Paranormal Investigations
Introduction to the Paranormal Investigations
By Emory Holt, Archivist of The Dunwich Examiner
It began with a locked drawer.
Not one from my own desk, mind you, but one inherited—salvaged from the shuttered backroom of a secondhand bookshop in Arkham, formerly located on Whitcroft Street. The drawer was jammed. Heavy. Lined with velvet that smelled faintly of sea brine and ozone. Beneath it, a false bottom. Beneath that, a bundle of folded papers, scorched along the edges. Notes in a cipher I’d come to recognize far too well.
Nathaniel Crowe. His script. His hand.
That drawer has never quite closed properly since.
And so began what I now call The Paranormal Investigations—a series of case reports, field documents, recovered testimonies, and journaled encounters that span more than a decade of Nathaniel’s work. Work that stretches far beyond Arkham’s borders. Work that pulls at the seams of what we call possible.
Each investigation you will find here has been pieced together from Crowe’s private logs, his ciphered marginalia, and occasionally from the accounts of those who survived what he did not. Some arrive bundled with sketches or coded diagrams. Others include sound recordings, faint and distorted, their origins uncertain. Some documents are too dangerous to publish in full. Others I have reproduced here as faithfully as I am able—with context provided, where it can be safely given.
What These Investigations Are
Let us be clear: these are not ghost stories. Not in the common sense.
They are forensic reconstructions of unexplained phenomena, assembled from primary sources that the institutions of science and society have refused to acknowledge. They involve ancient symbols, recurring dreams, mass disappearances, subterranean structures, and rituals older than human memory. Some take place in derelict mansions. Others in salt-flooded tunnels, forgotten by the maps. A few—more than I care to admit—occur in places you might pass every day.
The nature of these chronicles is not to frighten, though many are unsettling. It is to preserve, to warn, and to prepare.
Each volume is a capsule of dread and clarity. A record of how far the human mind can go before it begins to fragment. A study in what happens when you press too hard against the veil—and find something pressing back.
A Unique Form of Immersion
Each chronicle is presented in its entirety—unabridged, unfragmented, and free from editorial omission. These are not serialized teasers or episodic amusements. They are full-length accounts drawn directly from Nathaniel Crowe’s journals, offering the reader a single cohesive window into one investigation at a time.
How you choose to engage is left to your preference. For some, the experience is best taken in through the written page—a solitary reading in low lamplight, perhaps, when the wind rattles faintly through the windows. For others, there is the audio narration, faithfully rendered in a tone that mirrors Crowe’s own cadence and observational style—delivered in a voice that carries both the weight of what is known and the dread of what cannot be explained.
But be warned, this is not passive listening. These investigations are immersive. Once entered, they are difficult to leave behind. The details linger. The symbols stay in the mind. Some readers report dreaming of settings described in the chronicles. A few have written to say the voices in the recordings continued after the audio stopped.
However you choose to proceed—read, listen, or both—know this, the chronicles are not just stories they are experiences. And they do not forget their listeners easily.
Why These Investigations Matter
We publish these investigations not to entertain, but to preserve. To catalog events that do not fit within the margins of conventional explanation. These are not the whispers of folklore or the tricks of faulty memory. They are documented encounters with forces older than scripture, places that exist between maps, and phenomena that leave behind physical traces—ash, symbols, inexplicable injuries.
The world Nathaniel Crowe explored is not elsewhere. It is beneath, behind, and between—hidden not by distance, but by fragility. Our understanding of reality is a fragile veneer, and these investigations reveal the fractures that run just beneath its surface.
These chronicles matter because the patterns are beginning to repeat. The symbols return. The names re-emerge. Certain phrases have appeared in multiple, unconnected cases—often from individuals who never met. The same sigils show up scratched into floorboards in Arkham and painted on rocks near Aylesbury. Some entries in Crowe’s journal are dated years apart but describe the same event—from different perspectives.
You are not reading fiction. You are reading a warning system. A record of the unnatural—compiled by the one man who dared to write it down and the archivist who dares now to release it.
Your Invitation to the Archive
The Dunwich Examiner releases its investigations as they are made fit for public reading—each a complete case drawn from Nathaniel Crowe’s field journals and reconstructed at the editorial desk. Every account stands on its own, yet taken together they trace a rising pattern. A convergence.
I publish these reports in the order I have come to understand them. Not always by date. Sometimes by recurrence. Sometimes by significance. Occasionally, by request—when a name surfaces twice across distant volumes, or when an incident in Dunwich answers an echo from Innsmouth years prior.
Begin wherever you wish—at the newest report, with a subject that calls to you, or by paging through the full index below. If you would like a quiet notice when a new case is published—or when an earlier file is amended with fresh evidence—add your particulars on the Sign Me Up page. Notices are discreet and infrequent.
—Emory Holt, Archivist, The Dunwich Examiner
You are cordially invited to join our list of correspondents to receive a personal notice upon the release of the next installment in The Paranormal Investigations of Nathaniel Crowe. Join with the Sign Me Up button above, and await further communiqué from the offices of The Dunwich Examiner—where the curious and the uncanny are never far apart.