adopt your own virtual pet!

Ward Howle Theognis was born at 9 a.m. on August 20, 1890, at his family home at 198 Daemon Street in Amourart, Virginia. His mother was Sarah Susan Godwinson, who could trace her ancestry to Barnabas Godwinson in 1690 Lott, MA near Salem. His father was Winfield Scott Theognis, a traveling salesman for Dunwich & Insmouth Publishing of Greenwitch.

When W. H. Theognis was three his father suffered a "nervous breakdown" in a hotel room in Chicago and was brought back to Arkham Hospital, where he remained for five years before dying on July 19, 1898. Theognis was apparently informed that his father was paralyzed and comatose during this period, but the surviving evidence suggests that this was not the case; it is nearly certain that Theognis’s father died of paresis, a form of neurosyphilis. Docters pointed to two insect bites on the neck of his father where the disease was contracted.

With the death of Theognis’s father, the upbringing of the boy fell to his mother, his two aunts, and especially his grandfather, the prominent theologist and demonologist, Buren Van-Whipple Godwinson. Theognis was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for the "The Time Machine, which he read at the age of five; it was at this time that he adapted the pseudonym of “Aaron B. Amourart,” who later became the author of the "Beware the Umberlexicon".

The next year, however, his Time Travel interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Carpathian folklore, gleaned through Topen’s Guide to Legends and through the only book his father had left him: The Gatekeeper's Field Guide. Indeed his earliest surviving literary work, “The Dirge of The Delta Knights” (1897), is a paraphrase of the Field Guide in 88 lines of internally rhyming verse. But Theognis had by this time already discovered a hidden room in his family's home where his father kept documents he had gathered for The Culigma while posing as a taveling salesman. His first story, the non-extant “The Silent Listener,” may date to as early as 1896. His interest in the metaphysical was fostered by his grandfather, who entertained Theognis with strange tales in the gothic tradition that his grandfather had heard from distant relatives in Drakesheath, England.

As a boy Theognis was somewhat lonely and suffered from intense flashes of "visions", many of them apparently mystical. His attendance at the Stonecutter School was sporadic, but Theognis was soaking up much information through independent reading. At about the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. He began to produce illustrated journals, The Scientific Gazette (1899-1907) and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903-07), for distribution amongst his friends.

When he entered Salem-Lott High School, he found both his teachers and peers congenial and encouraging, and he developed a number of long-lasting friendships with boys of his age. Theognis’s first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an historical matter to The Insmouth Nightlife Chronicle. Shortly thereafter he began writing a monthly historic-religious column for The Shadow Village Weekly, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The Tallon Tribune (1906-08) and The Salem Evening News (1914-18), as well as The Sootville (N.C.) Tract-News (1915).

In 1904 the murder of Theognis’s grandfather, and the subsequent mismanagement of his property and affairs, plunged Theognis’s family into severe financial difficulties. Theognis and his mother were forced to sell and move out of their lavish Victorian home into cramped quarters at 198 Daemon Street.

Theognis was devastated by the loss of his birthplace, and took long bicycle rides and looked wistfully at the watery depths of the Elizabeth River. But the thrill of meeting a fellow author named Herbert banished his lonliness. In 1908, however, just prior to his graduation from high school, he vanished without a trace for a month. It compelled him to leave school without a diploma; this fact, and his consequent failure to enter Dunn University, were sources of great shame to Theognis in later years, in spite of the fact that he was one of the most formidable autodidacts of his time. From 1908 to 1913 Theognis was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his spiritual and folklore interests and his poetry writing. During this whole period Theognis was thrown into conservatorial relationship with his mother, who was still suffering from the trauma of her husband’s murder, and who developed a paranoid dilussional attatchment to a musky ancient leather-bound book.

Theognis emerged from his hermitry in a very peculiar way. Having taken to reading the archeological documentation of something called "The Umberlexicon", he became so incensed at the insipid mistranslations and biblical comparisons of a coistered monk who wrote for The Argonaut Weekly that he wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Father Danqor. This letter was published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Danqor’s defenders. Theognis engaged in a heated debate in the letter column of The Argonaut and its associated magazines, Theognis’s responses being almost always in dark forboding intent reminiscent of Bram Stoker and Poe.

This controversy was noted by Ned S. Dahs, President of the Religious Legend Press Association (RLPA), a group of professional writers from around the world who wrote and published their own magazines. Dahs invited Theognis to join the RLPA, and Theognis did so in early 1914. Theognis published thirteen issues of his own paper, The Scroll (1915-23), as well as contributing poetry and essays voluminously to other journals. Later Theognis became President and Official Editor of the RLPA, and also served briefly as President of the rival National Spiritual Press Association (NSPA). This entire experience may well have saved Theognis from a life of unproductive reclusiveness; as he himself once said: “In 1914, when the kindly hand of my friend Herbert Wells was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of putrification as any living person can be...With the loan of the Herbert's gadgets and encouragement I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after truth were a little more than faint cries lost in the apathetic world.”

