NEREID
“Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins’ backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange High House In the Mist
“Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Azathoth
“Nereids-Sea nymphs of the Mediterranean: the fifty granddaughters of Pontus the sea god and Gaea the earth mother. They have some relationship to the mermaids of other seas and oceans, and like them are extremely beautiful, but they do not have fishtails.”
Michael Page & Robert Ingpen, Encyclopedia Of Things That Never Were
SIREN
“Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses;”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath
“These maidens later appeared, much like the Harpies, as the lower half of a bifd and above the waist the torso and head and arms of a woman.”
“By the later periods of development and the influence of Christianity, the image of the Siren seems to have been equated with that of the northern mermaid whilst retaining the name Siren and in some cased the original description.”
“Isidore of Seville gave them scales and webbed feet.”
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters & Dragons
MERMAID
“22-Mermaid Legend—Encyc. Britt. XVI—40.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book
“This is the name of a female water being in the form of a beautiful young woman from the head to the waist, the rest of her body being like the tail of a huge fish.”
“Even the ancient accounts, as well as the more modern ones, mention the appearance of these supernaturals in conjunction with misfortune and disaster, although occasionally they can be benevolent.”
Carol Rose, Giants, Monsters and Dragons
MARTIN’S BEACH HORROR
“The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single, deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions;”
H.P. Lovecraft & Sonia H. Greene, The Horror At Martin’s Beach
THING WITH NO BODY
“But I had to shut my eyes again when I realised how many of the things were assembling—and when I glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly and steadily without any body above the waist.”
H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids
VAMPIRE
“105-Vampire visits man in ancestral abode-is his own father.”
H.P. Lovecraft, Commonplace Book
UNKNOWN LURKER
“And the conches of the tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves.”
H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange High House In the Mist
