In H. P. Lovecraft's terrifying and atmospheric 1927 short story "The Colour Out of Space," a meteorite strikes near a farmhouse in a rural area "west of Arkham," the fictional town in Massachusetts that is the setting of many of his stories.
The farm's owner, Nahum Gardner, and many others witness its fall; a "white noontide cloud... [a] string of explosions in the air, and [a] pillar of smoke from the valley." Nahum, being closest, goes to investigate:
By night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place... Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone... He and his wife went with three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool...
The day after that... the professors had trooped out again in great excitement... [T]he specimen... had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone as well, and the men talked about the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal... and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool... upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum.
Eventually, the entire meteorite -- both the samples the scientists took, and the much larger piece in Nahum Gardner's yard -- evaporate away completely. Well, not completely, because it's Lovecraft, after all; it left behind a miasma -- dare I say, an eldritch miasma -- that proceeds to poison the well, the soil of the farm, and the entire Gardner family. The result is the crops, domestic animals, Nahum and his wife and three children, and finally the homestead itself quite literally falling apart, crumbling into a gray dust that "the wind does not seem to affect." At the end of the story, the narrator describes the reason he found out about the affair -- he is an engineer hired by the state of Massachusetts to scope out a proposed site for a dam and a reservoir, which would flood "the blasted, withered heath that is all that is left of the old Gardner place" and the surrounding land. "I shall be glad to see the water come," he says. "I hope the water will always be very deep -- but even so, I shall never drink it."
*shudder*
The story is quite different from Lovecraft's usual fare of cults and Elder Gods and idols of the Great Cthulhu and so on, and you have to wonder what inspired it. One thing is pretty likely to be the construction of the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island in 1925, near his native Providence, and the much-publicized plans for the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts; but I wonder if he also got the idea from a pair of wild tales that had been all over the news not long before.
The first occurred in 1916 near Bargaintown, New Jersey, where a farmer named Henry Prantl reported something very much like what Nahum Gardner saw in Lovecraft's story -- a white light streaking across the sky, followed by the boom of an impact. Rushing out to investigate, Henry and his son John found a "writhing piece of mystic material"...
... shaped like a charred human hand.
It was at first too hot to touch, but once it cooled, they were able to examine it. We find out it was "made of no known material," and was "abnormally light for its size." At first reluctant to part with it, the Prantls realized what money could be made from such an oddity, and leased it to an amusement park in Atlantic City where it was displayed for several years. Somewhere along the way it was lost, and the Prantls found their temporary fame and dreams of wealth evaporating as quickly as Nahum Gardner's mysterious meteorite.
Not to be outdone, a gem miner in northern California claimed ten years later that he witnessed another meteorite fall, and this one was even better than a flaming hand; it was a flaming skull. This is only a year before Lovecraft wrote "The Colour Out of Space," and like the first meteorite, it was all over the news, largely because of the indefatigable efforts by its discoverer, Charles E. Grant, to make sure it got into the headlines and stayed there. Grant said he'd been told about the fall by a "reputable and well-to-do man," and they went out to retrieve the object. He wouldn't let anyone see it, but sent a photograph to a reporter named Ben Cline, who dutifully wrote a story about it, ending with the wry comment, "[it has] the shape of a human skull, with depressions suggesting facial organs. The writer's first-hand knowledge of races inhabiting planets other than Mother Earth is limited, and he hesitates, therefore, from the picture, definitely to place the Butte County visitor in the nebular scheme of things."
It didn't take long for people to connect the New Jersey story to the California one, and suggest that the hand and the skull had come from the same body. If so, it was a little mysterious (1) why one had fallen ten years before the other, (2) how the unfortunate individual got up there in the first place, and (3) why he was coming down in chunks.
Maybe he had the Nahum Gardner falling-to-pieces syndrome, or something.
In any case, people started frantically looking around to find out if other charred body parts had come crashing to Earth, so they could cash in on the notoriety, but no such luck. What with the hand getting lost right around the same time, and Grant refusing to show anyone the actual skull -- leading many to surmise that he made the whole thing up -- the only result was a flurry of interest in meteorites and, perhaps, Lovecraft's story.
Myself, I wonder if the "hand" was actually a fulgurite -- a long, branching tube of vitrified and fused soil, sand, and debris left behind when lightning strikes the ground. Some of these things have a remarkably organic look, and the ones I've seen have a striking resemblance to the Prantl photograph. This would also explain why it was "abnormally light for its size." As far as Grant's flaming skull goes -- well, like I've said many times before, if you expect me to believe something, show me the goods or else bugger off. If there was a meteorite at all -- i.e., if the photograph itself wasn't a fake -- its resemblance to a skull is very likely to be nothing more than a combination of pareidolia and Grant jumping up and down shouting, "It looks like a skull, doesn't it? Doesn't it?"
So that's today's tidbit of historical weirdness. Meteoritic body parts and one of Lovecraft's best stories. I'm happy to report that neither the Scituate nor the Quabbin Reservoir seem to have poisoned anyone, and that I haven't heard any reports out of southern New Jersey or northern California suggesting anybody out there had any difficulties with "colours."
Just as well. What happened to the Gardner family was nasty. I wouldn't even wish that on Elon Musk, and that's saying something.
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