“The Orchid Horror” by John Blunt appeared in Argosy, September 1911. The story begins with a strange event narrated by the author. During a friendly evening with friends, Loring, who the narrator has vouched for, embarassses him. The quartet go to the greenhouse to settle an argument (whether plants are sensitive to breath or touch), when Loring shoves their host to the ground and flees like a man on fire. The narrator finds him at their club and forces him to explain.
After much pressuring, Loring tells his story at last. He can not stand the odor of orchids. A few years back he had decided he wanted to get married. But most women seemed uninteresting to him. A skeletal-looking stranger approaches him, speaking of flowers but also of the beautiful daughter of the orchid grower. He meets her and is instantly enchanted. He doesn’t give names, but refers to her as his Goddess of the Orchids. Her father has hundreds of orchids. Loring hangs around for a few days totally smitten.
Eventually he proposes to her, but there is a problem. The old man is so fond of his daughter she couldn’t leave him. Not unless Loring brought him a rare orchid, the Cattleya Trixsemptia. If he had this flower, he would be so happy he would allow her to leave. Loring takes on the challenge and heads to South America. There he meets an Englishman who is a professional orchid hunter. Loring wants to join him but he refuses because he is too green. The terrors of the jungle are too many.
Loring tries to trick him into taking him. Eventually he confesses the real reason. The Englishman knows of the Goddess. He describes the skeletal-looking fellow, her accomplice, as well as the set up. She is a gorgon who has sent many men to their deaths. Those that succeed receive only laughter and ridicule. The skeleton-looking guy is the one fellow who failed to get an orchid and survived. He serves her in the hope that she will someday marry him.
Loring rejects the Englishman’s obvious understanding. He forces the man to take him along. They encounter wild men, snakes, and soon their numbers are half. They know they are getting close because the jungle air is killed with the sickly-sweet odor of orchids. The natives abandon them. The two men go on. The air becomes thicker and thicker until they can breath it no more. They turn back. Once safe, the Englishman gives up orchid hunting forever. Loring has come to a different realization. He now knows that his Goddess is all the horrible things the Englishman said. He decides to try again, to get the flower out of vengeance.
His plan is to approach the orchids from the opposite direction, with the wind making the air breathable. No natives will go with him so he does it alone. He finds the blue Cattleya Trixsemptia by the thousands. The wind shifts and the smell knocks him out. He wakes up and flees. But he returns because the narcotic effects of the flower have taken over his mind. He approaches the flowers again, is knocked out, and wakes again. This cycle of addiction keeps him in the jungle for three days. He is doomed.
His rescuer surprises him. His Goddess with a group of natives appears, giving him a draft that takes away his craving. The woman realized after Loring left that she was actually in love with him. She had to come find him before he found death. The narrator asks Loring how it all ended.
“So I suppose,” I remarked. “you married her and lived happily ever after?”
He looked at me, wild-eyed. “Married her?” And he shuddered.
Blunt’s plant monster has a logical but unusual method of attack. In most plant monster tales, the plant has some form of active transport for grabbing victims and consuming them. The narcotic odor of the orchids does all the work. Animals that wander into their sphere become unconscious then addicted and finally die near the flowers to replenish the soil. I don’t know if Blunt is the first to use this idea but he may be.
H. G. Wells’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” feels very much like the progenitor of this tale. In Wells’ tale, the horrors of the orchid hunter in the jungle are only implied by “blood-sucking leeches”. The protagonist Wedderburn is an armchair orchid hunter. Blunt gives us the travails of gathering such a flower. “The Orchid Horror” is not a blood-sucker but in its way even more terrible. Weird Tales would offer many versions of the plant monsters in the decades after this tale, especially “White Orchids” by Gordon Philip England (Weird Tales, December 1927) which has killer orchids with a powerful odor. Later comic books would use this idea as well.
Blunt may have read classic books on orchid hunting such as Albert Millican’s The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter (1891).
