The Paranormal Investigations

In the shadowed recesses of history lie events too strange for the record books and too damning for polite society. They are whispered of in half-forgotten tongues, referenced only in the margins of censored texts, or left as scorch marks on the stone where no fire was lit. The files contained herein are not fiction. Nor are they quite fact, in the way common minds define it. They are accounts—faithfully transcribed, encoded, and preserved—of the investigations undertaken by Nathaniel Crowe, a man whose profession was not of this world, but of the thin and splintering veil that borders it.

Crowe did not advertise his services. Those who found him were seldom seeking answers, but relief—from whispers in the walls, from dreams that bled into waking life, from children who spoke in archaic scripts never taught, and from houses that breathed. His office on West Pickman Street, shrouded behind boarded windows and ritual wards, served as both sanctuary and archive. Here he compiled case after case—some half-finished, others closed only in theory, none without consequence.

Each chronicle in this volume is a wound reopened.

From the fog-drenched towers of Arkham to the brine-choked streets of Innsmouth; from crumbling sanatoria haunted by laughter that should not echo, to staircases in the Dreamlands that spiral out of time itself—these are the chronicles of a man chasing not truth, but understanding. And perhaps, at times, escape.

To read them is to trespass. To know them is to risk being known in return.

But if you insist on proceeding, as Crowe once did—lantern in one hand, journal in the other—then steel your nerves and keep salt near the door. The things you find in these pages may seem distant and unreal. Until one night, they knock.

—Archivist’s Preface, Unmarked Vault, Orne Library

Filed under "Apocrypha – Do Not Circulate"