Ruth Muriel Eddy Bell (27 May 1921 – 21 May 2009) was not the last living person to have met H. P. Lovecraft—but with her passing went one of the last living memories of the Old Gent. Fortunately for us, she recorded her impressions in a brief memoir, “The Man Who Came At Midnight,” first published in The Fantasy Commentator, Vol. III, no. 3 (Summer-Fall 1949).
How much Ruth might remember, and how accurate are those recollections? We know from Lovecraft’s correspondence with her mother Muriel E. Eddy that HPL first visited the Eddys in 1923. Ruth was the youngest of the three children, only about two years old when Lovecraft supposedly came at midnight. These early impressions were very likely influenced in later years by Muriel’s various memoirs of Lovecraft, her stories told and retold until they became part of family lore. So what we have is not a “pure” memoir, but a memoir that was expanded, shaped, and influenced by the other things written about Lovecraft by his friends and possibly critics. This was a step in the process of building Lovecraft’s legend.
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THE MAN WHO CAME AT MIDNIGHT
by
Ruth M, Eddy
Gaslight flickered eerily through the crack in my bedroom door. It was Hallowe’en, night of the supernatural, and long past midnight, I had drifted off to sleep with visions of hobgoblins and Jack-o’-lanterns drifting through my childish mind. Suddenly, as in a dream, I heard a sepulchral voice saying, “Slithering…sliding…squealing…the rats in the walls!”
Half-asleep, half-awake, I lay in the darkness for a moment, and then shouted for my mother as loudly as I could. She came into my room and spoke softly, “Everything’s all right, dear. It’s just Mr. Lovecraft telling us about the new story he’s writing. Don’t be afraid. Go back to sleep.” Her warm tones were reassuring, and I was comforted as she leaned down to kiss me.
But sleep was impossible, for little as I was then, I lay listening to the strange-sounding story our nocturnal visitor was reading. As I was to find out years later, not only was Howard Phillips Lovecraft an expert writer of weird, spooky and uncanny tales, but he was also something of an actor. He made his fictional characters come truly alive through reciting his manuscripts aloud. And this he did in the wee sma’ hours of the morning as my parents listened attentively.
Lovecraft did not like daylight. He preferred darkness, always. Even when doing creative writing at home, if it was daytime he would draw the heavy curtains and write by artificial light. He did not like to leave his house during the day, but he and my father would often explore dark, unlighted alleys after midnight, walking along wharves and dimly-silhouetted bridges on the edge of the swamplands. It is not hard to imagine H.P.L. postulating unknown entities in these dark places, and from such nocturnal jaunts would often come ideas for his future stories.
In case I could stay awake long enough, I would sometimes listen to these tales, drifting off to sleep however before the story had ended. I grew accustomed to his voice, though I never quite got up enough courage to peek past the bedroom door at the reader himself. Yet in later years, as my father and mother discussed this friend of theirs, I could not help feeling that I had really known him, too.
How Lovecraft loved coal-black cats! He always had one near him. Cats sat in his lap while he wrote and they followed him out on his lone midnight explorings. His beloved black cat played a prominent part in ’’The Rats in the Walls,” and when one day this cat disappeared he became heartsick.
I feel H.P.L. would have been astounded, indeed, had he heard his “Dunwich Horror” broadcast two years ago on Hallowe’en. Never a lover of modern days and ways, using even such a common device as a telephone annoyed this gentleman and scholar of a different world! He preferred writing by hand to typing, and my parents often typed his manuscripts to relieve him of a hated task.
The shy and reticent Howard Lovecraft gained encouragement from my father and mother because of their interest and enthusiasm in his work, and soon after that Hallowe’en night he sold his macabre “Rats in the Walls” to a well-known magazine. Not a Hallowe’en has passed since Lovecraft’s death in 1937 without my family gathering for the reading aloud of a weird story by our favorite author—now internationally famous as a writer in the genre—although our eloquence cannot compare with his masterful interpretations.
And even though I never saw Howard Phillips Lovecraft, I shall always remember him as the man who came at midnight!
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Muriel wrote several times about Lovecraft reading “The Rats in the Walls” (Weird Tales Mar 1924) in manuscript to the Eddys, including in “Message in Stone” (1956), and the accounts of mother and daughter are consistent, though Ruth offers her own viewpoint and details. There are other details in the account that show things a young Ruth could not have known and picked up later—the bit about Lovecraft’s pet cat, for example. The idea of Lovecraft loving the darkness speaks to early myth-making; as with most aspects of Lovecraft’s legend, the reality is more complicated, with his letters often painting him as both a night owl and enjoying sunlit walks and writing outdoors in the daylight.
It is fun to imagine what it might have been like, to lie awake in the dark and hear a sonorous voice read off a dark tale, probably filled with words she did not yet understand…and only later coming to understand who she had been listening to. There is no indication that Ruth Eddy was being dishonest in this account, only that she was being influenced by more than her childhood memories. She was so young, after all; and was writing of events twenty-five years in the past. No surprise, then, to find that her adult mind may have shaped whatever impressions she had from those sleepless nights of long ago.
“The Man Who Came at Midnight” by Ruth M. Eddy has been reprinted in The Gentleman from Angell Street (2001), A Weird Writer in Our Midst (2010), and Ave Atque Vale (2018).
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 