The Dunwich Examiner
Excerpt from the Dunwich Examiner, Special Investigator’s File (1925)
Nathaniel Crowe was once a scholar of ancient religions and forgotten tongues at Miskatonic University. Brilliant, if eccentric, he vanished from academia following an ill-fated expedition to a buried site in Dunwich—an incident that left three dead, a fourth irreparably mad, and Crowe hospitalized for weeks, speaking in a language no one could identify.
Since his recovery, he has worked independently as a paranormal investigator, quietly taking on cases others fear to speak of. His clients are often anonymous. His findings rarely shared. And though the cases vary—vanished children in Innsmouth, spectral lights over Kingsport, buried sigils unearthed near Arkham—they all leave a mark.
Crowe is methodical, skeptical, and scarred by what he’s seen. There are rumors he keeps a journal written in cipher, that he dreams in symbols, and that something beneath the earth is whispering his name.
He does not seek danger. But danger, it seems, knows where to find him.
What You Now Hold in Your Hands
If you’ve found your way here, then the veil has thinned for you as it once did for me. The Dunwich Examiner is not merely a newspaper. It is a ledger of secrets. A preservation of truths too fragile—and too dangerous—for open publication.
My name is Emory Holt, archivist and investigative writer. It is my solemn duty to compile, annotate, and present the recovered casework of Nathaniel Crowe. What you will find within this site is not fiction, nor fevered ramblings—but true accounts drawn from Crowe’s own journals, secured at great personal cost and deciphered one page at a time.
These tales form The Paranormal Investigations of Nathaniel Crowe—an ongoing anthology chronicling the events he dared to confront, and the knowledge man was not meant to possess.
The Chronicles
The chronicles presented here are meticulously reconstructed from journal fragments, eyewitness statements, and, when available, the notes Crowe dared to share with me. These investigations are expansive in scope and tied deeply to the shadows that stretch across Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Dunwich, and beyond.
No two investigations are alike. Some unravel haunted houses sealed since the Revolution. Others trace forgotten rites whispered beneath salt-marred cliffs. Still others uncover subterranean networks, carved long before mankind dared to name the stars.
Each chronicle is delivered in its entirety—complete and intact, just as I have reconstructed it from the source material and bears the weight of the truth I have unearthed—whole, harrowing, and undiluted.
The World Beneath Our Own
The universe of Nathaniel Crowe is grounded in the hidden terrors of the 1920s, when whispers still echoed through the timbered streets of Arkham and the sky turned black above Kingsport on nights without moon or stars.
These stories are not told as mere tales, but as living documents: penned in my own hand, drawn from Crowe’s ciphered logs, and assembled with grave care. Here, you will come to know the histories and horrors of a world that lies just beneath our own—a place of shuddering knowledge, ancestral madness, and cosmic indifference.
The Dunwich Examiner Archivist
The following excerpt was taken from the personal notes of Emory Holt, recovered shortly after the arrival of the Crowe journals.
Preface to “The Paranormal Investigations of Nathaniel Crowe”
by Emory Holt, Archivist of The Dunwich Examiner
I make no claim to heroism. My hands have never shaken at the turn of a lock in some forgotten tomb. I’ve never stood eye to eye with things man was not meant to name. But I have read the journals. I have seen the ink. I have pored over the stains.
And that, dear reader, is burden enough.
For nearly a decade now, I have served as archivist for The Dunwich Examiner, a position that once meant little more than sorting clippings, cataloging letters, and penning the occasional obituary when our staff was thin. Mine was a quiet existence. A contemplative one. I studied old cases and dusty folios, hoping to make sense of patterns long buried beneath bureaucracy or intentionally overlooked.
That changed the day I received a crate marked only with the sigil of Miskatonic University—an outdated crest, mind you, one that hadn’t been in use since the Great Fire of ’11. No return address. No sender’s name. Just a battered wooden box, sealed with pitch and bound in rusted wire.
Inside were journals. Dozens. Bound in cracked leather and vellum, some inked in Latin, others in Greek, and a few in languages I did not recognize. Interleaved among them were letters, sketches, faded photographs, and maps with hand-drawn annotations.
But it was the name scrawled on the inside cover of the first journal that stopped my breath: Nathaniel Crowe.
The Toll of the Task
Some nights, when the oil burns low and the wind slips beneath the panes of my study, I wonder whether these journals were meant to be found—or meant to remain buried. Their arrival was no accident. I am convinced now, more than ever, that someone—or something—wanted them read.
There are entries scrawled in haste, entire pages torn out and stuffed behind others. Several volumes had sigils etched into the leather bindings, scored in with what I first assumed to be rust but, under careful analysis, proved to be iron oxide—blood, perhaps, though aged beyond certainty. There are sketches that appear more hallucinated than drawn, filled with spirals, limbs, and architectural impossibilities. A few depict individuals with faces half-erased or strangely mirrored. One journal contained a feather sealed in wax. Another—hair.
