Where Is the Miskatonic River?

The Miskatonic runs through Arkham, Massachusetts, and inland from it through hill country that the accounts call the Miskatonic Valley, to an upper reach near Dunwich. It appears on no public survey, as the Archive would expect of a river that belongs to a suppressed town. The University, the Library and this office all stand on it, and so did the Antarctic expedition of 1930–31, which sailed under the University's name.

What the accounts put on it

• Arkham. At the mouth, on the coast, with the University, the Witch House, the Derby house and the old burying ground.
• The farmhouse in the backwoods. A decrepit seventeenth-century building in the valley, found by a witness sheltering from a November storm, and filed as a locality of its own.
• The blasted heath. In the hills west of Arkham, where the meteorite fell on the Gardner farm.
• Dunwich. Far up the valley, off the Aylesbury pike, in a hill country that most roads miss.

How far it runs

On the Field Survey's chart the pins run in a line from Arkham inland to the west. The farmhouse lies about thirty-five miles out, and Dunwich's conjectured zone about seventy. Those are the Archive's approximations from the pins and not a survey of the river, which no survey has been made of.

The real river

The Archive makes no ruling on a surviving river that corresponds. Readers who want one to point at most often name the Merrimack or the Ipswich, both of which run through the same stretch of country. The usual reconciliation for Arkham itself is Salem.

Why the river matters to the filing

The name is carried by almost everything this Archive catalogues: the University, the Library and its Special Collections, the medical school, the valley and the expedition. The river is the one feature of the county that all of them share, which is why the Field Survey lists the Miskatonic localities together and not by town. Open Arkham on the interactive map and the Arkham coast view frames the coast and the first of the valley.