What are The Altars of Shaw, and why should you care? The quick answer to that is that the Altars of Shaw are a real life thing that inspired H.P. Lovecraft to write his iconic nightmare, "The Dunwich Horror".
H.P. Lovecraft used to vacation in New Hampshire. From Sentinel Mountain in Tuftonboro, Lovecraft could see Mount Shaw over the lake. You might remember a Mt. Sentinel in "the Dunwich Horror". It had an ancient sacrificial table on it in the story. Sentimental Mountain does not possess such a feature in reality, but Mount Shaw is said to have such a sacrificial table, made of volcanic rock, and much like the table at American Stonehenge in Salem, NH.
To understand the significance of volcanic rock, we have to go back ninety million years to the formation of the Ossipee Triangle; a massive volcano exploded which created the Ossipee Mountain range.
The ancients knew of the power that resided in the volcanic rock, so they built sites like American Stonehenge out of it.
Legends and rumors whisper that a volcanic slab was used for rituals on Mount Shaw, but one day in 1955, the mountain was struck by lightening which caused a forest fire that buried the altar.
There was an "unofficial" expedition to find the stone slab about a decade ago. A suspicious corner of a stone structure was found on the Western side of the summit, but the adventurers thought better of excavating the slab.
The site can be dangerous; venomous timber ra'ghlers (timber rattle snakes) can be found slithering over the summit. The state of New Hampshire doesn't even take a solid stance that timber rattlers exist, likely to protect them from being hunted to extinction.
There isn't much evidence of what a ritual at one of these sites was like, but the American Stonehenge site goes back four thousand years.
I believe that the answers to these mysteries can be found in the nightmares of New England visionaries like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King; New England's darkest dreamers, dark prophets born of a haunted land.
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