Randolph Carter

Also on file as: Swami Chandraputra (assumed identity, New Orleans, 1930–32)

A Boston aesthete and sometime occult investigator whose capacity for genuine dreaming — the kind that opens onto real other places rather than ordinary sleep — has followed him, on and off, his entire adult life. The Archive holds his own sworn statement about one especially bad night in an Arkham cemetery, his closest friend's account of a second disappearance decades later when he drove out to his family's ruined homestead and didn't come back by any road, and a full Dreamlands expedition on top of both. A fourth case — an unnamed 'Carter' attacked alongside a friend during a graveyard argument about the indescribable — is filed under his dossier on strong circumstantial grounds, though the Archive notes the record itself never gives a first name. A fifth, considerably stranger case has him vanishing outright in 1928 and resurfacing four years later inside a disguise so complete the estate lawyers handling his affairs took some convincing it was really him under it — filed here rather than treated as a separate person, on the Archive's judgment that a body swap is still a change of address, not a change of identity.