H. P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House

Lore & Background

The episode follows university student Walter Gilman, who moves into a cheap room in an old boarding house. He encounters a neighbor, Frances, who is chased by a large rat, and an older tenant, Masurewicz, who warns him about a witch and a rat with a human face. Walter experiences disturbing dreams in which a witch appears, and he later discovers a pentagram carved into his back. He is compelled by the rat to sign a book and finds himself in a library with the Necronomicon, where he sees diagrams of infant sacrifice.

Reader's Guide

Walter eventually breaks through a wall in his attic and finds skeletons of past sacrifices and a cage holding Frances's son Danny. The witch commands Walter to kill Danny, but he resists and gouges out the witch's eyes, strangling her with a crucifix. He escapes with Danny, but the rat kills the child. Walter is found covered in blood, holding Danny's corpse, and is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The police recover infant remains and unknown DNA. Later, in a psych ward, a rat leaps from Walter's stomach, killing him. The episode ends with a "Room for Rent" sign outside the house.

Did You Know?

• Ezra Godden previously starred in another Stuart Gordon-directed Lovecraft adaptation, Dagon.
• The episode features the rat-like creature Brown Jenkin and the witch Keziah Mason from Lovecraft's original tale.
• The protagonist wears a Miskatonic University T-shirt with a design based on the seal of Brown University.
• The DVD was released by Anchor Bay Entertainment on March 28, 2006.

Plot & Narrative Arc

Walter Gilman, a mathematics and folklore student at Miskatonic University, rents an attic room in a cursed house in Arkham, Massachusetts. The house once sheltered Keziah Mason, a woman accused of witchcraft who vanished from a Salem jail in 1692. Gilman learns that most previous attic tenants have died young. He notices the room's dimensions follow a strange, non-Earthly geometry and theorizes the structure permits passage between planes of existence. His dreams grow increasingly vivid: he drifts formless through alien spaces populated by fleeting entities, including a polyhedral creature, and visits a city of the Elder Things, even carrying a statuette back. Nightly, he encounters Keziah and her rat-bodied, human-faced familiar, Brown Jenkin. Under the compulsion of Keziah, Brown Jenkin, and Nyarlathotep, Gilman signs the Book of Azathoth, participates in the kidnapping and sacrifice of an infant, and kills Keziah in self-defense. Brown Jenkin kills the baby, then later kills Gilman. The house is eventually demolished, revealing the skeletons of Keziah and Brown Jenkin, her black magic texts, relics, and the remains of children stretching back to the Salem Witch Trials.

Character Ensemble & Mythos Integration

The story assembles a cast that bridges the mundane and the mythic. Walter Gilman, originally from Haverhill, Massachusetts, studies non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics at Miskatonic, linking these disciplines to legends of elder magic. His obsessive scholarship earns him a ban from consulting the university's rarest volumes, including the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Keziah Mason, a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century, is reimagined as a figure whose mathematical insight may have surpassed even Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and De Sitter. Her physical description—bent back, long nose, shrivelled chin, shapeless brown garments—contrasts with her terrifying expression of malevolence and her croaking, persuasive voice. Brown Jenkin, her familiar, is a small furry creature no larger than a rat, yet with a bearded, evilly human face and tiny human hands, nursing on blood and speaking all languages. The Black Man, a tall, lean, dead-black figure in a shapeless robe, is identified as Nyarlathotep, the deputy of hidden powers. Frank Elwood, Gilman's only fellow resident, serves as witness and confidant before being institutionalized for a year.

Mathematical & Scientific Underpinnings

What distinguishes this tale within Lovecraft's body of work is its deep engagement with contemporary science. The story was likely inspired by Willem de Sitter's lecture The Size of the Universe, which Lovecraft attended roughly three months before writing the piece in January and February of 1932. De Sitter appears by name in the narrative, positioned alongside Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein as intellectual giants whose work Keziah Mason may have somehow transcended. Gilman's academic focus on non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics is not mere window dressing; it forms the logical framework through which he interprets the Witch House's anomalous geometry. The attic room's dimensions, which seem to conform to an unearthly spatial logic, become the mechanism for dimensional travel. This grounding in real mathematical and physical concepts—geometry that defies Euclidean axioms, the quantum realm, the structure of the universe—gives the horror a rational scaffolding. The terror does not arrive as pure superstition but as a consequence of knowledge pushed past its boundaries, a theme that resonates with the intellectual anxieties of the early twentieth century.

Publication History & Legacy in the Mythos

The Dreams in the Witch House was composed in the brief window of January and February 1932 and saw its first appearance in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Its placement within the Cthulhu Mythos cycle is explicit: the narrative weaves together references to the Necronomicon, the Book of Azathoth, the Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the Elder Things, binding it to Lovecraft's broader fictional cosmology. The Black Man's identification as Nyarlathotep, the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers, anchors the story firmly in that shared mythology. The tale also carries traces of Lovecraft's other works; a Father Iwanicki appears in an early draft of The Shadow over Innsmouth (1931) before being excised, suggesting the Witch House's world and that of Innsmouth existed in a shared creative space. The story's 1933 publication in Weird Tales placed it alongside the era's other landmark horror fiction, and its fusion of academic rigor with cosmic dread helped cement Lovecraft's reputation as a writer who could make the mathematics of the universe feel genuinely terrifying.