Exham Priory

[HPL Rats (online text)]: Ancestral home of the de la Poer (later Delapore) family, located three miles west of the village of Anchester, England. It stood on the site of a prehistoric temple, from Druidic or pre-Druidic times. It appears that the cult secretly kept a herd of slightly subhuman, plump, white, flabby quadruped things in a grotto under the temple, for use as food and possibly as sacrifices. A large population of rats also lived there and apparently subsisted on the herd-things, or possibly on their remains.

During Roman times, rites from that prehistoric cult continued under the guise of the worship of Magna Mater. The cult continued even after the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome. Certain Saxons added to the temple, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy (the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England). About 1000 A.D. the place was a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens. It was never destroyed by the Danes, but declined after the Norman Conquest, until Henry the Third granted the site to Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261. The family built a castle on the foundations of the old temple and priory. Thereafter the de la Poer family apparently adopted the habits of the original cult. The family developed an evil reputation, and was suspected in the occasional disappearances of villagers through several generations.

During the reign of James the First (1603-1625), Walter de la Poer, the third son of the family, apparently became appalled by the family cult practices. (The date was 1610 or later, since grafitti from 1610 was subsequently found onsite.) Walter murdered his father, five of his siblings, and several servants, and then emigrated to Virginia. Three months later, an army of rats burst forth from the castle and devoured domestic animals and two humans. Subsequently, the estate reverted to the crown. Exham Priory remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of the neighboring Norrys family.

Exham Priory had Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was reputed to be a blend of Roman and Druidic or native Cymric. This foundation was merged on one side with the solid limestone of a precipice. The nearby Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place.

Delapore (a American descendant of Walter de la Poer) bought Exham Priory in 1918, and visited in December 1921, then began restoring the Priory. He moved into Exham Priory on July 16, 1923. Almost immediately his cats showed signs of agitation and frenzy, and Delapore himself heard unaccountable sounds of a horde of rats scurrying through the solid stone walls. No other humans could hear the sounds. While investigating the subcellar with his neighbor Capt. Norrys, Delapare discovered an entrance to a deeper sublevel. With a team of archaeologists, they ventured downward and found a vast grotto with skeletons of the cult's victims and of many rats. There were also tumuli, a circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English edifice of wood.

Venturing too far into the dark recesses of the grotto, Delapore seems to have reverted to the habits of his ancestors by slaying and partially eating the plump, flabby Capt. Norrys, who apparently reminded him of the herd-things. Delapore denied the crime and claimed that the rats had done it. Subsequently, Delapore was confined to a barred room at Hanwell. Workmen blew up Exham Priory, and worked to obliterate its foundations. Most of the facts concerning the Priory were suppressed.

One of Delapore's statements may imply that the Exham Priory cult was really dedicated to Nyarlathotep: "It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players."

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