In one of the most terrifying scenes from Stephen King’s 1975 novel Salem’s fatea gravedigger named Mike Ryerson rushes to bury the coffin of a local boy named Danny Glick. As night approaches, Mike is struck by a disturbing thought: Danny is buried with his eyes open. Even worse, Mike feels Danny looking back at him through the closed casket.
A mania overtakes Mike. Prayers run through his head: “the way things like that happen for no good reason.” Then even more disturbing thoughts arise: “Now I bring you rotten meat and stinking meat.” Mike jumps into the hole he dug and furiously shovels the dirt off the coffin. The reader knows what he is going to do, but should not do it. Then Mike will open the chest and free what Danny has become.
Enter the whip-poor-will. Several of them, King writes, “began to raise their shrill cry, the demand for violence that gives the species its name: whip-poor-will.
This isn’t the first time whip-poor-will has appeared Salem’s fatenor is it the last time King uses them in his work. But despite the importance of the species to King, whiplashes never appear in film and television adaptations Salem’s fate.
Released on October 3, the most recent adaptation of Salem’s fate contains birdsong, but makes little use of it. Here and there an American crow or blue jay calls. Sparrow-like peeping pepper scenes at night. And as Mike unearths the undead Danny, the less threatening call of a barred owl replaces that of whip-poor-will.
As a cultural sociologist writing a book on Eastern whiplash, I am not interested in this omission because it reflects an unfaithful recreation of King’s novel. On the contrary, I see the erasure of the whip-poor willpower Salem’s fate as a symptom of broader ecological changes, with species loss also linked to cultural loss.
The horror of the night
At least in Washington Irving The Legend of Sleepy Hollowthe call of whip-poor-will, a member of the nocturnal nightjar family, haunted American fiction.
Perhaps the most famous whippings in American horror occur in HP Lovecraft’s novella The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft refers to the species nearly twenty times in his story, with the birds often appearing around the deaths of the Whateley family, who live in the fictional town of Dunwich, Massachusetts.
Behaving in a way that real whip-arms never do, Dunwich’s nightjars symbolize the horrors the Whateleys unleash on the townspeople. The birds also act as psychopomps: creatures that guide the souls of the recently deceased to the afterlife.
The poor of Dunwich remain in the town until Halloween – ‘unnaturally late’, Lovecraft writes – singing in harmony with the Whateleys’ dying breath. (Indeed, most whip-poor-wills leave the Northeast in late September, and they usually don’t coordinate their singing.) But while whip-poor-wills are essential to the plot of The Dunwich Horroranother common owl, this one a great horned owl, replaces whip-arms-will in the 1970 film adaptation of Lovecraft’s story.
King also uses whip-poor will to great effect. In The Fate of Jerusalemthe short story that King later published as a prelude to Salem’s fateghost-poor willpower haunts the Maine town. And in his 1989 novel The dark halfKing refers to the lore of whip-poor wills as psychopomps.
Lovecraft and King’s fictional whip-poor-will is based on widely held indigenous, European, and American understandings of the species. Chanting a whip poor will near one’s home was a particularly ominous sign, usually meaning that death would soon befall someone in the home. An 1892 article in the American Journal of Folklore documents this belief in King’s home state of Maine. It also offers a story, probably apocryphal, as evidence: “A whippoorwill sang repeatedly at a back door; finally the woman’s son was brought home dead and the corpse brought into the house through the back door.”
Birds and faith disappear
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, knowledge of the whip-poor-will circulated among people who encountered the bird. Outside the world of folklore studies, bad omens may be mentioned in passing in the nature books of Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper, although neither believed in this superstition. Local newspapers continued to share knowledge about the birds with their readers into the 20th century.
But as the erasure of the species from horror suggests, the broader cultural familiarity with the whip-poor will has disappeared. With one exception, Chapelwaitea 2021 television series based on King’s The Fate of Jerusalemthe characters explicitly discuss the birds’ behavior so that viewers understand the reference.
The cultural extermination of the whip-poorwill reflects the actual decline of the species. Conservationists estimate that populations of poor people in the East have declined by about 70% since the 1970s. This decline is likely to lead to what naturalist Robert Michael Pyle calls the “extinction of experience.” Pyle reasons that when a species declines, people lose the opportunity to encounter it in local landscapes and are less likely to be familiar with it in the first place.
Such decline also causes social and cultural losses. This is most serious when a species becomes extinct. Consider the passenger pigeon. As writer Jennifer Price shows in her book Flight mapsAmericans’ lives were once intertwined with the species. When huge flocks of passenger pigeons arrived, communities gathered to hunt the birds, which were once an integral part of the American diet. Now, however, the species is remembered almost exclusively as a symbol of man-made extinction.
Likewise, the decline of common birds is changing people’s relationship with the environment. In Britain, for example, the decline in house sparrow numbers is robbing landscapes of the beloved sights and sounds of a once ubiquitous species. The loss of the common cuckoo, meanwhile, means spring arrives in Britain without its iconic song.
Beyond the loss culture
I think we are witnessing similar cultural changes with whip-poor willpower. Their absence from the adaptations of King’s work reflects their absence both from the landscape and from the lives of people. But while loss and grief rightly characterize many people’s relationship with whipping and other declining species, I want to argue for hope.
On the one hand, there is reason to be hopeful about the possibility of conservation: whip-poor-will appear to respond well to forest management practices that create diverse forests with a mix of younger and older trees. Many places where whippoorms breed have active conservation plans to support the birds and other species that share their habitat.
The whip-poor will is also not culturally extinct.
After all, readers still find their way to the work of Lovecraft and King. These and other enduring references to the species offer people the opportunity to find their way back to the bird – and what the species meant to all who cared for it.
Jared Del Rosso is an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
