Pigeons from Hell

The story opens as two New Englanders, John Branner and his friend Griswell, are travelling in the South and spend the night in a deserted plantation manor. Griswell awakens from a troubled sleep, including a dream of some creature with a yellow face looking at him, to see Branner walking up the stairs in a trance. He is horrified when Branner returns, no longer alive but an animated corpse gripping the bloody axe that had split his skull. Griswell flees the house in a blind panic and runs aimlessly into the woods.

In his headlong flight he meets the county's sheriff, Buckner, who investigates the house and finds Branner cold and motionless on the floor. Griswell is implicated in his friend's murder, but the sheriff gives him the benefit of the doubt and doggedly attempts to clear him. Buckner is inclined to give some credence to Griswell's bizarre tale due to the ominous reputation of the manor. It was once the residence of a family from the West Indies, the Blassenvilles, who were known for their cruelty. After the American Civil War the Blassenvilles fell into poverty, with all their menfolk dead, and only four sisters remained, shortly to be joined by their aunt Celia from the West Indies and her mulatto maid Joan. Celia was known to mistreat Joan badly, and when the latter disappeared it was thought she had run away. Soon after, Celia vanished as well, and it was thought that she had returned to the West Indies. Over the next months three of the Blassenville sisters also vanished one by one without information. One night in 1890 the last of the Blassenvilles, Elizabeth, fled from the house, claiming that she had found her sisters' corpses in a secret room and that she had subsequently been attacked by something in the shape of a woman with a yellow face. She then left for California and never returned. The manor has lain deserted ever since and is shunned by the local black folk. The pigeons of the story's title are ghostly birds that sometimes flock mysteriously about the decaying manor. Legend has it that they are the souls of the Blassenvilles let out of Hell.

The following evening Buckner and Griswell go to the hut of an ancient voodoo man, Jacob, seeking information about the house and the Blassenvilles. Jacob tells of the extinct family and of Celia Blassenville, who mistreated her mulatto maid Joan. He claims to be a maker if "zuvembies", but says he cannot talk about them to a white man without Damballah sending a snake with a white crescent moon on its head to kill him. But he drifts off into senility and then begins to ramble incoherently about voodoo, the god Damballah, and about zombies and their female counterparts, zuvembies, who live only to kill and have no sense of time, possess hypnotic powers, and who can live indefinitely unless wounded by "steel or lead". Finally he tells how "she" participated in voodoo rites and that "the other" came to Jacob for the "Black Brew" with which to make a woman a zuvembie. While reaching for firewood, Jacob is bitten by a venomous snake, meeting the very fate he feared would overtake him for revealing the secrets of Damballah. Buckner and Griswell mistakenly conclude that Joan transformed herself into a zuvembie to exact vengeance on Celia Blassenville and her nieces. They resolve to spend the night in Blassenville Manor to learn the truth. There they find Elizabeth Blassenville's diary which tells of her fear that something is in the house with her, has killed her sisters, and will kill her too.

That night while lying awake in the darkness Griswell hears the same whistling as the previous night, which Elizabeth's diary had also mentioned. Thinking he is fleeing the house in a panic, he finds himself climbing the manor stairs against his will, and confronted by a female apparition with a yellow face and a knife. Griswell, hypnotised, is powerless to resist, but just in time Bruckner, who has followed him up the stairs, shoots the creature, which, though mortally wounded, flees. They track its dying noises to the secret room where they find the hanging bodies of the three missing Blassenville sisters as well as the corpse of the zuvembie, which is still dressed in a ball gown.

Bruckner recognises the face of the zuvembie, whose portrait he has seen. It is Celia Blassenville. The maid Joan, in revenge, gave the Black Brew she got from Jacob to her mistress and then ran away. Celia Blassenville, transformed into a zuvembie, killed three of her nieces and then had been living in the otherwise abandoned manor, killing anyone who entered it at night.

Bruckner says that the case can be closed by saying that a madwoman had killed Griswell's friend John Branner, since nobody will believe the truth of the matter.

"Pigeons from Hell" is one of several regional horror stories by Howard set in the Piney Woods of the ArkLaTex region of the Deep South. Other stories include "The Shadow of the Beast", "Moon of Zimbabwe", "Black Hound of Death" and "Black Canaan".

In 1983, Stephen King, writing in Danse Macabre, considered "Pigeons from Hell" to be "one of the finest horror stories of our century". The horror historian R. S. Hadji included "Pigeons from Hell" on his list of the most frightening horror stories.[2] With its decaying Southern family, sexual sadism, gruesome murder, and evil psychotic spinster, it is reminiscent of the works of William Faulkner and other writers in the Southern Gothic tradition.

The story was the basis for an eponymous episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller television series, airing in June 1961.[3] In 1988, the story was adapted into a graphic novel by Scott Hampton for Eclipse (ISBN 0913035688). More recently, it has been turned into a four-issue comic book mini-series and trade paperback. It was also adapted as an episode in the first season of Blues Hours Productions' revival of the Suspense radio drama.

• Pigeons from Hell at Faded Page (Canada)
• Publication history (including early draft)
• Joe R. Lansdale's Official website