Leavenworth, Indiana

Here I was, casually gawking at the sites of a small Hoosier town and what do I espy? It seems that a former resident of Innsmouth had migrated to the midwest! We greeted each other, but he was bit standoffish.

Actually, last Fall we were at the Overlook Restaurant. Some local artist had made this sculpture of tin or brass. I had to have my picture taken. :)

I've been contemplating the froggish folks of Innsmouth and T. Peter Park's Lincoln Legend lately - a very serious issue. I just made the connection today as I went through my digital photos. Someone else had an active imagination, or at least a whimsical moment in the studio. I have no information on this.

However, I do recommend the dining at the restaurant, and the view.














*From Shadow Over Innsmouth:


...The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

...

"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives ... sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island - sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. ... Wal, Sir, Obed he 'lart that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about - an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. lt seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started."
They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible - and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me.