Marceline Bedard

[HPL Medusa (online text)]: A composite being, resembling a young woman, whose hair had a life of its own. She was the ultimate source for legends of Medusa and the Gorgons. The painter Frank Marsh hinted that she had existed for 75,000 years. His painting showed her in sunken R'lyeh. Her devotee, Old Sophonisba, referred to her as a child of Clooloo (Cthulhu). It is not clear if Marceline was really that old, or if she was merely a participant in a tradition started by Cthulhu. It is possible that the hair was a symbiotic creature that attached itself to a series of human hosts. This may be the meaning of her statement that Marceline Bedard was her name only "in this latest incarnation."

She played a part in a frightful secret that came down from the days of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones (5). "It was the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention—the thing hinted at in the Necronomicon and symbolised in the Easter Island colossi." She knew how to call up what lies hidden in Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R’lyeh. She told of "elder secrets" and "unknown Kadath."

More specifically, she was the priestess of a cult of magic that survived R'lyeh, passing down to Atlantis, then to lost African civilisations such as Zimbabwe and dead Atlantean cities in the Hoggar region of the Sahara. Later the cult seems to have been associated with the goddess Isis in Egypt and the goddess Tanit in Carthage. In modern times, the cult surfaced among the Bohemian set on the left bank in Paris, around 1910.

Her Modern Incarnation

Marceline claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of the Marquis de Chameaux. She passed as white but was of partly African descent. It was rumored that she had lived in the West Indies, possibly in Martinique. She had worked as an artist and a model before becoming a "priestess" and styling herself Tanit-Isis, leading her group in hair-snake rites. She made a great show of austerity and holiness.

In appearance, she was a beautiful young woman with olive skin, large dark eyes, and jet black hair that was long enough to hang below her knees. Sometimes the hair seemed to move slightly of itself. She brushed it incessantly and fed it with queer oils. Marsh's painting portrayed her hair with snake-heads at the ends, but these were not visible normally.

While in Paris, she married Denis de Russy, scion of an American planter family. She vowed to resign her position as priestess of the cult, and returned with Denis to his family estate in Missouri around the start of 1916. Most of the blacks at the estate feared Marceline, except for the elderly Zulu woman Old Sophonisba, who revered her.

Trouble on the Plantation

Later they were joined by Marsh, who began a painting to show Marceline as she actually was. She became enamored of Marsh, but he spurned her advances, and refused to show her the portrait in progress. When Denis finally saw the portrait, he realized the truth about her, and killed her with a machete, then hacked off her hair. Her hair then crawled away and strangled Marsh, remaining tightly coiled around his corpse.

After Marceline's death, Sophonisba called out to Shub-Niggurath and Cthulhu, saying "De hair ain' got no missus no mo'." Denis believed that Marceline's hair could only be killed by burning it. But after Denis's suicide, his father Antoine de Russy merely buried the bodies under the cellar, with Marceline's hair still coiled around Marsh. Later a ghostly emanation of the hair, in the form of a black snake, haunted the cellar and visited Sophonisba in her cabin.

Marsh's painting spoke to Antoine, telling him that he must guard it to keep Marceline and the hair from coming up out of their graves. After a visitor later shot bullets through the portrait, Marceline's corpse came back and killed Antoine, while her hair pursued the visitor to his car. The house burned down, but it is unclear what became of Marceline's body or her still-living hair.

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