Where Is Dunwich, Massachusetts, on a Map?

Dunwich is the hardest of the four Massachusetts towns to place, and the Field Survey says so. Arkham, Kingsport and Innsmouth are pinned against surviving towns on the coast; Dunwich is a conjecture, drawn as a shaded zone rather than a dot. The chronicle puts it in the hill country of north-central Massachusetts, up the Miskatonic valley and off the Aylesbury pike. The Archive's best reading places the zone in the central upland of the state, roughly seventy miles west of the Arkham pin.

What the accounts give

The chronicle describes a decayed farming township reached by an ordinary road, with no railway, set among hills and stone circles, with Sentinel Hill and the Whateley farm outside the village proper. Witnesses name the road, the valley and the region, and nothing finer.

Why the zone sits where it does

Researchers have long pointed to the Swift River valley in central Massachusetts, whose small farming towns were cleared and flooded in the 1930s for the Quabbin Reservoir. The reading fits the isolation described and the sense of a township in decline, and a clearance carried out under official authority is exactly the kind of event this office would expect to find behind a SUPPRESSED stamp. It remains a reading, and this office draws no conclusion from it. The Field Survey therefore draws a wide zone of doubt over the region and lets the reader judge.

The interactive map shows the Dunwich zone and, beyond it, the Akeley farm of The Whisperer in Darkness, which sits in the Vermont hills to the north-west and gives some sense of how far the inland country extends.