Well wasn't this a pleasant little surprise. I'd never run across this story before and damned if it isn't one of Lovecraft's best. A creepy little story with some really wild ideas and imagery.

Highly recommended. ( )

That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass at it. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly from the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paraded by day and the glimmering will-o’-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted at face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject. It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every direction, and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village was simply kept trailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which children and strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace which clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.

I have read this novella before, but for this re-read I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jim Campanella.

The story concerns an academic who comes to Binger, Oklahoma to investigate an old mound and the ghosts who haunt it. He soon finds that there is something real behind the ghost storie, as the ghosts can be seen through binoculars, and although many of the people who have investigated the mound over the past 40 or so years have come back unscathed, others have disappeared completely or come back strangely changed.

I liked the way this story links into the real history of the area. The village was settled less than half a century ago, but the local Native American tribes know a lot more about what is really below the mound, and although the narrator finds a scroll dating from the time of the conquistadores, it is young compared to the ancient horrors beneath the mound. ( )