The Arkham Examiner Archivist

From the dust-choked stacks of the Arkham Historical Society’s basement archive—past the warped ledger books and moldering microfiche reels—there rests a locked cabinet marked only with a red wax seal and a yellowed tag that reads: CROWE FILES—DO NOT PUBLICIZE.

The key was found decades later, tucked in the hollow spine of a miscatalogued almanac.

My name is Emory Holt, archivist emeritus of The Arkham Examiner, and this introduction serves as both confession and preservation—for these pages are neither fiction nor folklore, but the last surviving registry of incidents our forebears never dared publish in full. As keeper of what remains, I have made it my final professional act to bring these accounts into light.

Founded in 1873, The Arkham Examiner was a fiercely independent broadsheet whose editorial office once overlooked the Miskatonic River, two blocks from the old ferry crossing. While the paper prided itself on rigorous journalism and regional integrity, its editors soon found themselves contending with a pattern of local disturbances that defied mundane explanation. Whispers of vanishing tenants, reversed timepieces, and entire farmsteads swallowed by fog—phenomena so bizarre they could not be dismissed, yet so troubling they could not be reported without consequence.

In 1891, Editor-in-Chief Josiah Lathrop quietly established what became known internally as the Department of Anomalous Affairs—a discreet bureau with a singular charge: to investigate the strange, the inexplicable, the wrong. At first, it was little more than a desk and a file drawer, manned by skeptical interns and visited by madmen. But by 1911, the department had grown into a full investigative annex, with correspondents, occult consultants, and a backlog of unsolved articles kept from print by legal pressure and editorial fear.

It was during this time that the name Nathaniel Crowe began to appear.

Crowe was not a journalist. He never submitted letters to the editor, never asked for recognition, and seldom acknowledged the press at all. But stories of his work circulated through the darker channels of Arkham’s legal offices, morgue records, and university vaults. He had become a ghost in the footnotes—appearing on the periphery of calamities that left no rational signature behind. Possessed children. Sealed cellars that whispered at night. Maps that changed themselves. The kind of things The Examiner had long since ceased to question aloud.

But Crowe kept records.

Meticulous, ciphered, obsessive—his journals were less diaries than topographical surveys of the uncanny. We came into possession of the first one during the winter of 1925, when a dying attorney named Arthur Pendell delivered a lockbox to our offices with a single note: “For those who still know where to look.” It took us nearly a year to decipher the contents. What we found was not a single case, but the latticework of a lifetime spent documenting, confronting, and—where possible—resisting the slippage of reality.

The stories that follow, published under the banner The Arkham Examiner Presents: The Paranormal Investigations of Nathaniel Crowe, have been carefully reconstructed from Crowe’s private journals, corroborating testimonies, suppressed articles, and fragments once deemed unprintable. Where names have been omitted, it is out of respect. Where details remain obscure, it is because the full truth remains sealed beneath deeper ink.

You may read these tales as a curiosity, a chronicle of one man’s descent into haunted scholarship. But I suggest you treat them as more than that. They are warnings—quiet and encoded, but clear to those with ears to hear.

Crowe once wrote: “Not all shadows are cast by light.”

Consider this collection a candle lit in the dark.

— Emory Holt, Archivist of Record

The Arkham Examiner (Est. 1873 – Defunct 1942)

Filed under Special Holdings, Box No. 9: Crowe, N.