W.H. Holmes (?-?)-An Unusual Ghost Story

It seems that for decades a lot of men and even many women used only their initials in everything they did. That habit confounds the people who in later years might look for them, especially when they had common surnames. W.H. Holmes is a case in point. I know nothing about him and have found nothing about him, although there were: a well-known American paleontologist named William H. Holmes (1846-1933) (he was a member of the Hayden Survey of the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s); a school superintendent, Dr. William H. Holmes, of Mount Vernon, New York, who died in 1934; and a newspaper editor and publisher by those initials and that name in Kansas during the early 1900s. I'm not sure any of these men makes a good candidate for our W.H. Holmes. Another possibility is that "W.H. Holmes" was a pseudonym, "Holmes" being the operative word.

W.H. Holmes was the author of six stories published in The Black Mask and Weird Tales in 1922-1923. The following credits are from The FictionMags Index:

• "A Deep Sea Dog" in The Black Cat (Jan. 25, 1922)
• "The Matrimonial Reef" in The Black Cat (Oct. 1922)
• "Creeping Death" in The Black Mask (Feb. 1923)
• "The Weaving Shadows" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923)
• "Scrambled Motives" in The Black Mask (June 15, 1923)
• "The House in Boney Hollow" in The Black Mask (Sept. 15, 1923)

Who can say why he or she stopped writing after 1923? Or maybe he or she started writing under a different name. In any case, W.H. Holmes appears lost to us.

W.H. Holmes' Story:

"The Weaving Shadows" is a short story of about eight pages. It is set in New York State, with an opening and a closing in New York City and the main action taking place above the city, in the Highlands of the Hudson, more specifically at Sunken Mine. Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. I'll have more on that in a while.

Chet Burke and his unnamed sister live in an apartment in New York City. Burke is a Sherlock Holmes-type character. The story itself is constructed like a classic Holmes story. Burke is sitting in his favorite easy chair, "absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic," when his cipher of a sister lets in two visitors. (She's the Mrs. Hudson character I guess.) Burke knows Chief Rhyne of the Rhyne Detective Agency. Evidently he's the Inspector Lestrade character. With him is a Mr. Hayden, a carpenter late of New Orleans and now living with his sister and her daughter in a backwoods house at Sunken Mine. The troubled Mr. Hayden tells his story, just as Sherlock Holmes' clients do. Burke agrees to take the case and goes afield with Hayden. Chief Rhyne is left behind. It would have been better if he had gone with them. Maybe a lot of death could have been avoided.

"The Weaving Shadows" is an unusual story. It has many of the conventions of the ghost story or a story of a haunting. It also has Spiritualism, that hoary holdover from the nineteenth century, as well as suggestions of vampirism. The setting is an old and decaying house in a place long-since abandoned of most human habitation. The ghosts first appear as the ectoplasm-like "weaving shadows" of the title. Hayden is lying in bed at night when he first sees them. He feels constricted in his chest, then paralyzed. The shadows coalesce and Hayden is confronted with two terrible visages. Then blood drips from the air above him. Slowly, then, "The Weaving Shadows" becomes a different kind of story, and though Burke finds some background to the haunting at Sunken Mine, he is not able to explain what happened there. The gist of what I write is that "The Weaving Shadows" appears to be a story at the beginning of a transition from the conventional ghost story of a previous era towards real weird fiction of the twentieth century. That makes me think that Weird Tales was necessary for the evolution of weird fiction into its truest form. How would it have gone otherwise without the advent of "The Unique Magazine"? 

W.H. Holmes wrote five stories published in The Black Mask. I wonder if  Rhyne or Burke were characters in those stories. Rhyne seems to be a conventional kind of detective. Maybe he turns to Burke when he has more outré cases, for Burke is obviously an occult detective, the most fully developed character of that type so far in the first issue. I wonder if W.H. Holmes planned to write more stories featuring Chet Burke.

One difference between Chet Burke and many of the other protagonists in the first issue of Weird Tales is that he fails. He is defeated in his quest to explain the events at Sunken Mine. What is implicit in the story is that the deaths--at least one of the deaths--there may be attributable to his failure. Failure, defeat, humiliation, insanity, and even death are the lot of the weird-fictional protagonist. Contrast that with the triumphant or victorious science-fictional hero.

Although there is Spiritualism in "The Weaving Shadows," there are also more sophisticated concepts, some of which may resonate with us more now than they would have in 1923. One is night paralysis, a phenomenon that is sometimes related to visions, apparitions, or hallucinations of dark forms standing at a person's bed at night. There are also hints of psychopathology in the Hayden family, of schizophrenia, terrible depression, or other psychological and emotional disorders. Long before the Haydens lived in their backwoods saltbox house, it was inhabited by another tragic family with its own unique problems. All of this leads to disaster for the Haydens.

