Lovecraft based this idea on information of local legends given to him by Edith Miniter of North Wilbraham, Massachusetts, when he visited her in 1928.

The bird also features in "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point", a poem by the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the outcast speaker asks: "Could the whip-poor-will or the cat of the glen/Look into my eyes and be bold?

"[16] It is also frequently used as an auditory symbol of rural America, as in Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", or as a plot device.

For example, William Faulkner's short story, "Barn Burning", makes several mentions of whip-poor-wills: "and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over.

[18] Emily Dickinson wrote "Many a phrase has the English language - / I have heard but one - / Low as the laughter of the Cricket, / Loud, as the Thunder's Tongue - / Murmuring, like old Caspian Choirs, / When the Tide's a'lull - / Saying itself in new inflection - / Like a Whippowil -"[19] The chorus of George A. Whiting and Walter Donaldson's song "My Blue Heaven" (1927) begins, "When Whip-poor-wills call and ev'ning is nigh".

In the 1958 movie Thunder Road, Keely Smith sings "The Whippoorwill," a song written by Robert Mitchum and Don Raye.

[25] The song, "Cockeyed Optimist", sung by Nellie Forbush in Rodger's and Hammerstein's South Pacific, mentions such bird, singing, "But every whip-poor-will / Is selling me a bill/ And telling me it just ain't so!

[27] In the fifth episode of the Netflix animated series The Midnight Gospel, titled "Annihilation of Joy", the protagonist encounters a talking bird attached to a prisoner.

The bird, voiced by Jason Louv,[28] introduces itself as a "psychopomp or a whippoorwill" and explains the cycle of death and rebirth experienced by its charge, a prisoner caught in an "existential trap".

The second verse of the song, "My Home Among the Hills", about the state of West Virginia contains the lyrics "Where the moonlit meadows ring with the call of whippoorwills".