What Happened to Everyone Who Read the Necronomicon?

This office maintains a Known Readers ledger on the Necronomicon's own record, and the honest answer to this question is that the outcomes vary — the book has never been reported to affect two readers identically, and the ledger records fates ranging from a quiet decline into obsession to considerably worse. A few of the more documented cases:

A few documented cases

Abdul Alhazred, the volume's own compiler, is on record — per Lovecraft's 1927 essay on the book's history, which this Archive treats as established background — as having been devoured by an invisible creature in a public marketplace in broad daylight, witnessed by a crowd that could describe only the result and not the cause.

Wilbur Whateley consulted the copy held at Miskatonic University's own library in preparation for an act his chronicle, The Dunwich Horror, documents in full — an act that did not go as he intended, with fatal results for Wilbur specifically, though not for what he had been preparing to unleash.

Joseph Curwen, and later Charles Dexter Ward, both consulted the book across the events of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in Curwen's case as part of a considerably longer project than any single lifetime should have allowed.

The remainder of the ledger — including the grave-robbing party in The Hound, the witnesses of The Festival and The Shadow Out of Time, and the historical readers Theodorus Philetas, Olaus Wormius, and John Dee — is catalogued in full, fate by fate, on the Necronomicon's own page, linked below.