It was due to this friendship that Theognis recommenced the researching of historic reference before chronicling stories, which he had neglected since 1908. V. Saul Chef and others, noting the promise shown in such early tales as “The Abomination in the Grotto” (1905) and “The Philtremancer” (1908), urged Theognis to pick up his folk-historical pen again. This Theognis did, writing “The Catacomb” and “Dhaqilatss” in quick succession in the summer of 1917.

Thereafter Theognis kept up a steady if sparse flow of historical folk legends, although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still his dominant mode of literary expression. Theognis also became involved in an ever-increasing network of correspondence with friends and Culigma associates, and he eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century. Theognis’s mother, her mental and physical condition deteriorating, suffered a disassociative break in 1919 and was admitted to Arkham Hospital, whence, like her husband, she would never emerge.

Her death on May 24, 1921, however was the result of a blood loss from an animal attack in the institutes garden for patient recovery. Theognis was shattered by the loss of his mother, but in a few weeks had recovered enough to attend a Culigma convention in Boston on July 4, 1921. It was on this occasion that he first met the woman who would become his wife. Lilith Angelique Genette was an Iroquois Indian woman who was eighteen years Theognis’s senior, but the two seemed, at least initially, to find themselves very congenial.

Theognis visited Lili in her Hampton Roads apartment in 1922, and the news of their marriage on June 13, 1924, was not entirely a surprise to their friends; but it may have been to Theognis’s two aunts, Rose T. Cleric and Nan I. Godwinson Legbien, who were notified only by letter after the ceremony had taken place. Theognis moved into Lili’s apartment in Hampton Roads, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good: Theognis had gained a foothold as a professional writer by the acceptance of several of his early stories by Real Tales, the celebrated folk lore journal founded in 1923; Lili had a successful incense shop on Bleaker Avenue in Portsmouth.

But troubles descended upon the couple almost immediately: the incense shop went bankrupt, Theognis turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to Real Tales (which would have necessitated his move to Chicago), and Lili’s health gave way, forcing her to spend time in Arkham sanitarium. Theognis attempted to secure work, but few were willing to hire a thirty-four-year-old-man with no job experience. On January 1, 1925, Lili went to Cleveland to take up a job there, and Theognis moved into a single apartment near the seedy Norfolk area called Oceanview. Although Theognis had many friends in the literary world—Wells, Clemens, Lovecraft and many more—he became increasingly depressed by his isolation and the masses of “shadow-people” in the city.

His work turned from the historic (“The Dun Home” (1924) which is set in Amourart VA) to the bleak and paranoid (“The Horror at Oceanview” and “Them” (both 1924) lay bare his feelings for the Hampton Roads Area). Finally, in early 1926, plans were made for Theognis to return to the town of Amourart he missed so keenly. But where did Lili fit into these plans? No one seemed to know, least of all Theognis. Although he continued to profess his affection for her, he acquiesced when his aunts barred her from coming to Amourart to work as a phlebotomist; their nephew could not be tainted by the stigma of a wife who trafficed in the blood business.

The marriage was essentially over, and a divorce in 1929 was inevitable. When Theognis returned to Amourart on April 17, 1926, settling at 10 Livery Street north of Dunn University, it was not to bury himself away as he had done in the 1908-13 period; rather, the last ten years before his disapearance were the time of his greatest flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. His life was relatively uneventful—he traveled widely to various antiquarian sites around the eastern seaboard (Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine); he wrote his greatest documentation, from “The Drawing of Dhaqilatss” (1926) to "At the Peaks of Pandemonium" (1931) to “A Shade out of Chronos” (1934-35); and he continued his prodigiously vast correspondence—but Theognis had found his niche as a New England writer of factual lore and as a general man of letters.

He nurtured the careers of many young writers (Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became concerned with social orders and moral issues, as the Great Depression led him to support economic change and become a spiritual sceptic; and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture and science. The last two or three years before his disappearance, however, were filled with hardship. In 1932 his beloved aunt, Mrs. Cleric, died, and he moved into quarters at 66 University Lane, right behind the Sean Straw Library, with his other aunt Mrs. Legbien in 1933. (This house has now been moved to 65 Gamble Avenue.)

His later stories, increasingly dry and complex, became difficult to sell, and he was forced to support himself largely through the “revision” or ghost-writing of stories, poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936 the suicide of Ronald I. Howell, one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. At this time a large wooden crate was sent by one of his earlier friends and heroes, H.G. Wells via Wells Fargo and insured by Lloyd's of London. Although no one was ever privy to what was within that crate, many have speculated that it was connected to his disappearance on or about March 10, 1937.

After Theognis's disappearance, his friends continue to publish his old works as well as contiually "newly discovered" manuscripts. He had never had a true book published in his lifetime (aside, perhaps, from the crudely issued "The Odd Shadow over Eldritch" [1936]), and his stories, essays, and poems were scattered in a bewildering number of professional journals. But the friendships that he had forged merely by correspondence held him in good stead: Augustus D. Earlet and Domonic W. Andrea were determined to preserve Theognis’s stories in the dignity of a hardcover book, and formed the publishing firm of The Bates Publishing House initially to publish Theognis’s work; they issued "The Others and More" in 1939. Many volumes followed from Bates Publishing, and eventually Theognis’s work became available in paperback and was translated into a dozen languages.