Is Red Hook a Real Place?

Yes. Red Hook is a dense, poor waterfront neighbourhood on the western edge of Brooklyn, New York, and the Archive files it VERIFIED. It is an ordinary mapped district of an ordinary city, which makes it unlike most addresses on file, and the Field Survey pins the neighbourhood and not a house.

What the account records

The chronicle is The Horror at Red Hook. Its witness is Thomas Malone, a New York police detective, who is put onto the case by a disturbance among the immigrant population of the waterfront. The man at its centre is Robert Suydam, a wealthy and scholarly recluse who takes to living in the district and gathers around himself a polyglot congregation that meets at night. Children go missing. The dossier describes the congregation as a blend of stolen fragments from half a dozen old-world traditions, and the Archive declines to summarize it as any one of them.

Malone follows the trail through the district and takes part in a raid, and the cellar rites come to an end with the collapse of the building. The Archive's account of the case explicitly declines to call the matter closed.

Why this one is VERIFIED

The towns around Arkham are stamped SUPPRESSED because the maps have lost them. Red Hook has not been lost. The building at the centre of the case has since collapsed, but nothing about the neighbourhood restricts entry, and the Archive considers that the more unsettling detail and not the less. A researcher who wants a point on the ground can find it in any street atlas of Brooklyn.

The same city has a second locality on file, the rooming house on West 14th Street from Cool Air, and a third that cannot be found, the Squire's Alley in Greenwich Village. The two stamps tell a researcher which of the three to bother looking for.