Lord Z wrote:Off the top of my head, there was the Scaring Crow article in Rifter #44, I think. The article was written by our own Mister Loucifer, and it extensively quoted the journal of a pioneer.
You flatter me by mentioning this Z-ster.
Keep in mind that the 1800's pioneer horror was all about superstition and by extention religious superstitions (the more cosmopolitan Easterners were just getting into tales of Madness like Poe's work). Bram's "Dracula" wouldnt be a hit in the states till the 1900's while Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was one of the earliest works of Science fiction and its context was lost to the new west. The Wendingo and the like were more American Indian lore shared with the pioneers. Even Pennsylvania's native monster the "Squonk" didnt really come into play until the early 1900's. Outside of Sea monsters and european creatures of the night, there isnt much to make use of history wise.
The pioneers lived a life of daily fear in a lot of ways, and superstitions has a lot to play in that as the pioneers brought all their ancestry superstitions with them. To many of them, "the evil eye" was a physical monster as much as it was a mental one. Actually, the many superstitions were almost of a "divining" nature to them, For example: If a rooster crows at your front door in the early morning, somebody was coming to visit. But if they crow while its still at night, the stranger would bring a calamity with them. That stranger could have been a bogey man looking for children, Hell hounds on the prowl, Scaring Crows looking for someone to terrify, a posessed stranger could be coming to make trouble, etc.
My advice is to still to the old classics, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, hell hounds, demons, etc and the Indian folklores. The more primal and simplistic, the more it fits their superstitious frame of mind. To "combine the familiar with the uncanny" is the very essence of horror and works well in this setting.
