His great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Wade Jermyn, an early explorer of the Congo region whose books on a mysterious white civilization there were ridiculed.

Alfred grew up to inherit his grandfather's title but abandoned his wife and child to join a circus, where he became fascinated with a gorilla "of lighter colour than the average".

Returning to a trading post, Arthur talks to a Belgian agent who offers to both obtain and ship the goddess's body to him.

Arthur begins his examination of the mummy, only to run away from his room screaming, and later commit suicide by dousing himself in oil and burning himself alive.

"[3] In a letter, Lovecraft described the impetus behind Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family: Somebody had been harassing me into reading some work of the iconoclastic moderns — these young chaps who pry behind exteriors and unveil nasty hidden motives and secret stigmata — and I had nearly fallen asleep over the tame backstairs gossip of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

The sainted Sherwood, as you know, laid bare the dark area which many whited village lives concealed, and it occurred to me that I, in my weirder medium, could probably devise some secret behind a man's ancestry which would make the worst of Anderson's disclosures sound like the annual report of a Sabbath school.

[4]While Lovecraft claimed that he intended to describe the most horrible family shadow, E. F. Bleiler declares that "actually, the story is a metaphor for his extreme bigotry and social snobbery; the motifs of expiating ancestral evil and committing suicide on discovering 'racial pollution' occur in other of his works.