I mention this not for sensation, but for context, Crowe’s work was not theoretical. He lived among the phenomena he chronicled, and it marked him. Sometimes physically. Always mentally.
The Quiet Custodian of a Hidden Archive
You may already be familiar with Mr. Crowe—at least in rumor. A brilliant, if eccentric, scholar of dead tongues and forgotten rites, once attached to the Department of Ancient Civilizations at Miskatonic. His fall from public life was as abrupt as it was final, punctuated by scandal, madness, and a trail of incidents that the university has since sealed behind locked doors and missing records.
What became of him afterward is the subject of these very chronicles. As for how I came to be their keeper—I do not know who sent the crate. Only that it was meant for me. And that, once opened, I could not look away.
The journals were encoded, most written in Crowe’s personal cipher, a blend of syllabary, shorthand, and occult reference. It took me months to unlock the structure of the language. Years to piece together the chronology. Entire seasons were lost to trying to understand the context of certain references—places that do not exist on any map, individuals unrecorded by any census, phenomena that defy categorization even by fringe sciences.
But as I worked—alone, often by candlelight—I began to sense a thread. A rhythm. An unseen order spiraling inward, like the pattern of a shell or the rings inside a felled tree. And I understood: these were not diary entries. They were not case files, not in the traditional sense. They were warnings.
Warnings Between the Lines
I have come to believe the journals are encoded not merely in language, but in intent. Crowe layered his entries like a man attempting to preserve truth under the weight of madness. Some pages contradict others, not out of error, but design. There are days when I am certain he intended his archive to be read by someone long after his disappearance—but only someone who knew how to look beneath the obvious.
In one entry, he describes an incident involving a series of repeating dreams tied to a particular sigil found in Kingsport. Two journals later, buried in a footnote, he corrects the symbol’s orientation with no additional comment—an adjustment that completely alters its meaning. This is not uncommon. Crowe left traps in the text, or perhaps tests. I have triggered a few. I no longer dream peacefully.
And yet, I continue. Because if I do not do this work—who will?
On the Act of Translation
Much of what I present to you now is a reconstruction. These are not verbatim transcriptions of the journals—many of which remain too fragmented or esoteric to publish in their original form. Instead, I have undertaken the task of assembling the events described into something akin to a narrative, to help you, the reader, navigate what would otherwise be sheer madness.
But know this, nothing is embellished. Nothing is fictionalized. Every horror recounted, every shadow glimpsed, every whisper from beneath the floorboards—I have seen them etched in Crowe’s hand, over and over, across pages dark with age and trembling ink.
Some chronicles contain drawings, crude but disturbing. Others include transcriptions of audio logs I suspect were transferred from wax cylinders—Crowe was, after all, meticulous. When possible, I include these within the published volumes, alongside maps, sigils, and photos from locations that, in many cases, have since been lost to fire, flood, or institutional redaction.
I do not publish these accounts lightly. Each time I finish one, I place it in a sealed folio and pray it does not move on its own overnight.
A Chronicle’s Journey
Each chronicle I prepare is the result of dozens of cross-referenced sources: Crowe’s original ciphered notes, newspaper clippings long since pulled from public archive, university records redacted in ink and fire, even letters from surviving clients too frightened to speak openly. Some are reluctant to reply. Others respond only once, and in haste. I treat each word they send as a thread in a fragile web.
Before a chronicle reaches your hands, it has passed through multiple layers of review—if not editorial, then spiritual. I have taken to scribing protective symbols in the margins of my own working copies, not out of superstition, but survival. Several times I’ve found the same word repeated on pages where it did not previously appear. Once, my own name.
Even now, certain investigations remain incomplete. Not for lack of material, but because what I’ve translated cannot yet be contextualized. Some incidents Crowe recorded—especially those involving Innsmouth—refer to locations that no longer exist, or perhaps never did in the way we understand place and time. I withhold those accounts until I can be certain of their structural coherence—and of my own safety.
An Invitation to Bear Witness
What you hold in your hands, or read on your screen, is not entertainment. It is a ledger. A record of one man’s descent into realms unspoken, and the echoes his work has left in our world. I take no liberties in rendering Crowe’s accounts. I add no flourish. If I describe something as unspeakable, it is because the original page was soaked in water, salt, and ink—and that was all it said. If these accounts unsettle you, then you are reading them correctly.
I offer them not as prophecy, but as precaution. Each chronicle is assembled for clarity, yes—but also as a ward, a beacon for those who may one day find themselves drawn into the same long shadows that followed Crowe from Arkham to Dunwich, from Kingsport to places far older than man. If you're reading this, you’ve already crossed the threshold. You are not alone.
Many ask me: Why continue? Why not lock it away, or burn it?
Because truth must be preserved. Because these stories—dark as they are—contain knowledge. Because someone, someday, may need what Crowe discovered in order to survive what’s coming.
