"The Chadbourne Episode" is a Short Story by Henry S. Whitehead that posthumously debuted in the February 1933 issue of Weird Tales and in 1946 was collected in West India Lights. It is one of the tales in which Whitehead's recurring protagonist Gerald Canevin takes the stage and it is the tale that dives into his homelife, notably by introducing his hometown, the fictional Chadbourne in the state of Connecticut.
Tom Merritt, a childhood friend of the occult expert Gerald Canevin, has spent four years after medical school as a consul in Persia. When he returned to become Chadbourne's general practitioner, Canevin entrusted Merritt with renting out his stately farm home whenever he went away for extended periods of time. One winter, the home is rented out to a Persian family, the Rustum Dadhs, consisting of a husband, his wife, their two daughters, their chauffeur, and the chauffeur's wife. The family stands out for two things. For one, the women rarely go out and only ever hidden underneath veils. For two, the family shops for live animals rather than prepared meat. After six months, the Rustum Dadhs return to New York, but nobody sees their two servants leave town. Then animals start to disappear left and right, but it is when the five year-old Truman Curtiss disappears nearby the Old Cemetery in the company of an unknown lady that Merritt puts it together: the Rustum Dadh servants are ghouls and they never left Chadbourne. Because he himself has a patient to treat, he calls in Canevin. He directs him to the cemetery with instructions to abandon hesitation and shoot any person he can't vouch for. Canevin trusts Merritt's judgement and in front of the Merritt Family tomb meets the Persian chauffeur. He kills him and enters the tomb, observing the chauffeur's wife, nine ghoul children, and little human bones. He eradicates the entire family. Along with Merritt and three other men out looking for Truman, the ghoul corpses are buried, the tomb cleaned out, and the truth covered up so peace may return to Chadbourne.
Of the handful of stories that take inspiration from "Amina", "The Chadbourne Episode" veers closest to it, copying elements such as how Persia deals with ghouls, how ghouls look and act down to their unmoving lips, and what ghoul family units look like. The one notable divergence is that while "Amina" describes ghouls as mainly canine with a hint of porcine, "The Chadbourne Episode" vastly emphasizes the porcine qualities. This also breaks with the tradition of canine ghouls that H. P. Lovecraft started with "Pickman's Model".
In the 1920s, Whitehead had a hand in several boys' summer camps. This led him to expand his literary oeuvre with boys' literature, resulting in his one ever novel, Pinkie at Camp Cherokee, in 1931. Some of Whitehead's penchant for horror seeped into the novel through in-universe campfire stories. "The Chadbourne Episode" is a reverse of that, with boys' literature seeping into horror due to the presence of Jed Peters, a young man that takes the role of tritagonist despite hardly being involved in the key events.
"The Chadbourne Episode" provides examples of the following tropes:
- "Arabian Nights" Days: Tom Merritt spent four years in Persia as a consul, where he stayed in places like Tehran, Jask, Kut-el-Amara, and Shiraz. During that time, he emerged himself in the local cultures and learned that ghouls actually exist and aren't just a fanciful invention of the Arabian Nights. He even saw two for himself as well as how the Persians dealt with them.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Gerald Canevin is an expert on the occult and ends up learning that ghouls are very real creatures at home in Persia. Yet he concludes the entire experience by stating that the reality of ghouls contrasts with the imaginary afreets and djinn, who are no more than entertaining elements in Arabian Nights. Afreets and djinn have not come up at all beforehand, so there's nothing for Canevin to base this conclusion on.
- Creepy Child: The ghoul children, who cannot be more than eight months old in the month of July if they were born in winter, were born as a litter of nine. They develop faster than human children do, possessing fast mobility and the jaws and teeth to tear living flesh apart. That is, when presented with prey, they kill it by eating it, which they've done to many a young animal and one human child.
- Death of a Child: Truman Curtiss is only five years old when he meets the female ghoul while playing outside. She takes him with her to the Old Cemetery and into the Merritt Family tomb, where she feeds him live to her family of one husband and nine children. In turn, the disappearance of Truman causes the ghoul family's presence to be discovered and the entire family, all nine children included, to be exterminated.
- Desecrating the Dead: Merritt suggests that the ghouls have been consuming the corpses in the three cemeteries of Chadbourne to supplement their meals. Whether this is true or not, and it likely is, the ghouls have for certain broken into his family tomb to make themselves at home there.
- Do You Trust Me?: Merritt tells Canevin everything he knows about ghouls, invoking Canevin's own occult knowledge as argument to believe him no matter how absurd it may sound to someone who hasn't lived in Persia and knows ghouls only from the Arabian Nights. Though he has no evidence, he sends Canevin with his Männlicher to the Old Cemetery to shoot any person he can't vouch for without hesitation, because that will be a ghoul and it will attack if given the slightest opening. Canevin has to trust that Merritt is reliable and isn't setting him up to commit murder on a fellow human. It is a trust that pays off.
- Dramatic Irony: Some other children see little Curtiss Truman walking with an unknown lady when they are on their way home for supper after picking berries. What the adults involved realize too late is that said lady is a ghoul and that she's also on her way home for supper after picking up a little boy.
- The End... Or Is It?: Because the Rustum Dadhs only ever purchased live animals instead of prepared meat, it is improbable that they wouldn't have known their two servants to be ghouls. They may very well be ghouls themselves too and if they aren't, then what purpose do they have in associating with ghouls and bringing them to the USA? As disturbing as every scenario is, Tom Merritt and Gerald Canevin agree that they do not have the means to track the family down and that they can only hope that Chadbourne will never have to suffer these creatures again.