Now we come to H.P. Lovecraft.

There are echoes of Lovecraft in "The Weaving Shadows." Or maybe I should call them pre-echoes. First is its setting in a remote and depopulated place, one obviously in decay. This is the standard setting for a Gothic story. So no Lovecraft in that alone. There is also a theme of decadence and degeneration in families and whole cultures or societies. That's also a theme in Gothic fiction. Still not necessarily Lovecraftian. And then you read about the five-mile journey Burke and Hayden make on foot from the train station to the lonely house--a description that reads like a descent--and you start to be reminded of Lovecraft's version of these places and things.

In "The Weaving Shadows," blood drips from the air above the bed onto the floor. Again, not from the ceiling but from the air. In other words, it seemingly materializes, as if it were coming through what we might call a wormhole into the room. Could it be drawn from Hayden's sister and niece, who are sleeping downstairs and who are showing signs every day of a further wasting away? I remember a similar occurrence in "The Picture in the House" by H.P. Lovecraft (written in 1920; printed in 1921, 1923, and 1937), except that the blood drips from the ceiling and is issuing from the room above, where a ghastly tableau is sure to be taking place, even as the protagonist sits unawares below, at least until that moment.

If you want to read "The Weaving Shadows" but don't yet want to know about its climactic events, you should stop reading this entry right now.

As it turns out, there are two ancient skeletons in the attic of the house. Burke and the local sheriff discover them after the tragedy of the Hayden family has played out. The skeletons show signs of violence. They have been encased in a crypt-like space, lined with plaster, for generations. Skeletons inside of a secret and enclosed space in an old house make me think of Lovecraft's later story "The Dreams in the Witch House" (written in 1932; printed in 1933). In "The Dunwich Horror" (written in 1928; printed in 1929), there is a terrible creature kept in an enclosed space in an isolated farmhouse. 

Burke fails to solve the mystery of the events at Sunken Mine. He confesses as much to Chief Rhyne. The stepbrother of the two women whose skeletons were found in the attic presumably killed them and hid their bodies in a specially prepared place. So was he a murderer and a fiend? Or did he do what he believed was necessary under the circumstances? In other words, were the two women helpless victims, or were they in some way evil, an evil recognized and headed off by the stepbrother when he killed them? And why did Hayden's sister find and choose that remote house for her new home? Was she called there somehow? To liberate the spirits of the two dead women? Hayden's sister and her daughter are Spiritualists. Did they call up the spirits of the dead women? Were those spirits unable to escape until summoned by acts of Spiritualism? These questions are only suggested by the events of the story and never addressed or answered.

I have one note on Holmes' prose, which is mostly okay but includes this horrible clause: "the chairs squatted grimly."

Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. You can still go there, for it is located on public land at Clarence Fahnestock State Park in New York. The Appalachian Trail passes through the area, but you might want to go the way Burke and Hayden presumably went. The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad presumably delivered them to Cold Spring, on the east bank of the Hudson River. There they got off the train and began their trek. If you walk east from Cold Spring, in the direction of Dennytown, you will probably be walking in their footsteps.

A little northeast of Dennytown is Sunk Mine, named, no doubt, after Sunk Brook. There is still a Sunken Mine Road east of Dennytown. At one time, it was the main street of a nineteenth-century mining town called Odletown or Odeltown, formerly Odelltown. Men began mining iron ore there before or around the time of the American Revolution. During the Civil War, the ore they mined was used to feed the forges across the river at West Point. Most of the mines in the area were shut down by about 1876. The Sunk Mine was in operation until the mid 1880s. There are still ruins and remnants of mining and habitation in that part of the state. Be careful all around, but be especially careful if you come upon an ancient saltbox house lost in the backwoods. Whatever you do, don't spend the night there.

Finally, in thinking, writing, and researching all of this, I wonder if the author of "The Weaving Shadows" was a New Yorker (maybe Dr. William H. Holmes, the school superintendent at nearby Mount Vernon, is a good candidate after all), alternatively, whether he was in the U.S. Army at West Point and explored the local area during his tenure there.

Putnam County, New York, 1854. The details are too small to see here, but you can view a larger version of this image on the website of the Library of Congress by clicking here. Look for the bridge over Sunk Brook along Eastern Turnpike, which separates two political divisions called Phillipstown (in yellow) and Putnamville (in pink), in the western part of the county. (Coming from the Midwest, I don't know whether these divisions are called towns, districts, townships, or what.) It's a very thorough and beautifully made map and gives you a real sense of the place as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft made much of the geography, history, and culture of his native New England. Another writer could easily have done the same kind of thing for this part of New York. In fact, it's not too late. Someone should give it a go.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley