If you’re visiting Salem already, you can take your haunted travels further; it is a county seat for Essex County, Massachusetts, frequently referred to as “Lovecraft country” (not to be mistaken with the novel by Matt Ruff or the HBO show).  While not all of his tales were set here, many of horror master H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are set in the area, and while the locations and geography have been fictionalized and altered,  Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester, and Newburyport in particular have been suggested as inspirations for the towns of Kingsport, Arkham (home of Miskatonic University), Innsmouth, and Dunwich (although not necessarily in that order). In an article for The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes:

 

Although Lovecraft’s towns and rivers have invented names and the geography is slightly altered, Lovecraft is adamant about the importance of his rural New England locations. He nestled his fictional towns, such as Arkham and Dunwich, in between real places, such as Newburyport and Plum Island. In his story “The Picture in the House,” Lovecraft describes the ghastly spell of the “ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England,” and the “elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance” which skulk there.

 

That Lovecraft mentions nonfictional places and place names in the same stories gives the reader a sense that it all could be real, and yet the fact that his imagined places are not quite analogues contributes to his creation of an uncanny atmosphere for the stories. Trying to identify exactly where they are can be difficult, as Lovecraft locates Arkham in different places in his stories. Luckily, there are fans of Lovecraft who have done the work of mapping out the inspirations and possible locations of his tales. Donovan Loucks of the H.P. Lovecraft Archive has researched Massachusetts sites tied into Lovecraft’s stories: while his short tour of Lovecraftian Massachusetts sites  includes Boston and Cambridge, most are in Essex County.

1920s Essex County and 2020s Essex County are very different places, as you can see in this Lovecraft lover’s 1997 journey, but bring your copy of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and imagine the geography and architecture of Essex County through a glass darkly.

Interested in Lovecraft-inspired fiction? Here’s a list of some relatively recent books that give his fiction a twist.