Dispatch · Locality Verification
Which Lovecraft Chronicles Are Set in Arkham, Massachusetts?
Arkham is, for the record, this office's own home town — Miskatonic University sits within it, which makes the question of who else's business has taken place there a matter of more than academic interest to this Archive specifically. The following chronicles are documented as set within Arkham proper, rather than in one of the other Massachusetts localities this catalog also tracks:
- The Colour Out of Space — the blasted heath at the center of the chronicle sits in the countryside west of Arkham, a scar the surrounding farmers still route around.
- Herbert West—Reanimator — the bulk of West's documented work took place in and around Miskatonic University's own medical school.
- The Dreams in the Witch House — set almost entirely within a single boarding-house room on Arkham's Witch House, a property with a documented history well predating its use as student lodging.
- The Thing on the Doorstep — centers on the Derby house, an Arkham property whose ownership history this office would rather not summarize outside the chronicle's own record.
- The Silver Key and The Unnamable — both chronicles involving Randolph Carter make use of Arkham's Old Burying Ground.
Arkham is not Dunwich, Innsmouth, or Kingsport
All four towns carry the same SUPPRESSED status in this Archive's filing scheme — genuinely real, deliberately hard to independently verify — and all four sit within a comparatively small stretch of Massachusetts, which invites confusion. For orientation: Dunwich is the isolated hill town in the central Massachusetts uplands, well west of Arkham, where The Dunwich Horror takes place; Innsmouth is the decaying fishing port further up the coast, documented in The Shadow Over Innsmouth; Kingsport is the older coastal town whose cliffs feature in The Festival and The Terrible Old Man. Arkham alone hosts the University, which is the detail most searches on this topic are actually trying to pin down.