Yep that’s the same building.

Also, In the Shadow Over Innsmouth the narrator spends some time in my hometown, Newburyport while investigating Innsmouth.

Um, why is the Witchhouse in Salem, MA when the trials actually took place in Danvers? It used to be known as Salem Town but the city fathers changed the name to Danvers due to the bad publicity. Salem, MA has been milking money from confused tourists ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danvers,_Massachusetts

Let me see if I can answer some of the questions here and make a few clarifications.

The Witch House in Salem isn’t necessarily the basis for Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House”. The house in Lovecraft’s tale was owned by a witch, but Salem’s house was owned by a witch trial judge. And in Lovecraft’s time the building was an unimpressive-looking drug store. It’s also not “the only structure left with direct ties to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692″ — there are at least a dozen extant buildings in Danvers and Salem that relate to the witch trials.

Danvers State Hospital has not been entirely torn down. About two-thirds of the main Kirkbride building was demolished and the site is now a luxury apartment complex known as Avalon Danvers. Yes, it was the site of the film Session 9 — the featurette on the DVD has some great footage of the asylum.

Lovecraftian Will Murray posited that Gloucester was Lovecraft’s inspiration for Innsmouth, but even a cursory study of Lovecraft’s letters indicate that it was actually Newburyport. Will also suggested that the Quabbin Reservoir was Lovecraft’s inspiration for “The Colour Out of Space”. However, Rhode Island’s Scituate Reservoir, which supplied water to Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, is a much more likely candidate.

There’s no evidence to indicate that Lovecraft borrowed the name Kingsport from the town in Tennessee. Lovecraft’s first use of the name Kingsport was in 1920, but his first trip through Tennessee was in 1932. The Kingsport described in “The Festival” (1923) is unquestionably based on Marblehead.

I’ll have to do some research on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue tunnel and see if it could’ve had any influence on Lovecraft’s writing of “The Horror at Red Hook”.

Donovan K. Loucks
Webmaster, The H. P. Lovecraft Archive

I think Alan Moore may have been drawing on the Quabbin Reservoir as inspiration for his Swamp Thing story about a flooded town full of underwater vampires. Just speculation on my part, but he has used Atlas Obscura type locales before, (i.e. the Winchester House in CA).

One of the older graveyards for Danvers State Inmates is behind the industrial park on Electronics Ave (off route 1). Quite a creepy place. Also there are several little private/family graveyards peppered around town…in back-yards, the mall parking lot, near the highway. I’m not sure if these were witches though.

For my nickel though, Dogtown in Gloucester and some of the old quarry sites in Rockport have the same vibe that I get when I read about Lovecraft’s “eldritch moors”.

I think it is still there, but now it’s luxury condo’s. panoramic views and electro-shock therapy. You can still see the steeples from I-95 i believe.

and Session 9 is pretty underrated, especially the alternate endings, and especially when you know it’s a real place not all too far from where you were watching it.

King’s Port, named after a guy named King, not royalty.

The Wiki for Kingsport (Lovecraft) says “It is based on Marblehead, Massachusetts” but urban legend/friend from there says Mr. Lovecraft visited the Tennessee location and used the name later. Not on the seacoast, of course.

There is a church circle, and the fog is more evil than in the era he visited..
More or less infused with Eastman Chemical’s exhaust fumes and the even-more-mysterious waters of the local river they put their other stuff in.

Fictional places I can handle, the real one is a place I would not want to live in. Bring a gas mask if you visit, or you will be plagued with the Cough of Chemiculu.

“Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep – but even so, I shall never drink it.”

The building really became the main character in the film and imbued everything with a paint-peeling sense of dread and foreboding.

I seem to remember that the headstones in the graveyard were particularly unsettling.

(I would have preferred this entry to finish with the sound of Vincent Price laughing maniacally.)