Where Is Arkham, Massachusetts, on a Map?

Arkham is on the Massachusetts North Shore, north of Boston, in the Essex County seaport belt, and this office, which sits inside it, can say so without reservation. What it cannot do is hand a researcher a dot on a current road atlas. Arkham carries the SUPPRESSED stamp in this Archive's scheme: real, but scrubbed from public maps and records by parties with more authority than the Library.

Researchers who want a single point on a modern map are almost always given Salem, and the Archive follows the convention: the Field Survey pins Arkham at a reconciled position, placed on Salem because Salem is the surviving municipality on that ground. The mark is a caution. It means this office is reconciling a suppressed town with the town that now holds its place in the public record, not asserting that the two are the same.

What the chronicles establish

The chronicles give Arkham a river, the Miskatonic, which appears on no public survey, and place within it a university, a hospital, a burying ground and a handful of old gambrel-roofed houses that the accounts return to over decades. No witness gives a latitude. What the accounts do establish is the neighbourhood: Innsmouth is up the coast to the north, Kingsport lies on the same shore, and the hill country of Dunwich and the blasted heath of the Colour lie inland along the Miskatonic valley. The Survey keeps those relationships and asserts nothing finer.

Salem is a sensible reconciliation for a further reason. It is the Essex County town known for the witch trials of 1692, and Arkham is the town the chronicles return to for the same long, local, unspoken history; the Witch House, with Keziah Mason's old garret, is the plainest case.

The Arkham cluster

Arkham is the most heavily documented town on file, so its pins cluster tightly. On the interactive map the Arkham coast preset zooms straight to it. The Witch House, the Derby House, the Miskatonic University Medical School and the Old Burying Ground each carry their own pin, and sit within a few streets of one another. Click one of the cluster markers and the map opens out until they separate.

For the full chronicle-by-chronicle list of what has taken place in Arkham, see the companion Dispatch; for the chart itself, use the Field Survey.