- Explosive Breeder: Ghouls breed as pigs do: a litter at a time. The servant couple have produced one comprising nine whelps. Ghoul children grow up fast too, because at most they're eight months old when they're already able to "scamper" and possess fully developed maws for tearing flesh.
- Fantastic Racism: The humans of Persia keep to a few simple rules when dealing with ghouls: Do not hesitate. Do not talk. Wield whichever weapon at hand to kill. It doesn't matter if the fight is unfair, because ghouls are eaters of humans and without mercy of their own.
- Harmful to Minors: By Canevin's reckoning, the one mercy in all that went down with the ghouls is that at six years old, Abby Chandler didn't yet have the worldliness to realize what she saw when she witnessed a large sow with a human head feeding her nine squeaking piglets. Neither does her mother believe Abby's account, which she blames on the girl's imagination being influenced by gossip from Chadbourne's elderly. It is for the peace of mind of people like them that Canevin arranges for the affair to become a secret known only to the five men involved.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Ghouls can sustain themselves with animal flesh and corpse flesh, but neither is quite as right as the flesh of a living human. To that end, when her children reach a suitable age, the ghoul mother abducts the five year-old Truman Curtiss and feeds him to her children.
- It's Probably Nothing: When lambs, calves, dogs, and possibly cats go missing in Chadbourne, it is blamed on a roving catamount or a pack of wild dogs. Nobody has seen either, but it suffices as an explanation, even for Tom Merritt, who is the only one to have all the knowledge to come to a different conclusion. It isn't until a five year-old child goes missing that he properly questions why the animal remains found all were out in the open up the hill when dogs tear up their catches on the spot and catamounts drag theirs deep into the woods. Along with two witness statements, finally he realizes that ghouls are active in Chadbourne.
- Kid-Appeal Character: Jed Peters is the youngest of the five men who come to know about the ghouls in Chadbourne. Always referred to as "young Jed" instead of just "Jed", he is at least sixteen on account of being able to drive a car in what is presumably post-1921 Connecticut. Jed enters the story as part of a search team for Truman Curtiss and although he doesn't get to see a live ghoul nor is involved with exterminating them, after all is over, he becomes the best assistant Canevin could've asked for in cleaning up the mess. Canevin holds up Jed as the ideal of New England stock and ends the narration with treating him to breakfast after Jed comes by to return his car to him.
- Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls are porcine humanoids with well-hidden overmuscled jaws filled with many sharp teeth, a stocky build, and a band of long, three-inch, and coal-black bristles running over their backs. There are eleven confirmed ghouls and possibly four more, all hailing from Persia. The eleven certain ghouls are the chauffeur of the Rustum Dadh Family, his wife, and their nine children born during their stay in Chadbourne. The four who could be ghouls are Mr. Rustum Dadh, his wife, and their two young adult daughters. Female ghouls are more different from female humans than male ghouls from male humans because of the two rows of ten or more teats on their torso. They lack a female human's curvature, which makes it nifty that as Persian women they can walk around in wide veils. The chauffeur's wife never leaves the home during the Rustum Dadhs' stay in Chadbourne while the other three women do. This could be because the other three aren't ghouls, are ghouls but more adventurous, are ghouls but don't hate clothes, or are ghouls but not pregnant ghouls. All adults are reluctant to mingle with humans and utter as few lines as they can get away with if caught in conversation. This appears to be because human languages are unnatural to them; when the chauffeur talks to Canevin, he does so in a "thick, guttural, repressed voice" with little lip movement. Ghouls produce offspring in litters and do not share humanity's enthusiasm for clothing. They can nourish themselves well enough with live animals and corpses, but live humans are the favored meal.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Truman Curtiss's sole purpose to the story is to be the first human to go missing in Chadbourne and to be eaten by the ghouls, which not only sets the plot in motion but also justifies the massacre of the ghoul family, including the ghoul children.
- Sinister Nudity: Ghouls prefer to go nude, but will wear clothes to go undetected among humans. The chauffeur's wife likely wears clothes when she abducts Truman Curtiss but all other times she doesn't. Her children don't wear clothes either. The chauffeur himself wears clothes while working for the Rustum Dadhs, but goes naked when his family moves to the Merritt Family tomb. Canevin encounters him at the cemetery wearing only a coat and trousers that he evidently slapped on in a hurry.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The ghouls come to Chadbourne because of both the actions of Gerald Canevin and Tom Merritt. It is Canevin who leaves his farm home to spend time in the West Indies and it is Merritt whom he hires as his agent to find tenants for the half a year he's gone. Thus the Rustum Dadhs come to live in Chadbourne for a while, ultimately leading to the death of Truman Curtiss before Canevin and Merritt put their heads together to end the threat.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Because of how dangerous ghouls are as creatures that look human but eat humans, the Persians have long ago developed a simple strategy to deal with them: kill them on sight. Doesn't matter if they're male or female, adult or child, alone or with loved ones, or if the fight is fair. All that matters is that they are dead as soon as possible.
- Would Hurt a Child: The ghouls prefer young animals for their meals over fully grown ones and when it's time they get their hands on live human flesh again, they target a boy only five years old. In turn, the humans do not hesitate to shoot dead all nine ghoul children.
