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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written January 1 to March, 1927

Published May and July 1941 in Weird Tales , Vol. 35, No. 9 (May 1941), 8-40; Vol. 35,

No. 10 (July 1941), 84-121.

'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious

Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an

Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes

of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape

of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.'

- Borellus

I. A Result and a Prologe

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently

disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward,

and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched

his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility

of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of

his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities

of a general physiological as well as psychological character.

In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant.

Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had

taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his

organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical

experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the

voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly

prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all

to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid

chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and

loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there

had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed

before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had

become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any sort

recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a

mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into

strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

the patient's gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the

sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was

always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew

the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It

was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful

and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the

strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his

intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment

he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted;

and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be

long in gaining his discharge from custody.

Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth

of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He

had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal

to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his

connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged

from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled

when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the

unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty

feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably

gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems strangely

easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more

if he thought any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his

room, but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened

the door the patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill

April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True,

the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they

had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once

over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite

called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any

knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of

Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly

fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time

no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.

Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the

venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of

his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his

devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial

architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his

sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness;

for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its

superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to

modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though

outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning;

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age through

some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer

interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them

through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering

those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably

expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to

hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and

conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life

and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to

have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of our own

time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired range of data, the

escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the dominant

opinion being that he is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting position till his stock

of modern information can be brought up to the normal.

The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the

eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the

Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of

the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual

researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's

altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and

among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor

named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the

panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was

known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of

1919-20 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general

antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at

home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's grave.

From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict on his

close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations and

discoveries which he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left

their mark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles

when he tries to write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would

ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in

the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal observation that

a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced

temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to

phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the actual

passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had

discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human though was likely to be

marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after

the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange

foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and

secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly

indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions; after

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's memory

commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his physical aspect underwent the

subtle modification so many subsequently noticed.

It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare

qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure

that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial

discovery. In the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's

ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page

of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness.

The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible reality, and Willett

had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be

believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there were the mysteries and

coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the Curwen

penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and

the terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained

consciousness after his shocking experience.

And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained

from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results which virtually

proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time

that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge.

One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as much to

the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a

considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had begun his junior

year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building,

erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious

park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social

activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his

classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the

State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter

Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley

Library in Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and

blond, with studious eyes and a slight droop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a

dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.

His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture

from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the

centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous

hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he

could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits

of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and

from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the

town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the shady,

sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with

narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their

generous yards and gardens.

He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the steep

hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a

greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these

rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used

to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the

child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and

steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed

embankment, and violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and

golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out

in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the

tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.

When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged nurse,

and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular

hill he would venture, each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He

would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial

gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique with

an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a

bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen

vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a

restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of the

pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals. On the

eastern side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone steps,

and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red

heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming

so visible.

Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town Street" that

the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes

with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was, it was

long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out a

dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue

along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the

1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington

stopped. At Meeting Street - the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods -

he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway

had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick

colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient Sign of Shakespeare's

Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the

Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its

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