Ghouls

[HPL Pickman (online text)]: A race of beings that burrows through human graveyards and eats the bodies of the dead.

Ghouls are roughly bipedal, but with a forward slumping, and vaguely canine cast. The skin has an unpleasant rubberiness, and is caked with mould. Their doglike faces have glaring red, bloodshot eyes; pointed ears, flat nose, and drooling lips. Their claws are bony and scaly; their feet are half-hooved.

Aside from haunting graveyards and eating corpses, they sometimes also attack people in their homes, while they are asleep.

The ghouls leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babies they steal. The ghouls teach the human children to feed off corpse-flesh like they do. The children of ghouls can pass for human among their human families, but have an unholy attitude.

Boston and Pickman

The Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman created numerous paintings of ghouls. From details of Pickman's paintings, Thurber inferred that the ghouls are linked to human beings by evolution; the ghouls are actually developed from human mortals. Pickman himself was gradually devolving, losing human attributes and gaining ghoulish ones. Either he was born with ghoulish ancestry, or found some way to unlock the forbidden gate.

Based on Pickman's paintings, the ghouls infested at least a portion of Puritan New England in colonial times; Pickman hinted at their presence in Salem during the witch-hunts. Pickman also recorded the ghouls in the Boston of the 1920's. Pickman spoke of a network of underground tunnels surviving under the North End from colonial times, all apparently infested by ghouls. The painting "Subway Accident" showed ghouls attacking people at the Boylston Street subway station, while another showed ghouls dancing at the Copp's Hill burying ground. Other paintings implied that the ghouls infest Beacon Hill and have savored the corpses of famous Amercans at Mount Auburn cemetery.

Passeways to Dream

[HPL Kadath (online text)]: Ghouls are also able to visit dreamlands, even while still awake. It seems that the ghouls frequent various abysses beneath the earth's surface. These abysses are connected by burrows to at least two regions beneath dreamland: the Great Abyss and the kingdom of the Gugs. In the Great Abyss, the ghouls live on a dim-litten plain, which is flat except for great boulders and burrows. This plain is in fact the flat summit of the crag of ghouls, which rises near the peaks of Thok. The ghouls on this plain throw offal over the edge, whence it falls into the vale of Pnath miles below. From somewhere within the Great Abyss, it is possible to access the upper dreamlands by climbing the black nitrous stairways that lead up to the deserted city of Sarkomand in Leng, in upper dreamland.

Alternatively, ghouls can follow burrows from earth's abysses to the kingdom of the Gugs. Risking attack from both gugs and ghasts, ghouls can travel through the gug kingdom to the tower of Koth (1). Ascending the steps within, they can reach the stone trapdoor that leads up into the enchanted wood, in upper dreamland.

Ghouls do not like to use the route that mortal dreamers follow between the waking world and the dreamland, for the ghouls do not like to pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame.

Though ghouls are capable of reaching upper dreamland, they generally do no business there, leaving the web-footed wamps to frequent the graveyards of dreamland. Hence, ghouls are not knowledgeable of the geography of upper dreamland.

Masters and Allies

The ghouls have no masters, and do not owe allegiance to the Other Gods or Nyarlathotep. However, the Other Gods can control the ghouls when they must.

The ghouls are bound by solemn treaties with the night-gaunts. The ghouls and night-gaunts communicate by means of ugly gestures.

On the Dream-Quest with Randolph Carter

The ghoul Richard Upton Pickman loaned Randolph Carter three ghouls to guide him through the gug kingdom and up the tower of Koth.

Later, these three ghouls were taken prisoner in Dylath-Leen by the almost-human merchants, and taken to the jagged rock of the moon-things in the northern sea, and thence to Sarkomand where they were tortured. After Carter discovered their plight, he alerted the other ghouls who, together with their allies the night-gaunts, ventured up to Sarkomand in force to rescue their fellows. Subsequently, the ghouls, the night-gaunts and Carter, led an assault on the moon-things at their rock in the northern sea. The ghouls secured victory, but over a fourth of their party was killed in the day's battle. Carter discouraged "the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded."

Then the army of ghouls and night-gaunts agreed to accompany Carter to Kadath where he planned to confront the Great Ones. Towards the end of their flight, the army was sucked forward by a might wind. After arriving at Kadath, the ghouls and night-gaunts disappeared; apparently either banished or destroyed by the might of Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods.

Related References

When the Outsider narrator saw himself in a mirror, he described himself as ghoulish. Later, he rode with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind. Nevertheless, he seems not to have been related to Pickman's type of ghouls, for the minimal description stresses that he is putrid, dripping, and eaten-away to reveal the bones. The Outsider narrator seems to resemble a disinterred corpse rather than the doglike ghouls of Pickman's ilk. [HPL Outsider (online text)].

Alonzo Typer wrote privately printed papers on ghouls, vampirism and poltergeists [HPL Diary (online text)].

The cat-goddess Bubastis was a type of ghoul, also known as Chewer of Corpses [RB Brood].

In Arkham, the Chambers house on Pringle Street had an iron door in the cellar that was reputed to lead through tunnels to the ancient cemetery on the hill behind the house. Previous owners Ezekiel Chambers and Jonathan Dark were reputed to have traffic with creatures from the cemetery. In modern times, one such creature emerged from the cellar door and devoured Joe Regetti. The surviving witness described hearing "something with long nails or claws that rasped and scraped" and was "croaking and chuckling as it moved through the cellar dark; something that wheezed with bestial, sickening laughter, like the death-rattle in the throat of a plague-stricken corpse." [RB Creeper (online text)] It is not clear whether the creature was a Pickman-like ghoul or some other cemetery-dwelling entity, such as a corpse reanimated through necromancy.

Alexander Chaupin told of things that lived in caverns beneath Misericorde Cemetery. "These were the dwellers that laired beneath; the ghastly spawn that ravened on the dead. They dwelt in nighted caverns lined with human bones and adored the primal gods before altars shaped of skulls. They had tunnels leading to the graves, and burrows still farther below in which they stalked a living prey." Chaupin would not describe these creatures save to say that they were very horrible and obscene to look upon. So we cannot tell whether they resembled Pickman's ghouls. [RB Grinning]

Richard Upton painted a portrait of a ghoul. He apparently showed that picture, or a similar one, to to H. P. Lovecraft. Laurel Colman was decapitated by a ghoul in Parkland Cemetery. [RB Strange]

Compare with: creeper in the crypt.

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