Is Innsmouth, Massachusetts a Real Place?

Innsmouth is real. This office would rather say so plainly at the outset than let the reader waste further effort searching a modern atlas for it, since that search will not succeed — and for reasons this catalog is in a position to explain, rather than merely note.

The locality carries a status stamp of SUPPRESSED in this Archive's own filing scheme, which is not the same as nonexistent. SUPPRESSED means the place is genuine — it has simply been scrubbed from public maps and records by parties with more authority than this office, and Innsmouth is one of the more thoroughly scrubbed entries on file. It was, by every account this Archive holds, a decaying fishing port on the Essex County coast of Massachusetts, north of the equally real Arkham and distinct from the equally real Kingsport — three towns that get confused with one another more often than their filing clerks would like.

The record most visitors are actually looking for is The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the chronicle that documents a witness's overnight stop in the town and what he found there — chief among it, a hereditary arrangement between certain Innsmouth families and a species this office catalogs as the Deep Ones. That arrangement, and the town's resulting decline into something federal authorities eventually took an unusual interest in, is the substance of why Innsmouth no longer appears where a 1920s road atlas would place it.

Innsmouth, Arkham, and Kingsport — sorted

Since the three towns are frequently mixed up: Arkham is the university town on the Miskatonic, home to Miskatonic University itself and this office's own parent institution. Kingsport is the older harbour town on the same shore, a few miles from Arkham, its cliffs featured in a small number of chronicles. Innsmouth sits further up that same stretch of coast, smaller and considerably less inclined toward visitors.