Eyrie" in September 1923.

• "A Strange Manifestation" by Matt. Byrne Ap'Rhys, C.E. In case you're wondering, Ap'Rhys is indeed a surname, I believe of Welsh origin.

September 1923

• "Pat McCloskey's Ghost" by J.P. Cronister.

• "The Velvet Death" by Henry Trefon, no doubt a pseudonym of Mary Sharon (née Henrietta Prouty, 1895-1962) or of Mary Sharon writing with her husband, Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971). Mary Sharon had a letter in "The Eyrie" in June 1923, and she would soon have a poem, "The Ghost," in Weird Tales (Feb. 1924), the first by a woman in the pages of "The Unique Magazine."

• "Arthur Armstrong's Predicament" by D.G. Prescott, Jr.

October 1923

• "After I Was Dead" by John W. Walton, age fourteen, of Pennsylvania.

• "Mysterious Radio" by Maxwell Levey.

Next: "The Eyrie" for June of 1923.

Weird Tales, April 1923, page 184, announcing "The Cauldron."

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley