Is Miskatonic University a Real Place?

This office is housed in it, so the answer is yes, with one qualification the correspondent should hear before going further. Miskatonic University stands at Arkham, Massachusetts, on the Miskatonic River, and it is not to be found where a public list of colleges would be expected to carry it. Correspondents who write asking after "Arkham University" are asking after the same institution under a nickname. Its name is Miskatonic University, and the town is Arkham.

The omission is the same omission that accounts for Arkham itself. The town carries a SUPPRESSED stamp in this Archive's scheme, meaning it is genuine but has been scrubbed from public maps and records, and an institution inside a suppressed town goes the way of the town. The University's medical school is the one part of it with a locality record of its own on file, and that record is stamped SUPPRESSED as well. The Library, whose Special Collections this Archive catalogues, keeps no public hours.

What the chronicles place there

No other institution turns up in the record as often. A short list of what the witnesses put on its grounds:

• The Library. It holds a restricted Latin copy of the Necronomicon, kept under lock and key in the care of the librarian Henry Armitage. It is the copy Wilbur Whateley came to consult in The Dunwich Horror, and the guard dog there ended his second visit, in August 1928.
• The medical school. Herbert West and his assistant studied there, and its dean, Dr. Allan Halsey, died in the plague year that Herbert West—Reanimator describes.
• The faculty. Three of its professors examined the meteorite at the Gardner farm (The Colour Out of Space). Albert Wilmarth lectured in literature before he went to Vermont (The Whisperer in Darkness). Nathaniel Peaslee held a chair in political economy until the five years in which he was not himself (The Shadow Out of Time).
• The students. Walter Gilman took the garret room at the Witch House (The Dreams in the Witch House).
• The expeditions. The Antarctic party of 1930–31 sailed under its name (At the Mountains of Madness), and so did the party that opened a trench in the Australian desert.

Can it be visited?

Not without an introduction, and this office does not issue them. For the town itself, and where to look for it on a map, see the Dispatch on Arkham's position below. The usual reconciliation is Salem, and a researcher who goes there will find a town with a long history of its own and no University gate.