And because I have seen enough to know that some things find you whether you believe in them or not. So I offer these chronicles to you—faithfully, completely intact—not as a literary curiosity, but as a matter of record.
Nathaniel Crowe
Compiled from the notes of Emory Holt, Archivist of The Dunwich Examiner
There are men whose names live in headlines. Others whose legacies lie buried in footnotes. And then there is Nathaniel Crowe—whose story we are only beginning to piece together, and whose shadow stretches further than most would dare admit.
To the common citizen of Arkham, the name Crowe might evoke nothing at all. He is not a figure of public record. No monuments bear his likeness. Yet if one digs deep—into university archives, sealed hospital logs, or case files marked “Unresolved” in brittle manila folders—his presence is unmistakable. He is the axis around which countless inexplicable occurrences turn.
Crowe was once a rising star among the linguistic scholars at Miskatonic University, specializing in dead languages, ritual symbology, and prehistoric myth-cycles. By all accounts, he was brilliant—methodical, soft-spoken, and driven by a quiet urgency that colleagues mistook for eccentricity. He lectured on Coptic fragments and untranslated Sumerian tablets. He once stunned an entire symposium by reconstructing a liturgical dialect of Old Hyperborean thought to be extinct.
But then came the Dunwich incident.
Officially, it was a field study. Unofficially, it was a response to an anonymous letter hinting at a site bearing symbols older than written history. Crowe led a team of four. Only he returned with his mind intact.
Of the others, one vanished without a trace, another was found months later in a cave several miles from the dig site—raving, naked, and half-starved. The third died of wounds no animal in Massachusetts is known to inflict. The final member, a graduate assistant named Elbridge March, spent his last hours painting concentric circles on the interior walls of the expedition tent with his own blood before succumbing to what coroners would later describe as “systemic collapse.”
Crowe was found days later at the base of a cairn, delirious and muttering phrases in a tongue no one could identify.
He spent seven weeks in isolation at St. Mary’s Hospital under neurological observation. When discharged, he resigned from the university. No public statement was made. The incident was buried under academic silence.
A Life in the Shadows
But that was not the end. Following his departure from Miskatonic, Crowe faded from public view. Yet over the next decade, strange reports began to surface—quietly, and often through indirect channels. A child recovered from the tunnels beneath Innsmouth, bearing a drawing of a man matching Crowe’s description. A burned farmhouse outside Aylesbury, with a charred notebook recovered intact—its contents written in the same cipher found in Crowe’s lecture notes. Eyewitness accounts of a lone figure standing on the cliffs near Kingsport during a mass hallucination event later dismissed by local authorities.
He had become something else entirely, a paranormal investigator. Not the sensational kind that peddles tricks for a crowd, but a scholar in exile. A field agent for the unspeakable. Clients found him through whispers, or through other clients. He accepted cases no one else would touch—disappearances, impossible illnesses, recurring dreams tied to locations long forgotten.
He never advertised. He rarely explained. But he always returned with an answer, though not always one the living wished to hear.
The Man Behind the Work
I have read his journals. I’ve held the pages in my hands, trembling not from age, but from whatever truth they struggle to contain.
Crowe was not fearless. On the contrary, his writing reveals a man very much aware of the toll his work exacted. He wrote often of sleeplessness, of migraines triggered by glyphs that “shifted when read aloud,” of a “presence” that followed him from one investigation to the next. He feared the growing gap between what he could explain and what he could prove. And most of all, he feared what he called “the recursive gaze”—the idea that once you begin to study a thing deeply enough, it begins to study you in return.
Yet he pressed on.
He was not a hero in the conventional sense. He bore no weapon, wore no badge. But he pursued answers with the same dedication a physician might show to a patient with no diagnosis—relentlessly, ethically, but never without cost.
The Legacy He Left Behind
Crowe was last seen in the winter of 1924. The last known journal from that period concluded with, “The sigil is no longer dormant. I go now to speak with what sleeps beneath.”
No one has seen him since. No body has been found. And yet, the journals continue to arrive.
They are postmarked from different cities. They are delivered in strange packaging. One arrived soaked in seawater. Another bore no postage at all—only a hand-drawn rune where a stamp should be. Each new volume expands the archive, offering pieces of investigations that span years, continents, and belief systems.
From these fragments, I have attempted to reconstruct his legacy—not as folklore, but as documentation. These chronicles are not embellished tales. They are field reports disguised as stories. They are records of the uncanny, recorded by a man who once taught ancient languages but died learning one no man should know.
What Remains
Nathaniel Crowe was many things: scholar, skeptic, recluse, recorder of the inexplicable. But above all, he was a witness. A man who walked too close to the edge of what reality allows—and took notes for those of us who dare to look over it.
His work lives on in the chronicles published here at The Dunwich Examiner, and through the readers willing to follow him into the dark, one investigation at a time.
I can only hope that wherever he is now, he has finally found quiet.
—Emory Holt, Archivist, The Dunwich Examiner
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